Dealing with disappointment (step one)

While dealing with fertility struggles brings up a wide variety of emotions, one emotion I always help clients work through is the feeling of disappointment.

Whether you are dealing with the disappointment of a medical test, a need to wait an extra two or three months for your next medicated cycle, or a negative pregnancy test, disappointment can rapidly spiral into sadness, helplessness, and depression.

This impacts ongoing fertility for two reasons:

1. Whether you reach the stage of depression or not, ongoing sadness and helplessness is going to impede your ability to make good decisions. Perhaps you will end up stopping before you are really ready. Or perhaps you’ll push yourself into a step “just” to stop the pain.
   
2. Anxiety and depression are two emotions have a physical impact on your fertility. Addressing these emotions will free up your body to bring up your fertility levels.
   

Over the last 10 years, I have taught my clients a four-step process to handle the ever-present emotion of disappointment. Today, I’ll give you step one.

First step: Acknowledge what hasn’t come and allow yourself to grieve.

Too many times, especially when you are trying to “stay positive,” you end up pushing away a disappointment. Perhaps you feel like it “shouldn’t” be that big of a deal…or it seems easier to push away the emotion than to have to feel the sadness of disappointment.

The only problem with this is you push the disappointment out of your consciousness, but your body remembers and stores the emotions. Then, the next time you experience disappointment, you find yourself reacting to the current disappointment AND the older memory. So, it is best to acknowledge the emotions as they are happening and do your grieving in the moment.

Allow yourself to feel the feelings.

Journal. Vent to the Divine. Get out colored pens and/or markers and pour your emotions out on to the paper. Use EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique – one of my go-to tools) to release the emotions from your body. Find a practitioner.

Does this step seem scary? A lot of times we choose not to process through our emotions because it seems like as soon as we open the door, the emotions will sweep us away, kind of like being caught up in a swift moving, downstream current.

The truth is, is that as we bring the emotions out into the light of day (instead of keeping them hidden inside), we are able to feel them and move through them. Think about it as crossing a deep river and coming out the other side rather than being swept up downstream.

And, again, if this seems overwhelming, find a partner to work with: RESOVE has great support groups, find a mental health practitioner, and if you are looking for a complete mind-body-Soul approach, reach out to me to find out more about how working one on one will not only help you release emotions, but set your whole fertility system up for success.

Remember, this is just step one of the process. I’ll be sharing each successive step in the weeks to come. If you’re ready for help, reach out and schedule some time on my calendar and we can determine what type of service package would best suit your needs.