Sometimes No is Better Than Yes

When you are dealing with infertility, there are so many decisions along the way. What kind of interventions are you comfortable with? How often do you do a medicated cycle? What doctor do you work with? Do you get a second opinion? And these are simply the tip of the iceberg.

Along with the challenge of all the decisions, there can be the feeling that you are racing time. Time running out for your body. Time running out to be a Mom at the same time as your friend group. Time running out to feel comfortable being in the role of new mom. Again, the tip of the iceberg.

The sensation of time running out can create a huge sense of urgency to make the decisions that will keep you moving forward as quickly as possible. While fully understandable, this constant pressure fires up the body’s stress response. The stress response not only impacts your entire inner fertility environment, but it also diminishes your ability to make decisions; the extra cortisol impacts your brain’s frontal cortex which is the area that helps you make decisions.

Let me share a story to illustrate what I mean.

Several years ago, I had a woman come to me for help. She booked several sessions and we dove into her history. At the time she reached out, she was very far along in her fertility journey with multiple IVF failures and was in the middle of her final cycle.

Unfortunately, her final IVF cycle did not result in pregnancy and she made the choice to move onto a donor egg cycle. Because it felt better to her to have a plan B, she had identified an egg donor while in the midst of her final IVF cycle. She got everything set up for the cycle, but sadly, the donor did not produce very many eggs (highly unusual for this proven donor).

As my client and I worked together, we talked a lot about slowing down, creating some peace in her mind and body, moving more into a space of being rather than doing. Intellectually, she agreed with me (it was why she reached out for sessions in the first place). But, she just was not able to put the techniques and the work into practice.

When the donor didn’t produce many eggs, my client had a decision to make. Should she try again with the same donor or take the longer route of choosing another donor?

Now, I’m going to tell you the decision she made but I want to make sure to make one thing clear first. There was no right answer. There was no crystal ball. There was no ability to watch the result of one decision, then the result of the other decision, and then make the choice.

The only variable was how the decision was made.

My goal with my clients is to get to a place where you can make a decision that you know you will not second guess. Whether you get the outcome you want or not is not guaranteed; however, you will have peace knowing you made the best decision you could.

As we approached the decision in one of her sessions, she pushed hard against doing anything but moving “fast”. She told me that she couldn’t afford to waste the time finding a new donor. While she knew that she was very in her head and being driven by fear, she felt like she didn’t have any other option. So, she and her partner went ahead and did another cycle with the same donor and the results were even worse.

When the results came in she was very, very upset with herself and started battling a horrible feeling of guilt that she didn’t wait for a new donor.

Remember, the point of the story isn’t that she got a bad result because she made a decision quickly. The point of me sharing this with you is that she made the decision from a place of fear rather than a place of mind-body-spirit alignment.

If she had taken the time to get in alignment first, she may have still made the decision to go with the same donor. But she would have avoided the paralyzing, soul-sucking guilt that came up when she didn’t get the result she wanted.

Bottom Line Learning: The more you practice mind-body-spirit alignment the better your overall mental state will be as you continue to work towards your family. And the better you feel, the clearer your decisions will be, the more you can connect with that wise part of you that knows what is the next best step. You will make your decisions with more clarity and the least possibility of second-guessing, guilt, and sadness. Question: How is your decision-making process? Are you doing it from your head or from alignment? If you’re ready to start creating mind-body-spirit balance amidst infertility, reply to this email and we’ll set up a time to chat.

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