Do I really have to think about that?

Do I really have to think about that?

Dealing with infertility means becoming exposed to many really difficult topics. You are inundated with facts and figures about age and chromosomes. You experience first hand the heartbreak of loss – whether that is the loss of trust in your body, the loss of the naïveté other women get to have regarding pregnancy, or the loss of a baby.

Of course you don’t want to spend any more time than you have to dealing with the difficult topics.

However, from a body/mind/soul perspective, it makes a difference to your ability to conceive HOW you handle the difficult topics. Sometimes, instinct makes you want to turn away from the difficult topics, to protect your heart, to keep from being completely overwhelmed. Oftentimes, the easiest way to do this is to bury the emotions, the memories, and the thoughts.

The problem with this, to borrow the title from a really wonderful book on this topic, “feelings buried alive NEVER die”. Not only do they not die, they go on living in your subconscious and the cells of your body. They are very much alive and influencing how the cells of your body are acting and behaving.

Stay with me here, because I know that this can be an overwhelming concept at first. It is NOT my goal to have you scared of your thoughts and emotions. In fact, you have more power than you know when it comes to these thoughts and emotions.

Here’s the key to handling thoughts and emotions: Instead of feeling like the choice is to either bury the emotion down deep or to push it away and try to pretend your way into having it not bother you, take your feelings or your thoughts one step at a time.

Take the “scary” or emotional thought and see what the next best thought is that you can have about it. The new thought doesn’t have to be all bright and shiny and positive, that’s not going to be believable. It just has to be a little bit better than the thought before.

So for example, let’s take the thought:

“My body is never going to do what I want it to do”

Shift that to:

“My body hasn’t been doing what I want it to do”

Feel the difference in those two statements. Read them each out loud and feel the difference.

Shift that to:

“I’m learning new ways to work with my body that I didn’t know about before”

Now, read the first statement and this statement out loud. Feel the difference.

If you never take this thought any further, can you feel the difference of where you have “left” your thoughts and emotions on this topic? Even a shift like this will make a profound difference in the cells of your body and your reproductive system.

As you get more skilled with shifting your thoughts, you will discover the power that your thoughts and emotions truly hold.