What does a Fertility Counselor do?
You might needing some help while on your fertility journey, whether your fertility doctor has recommended counseling, or you’ve decided on your own to see someone.
Or maybe you’re studying mental health and looking for a specialty, but not sure which to choose.
So what does a fertility counselor actually do? We’re going to go over this in this post.
How a fertility counselor helps people during their family building journey
Fertility counselors focus on helping people with coping strategies to get through the emotional ups and downs of a reproductive health diagnosis. As well as fertility treatment, we help people move through really challenging emotions. Find support inside of therapy, as well as outside to help them get through.
Oftentimes, if there's a diagnosis of infertility, the emotions we're talking about are guilt, grief, sadness, anxiety, anger, so many difficult emotions. And oftentimes they're being triggered all at the same time.
What does fertility counseling focus on?
Fertility counseling is a subspecialty of health psychology. Health psychology focuses on the biosocial and psychosocial aspect for patients, and to help them move through whatever treatment or health challenge they're going through. Biosocial and psychosocial pertain to learning and studying your biology, psychology and society. As a fertility counselor, I work on the bio-psycho-social aspects specific fertility treatment.
Biology - how your body's reacting and how your body's not only reacting to the diagnosis, but the treatment itself
Psychologically- how you're being impacted as a unique individual,
Societal - how are you being taken care of by a society? In reproductive health, that's a big challenge.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of reproductive health is silenced in our society and oftentimes I'm helping people move through something that is pretty traumatic.
Is fertility counseling just for women?
No, not at all!
Male factor infertility is just as much of a thing, but we see less male identified patients coming to counselors.
As a fertility counselor, I'm really always advocating for helping people find the people that can support them through this process. So that might also mean bringing in a spouse or a partner during a therapy session to talk and educate them a little bit and help them work as a couple or in any kind of relationship to help support their loved one. Sometimes couples are going through this together, but typically only one person will be really experiencing both the physical and emotional side of infertility or fertility treatment.
Won’t my coping strategies before my infertility diagnosis work just as well?
As a fertility counselor, I'm often helping people understand that just because they had effective coping strategies prior to an infertility diagnosis or fertility treatment, doesn't mean that those coping strategies are always going to apply in this space. Oftentimes we're developing new coping strategies to help them move through fertility treatment.
If you are looking for coping strategies to help you during your fertility journey, or are interested in studying how fertility and mental health intersect, or thinking about getting into mental health, and we're interested in this space, please ask any questions using the form below.