Infertility Mental Health Cara Gauthier, Infertility Life Coach

The illusion of happiness in the future fills our minds during infertility. We attach so many ideas that we will be happier when we've had the first-hand experience of giving birth or bringing our baby home from the hospital. While these visions are expected, all of the happiness you anticipate to feel at those events is available to you right now.



Happiness is an emotion. All emotions are vibrations in our bodies caused by our thinking. Every emotion that you have is preceded by a thought. During infertility we expect to feel happier when the missing puzzle piece - the baby - appears is part of our lives. However, no emotion is directly linked to an external circumstance. Thoughts always create feelings, so there must be a sentence in your mind that is driving the feeling of happiness in your body.



Thinking you will be happier when an external circumstance changes keeps your emotions beholden to the changes of the world around you. Luckily you don't have to wait until something external changes. You don't have to wait to be happier when. You can be happy right now.



Download the Infertility Mental Health Checklist and get started on your path to amazing mental health during infertility.

The ups and downs of infertility can feel like an emotional roller coaster ride. Fluctuating back and forth between the highs and lows on the path to motherhood can leave you feeling exhausted and even sore from the emotional whiplash you undergo.



The good news is that you don't have to keep getting tossed around every month. This episode explains how to ride the emotional roller coaster of infertility and not let it control your life.



 

What You Will Learn



How emotions fluctuate during infertility

Where emotions come from

What you can do to not feel stuck on the emotional roller coaster

How to take control over your emotional life



 



 

The infertility experience is a constant quest for answers. With thousands of thoughts flowing through our brains every day we need a way to direct what we are thinking. Questions help us do that and are how we tell our brains what to focus on. If you want to get to the best answers for your situation and life, you need to ask powerful questions that will prompt your brain to discover the answers for you.



One phrase that can block answers from coming to you is 'I don't know.' By telling this to yourself you are blocking the answer from coming to you. Instead of 'I don't know' shift into telling yourself, 'I'm learning' or 'I'm figuring it out.' This allows space for you to access the answers your brain can offer up and doesn't block the wisdom you are capable of creating in your life. 



Answers will only be as good as the questions that prompt them. Many times we pose disempowering questions to ourselves and expect great answers. Disempowering questions include 'Why is this happening to me?' and 'When will this be over?' Questions like that don’t tap into your empowering beliefs about the future. You can decide if a question is empowering to you and if not, change it. 



If you want great answers, you must ask great questions. When you are inquisitive you can help you brain focus on what to think. Most of us don’t deliberately choose what we are thinking. 



Feelings are signals for us to find out what we are thinking and just becoming aware of our thoughts is hugely helpful. The best question to ask that will uncover how you really think about something is 'Why?'.



Asking high quality questions will help you get to high quality answers. Don't be afraid to let your brain tackle questions that initially seem complicated or uncomfortable. Growth is in the difficult parts. 



 

What You Will Learn



The power of having your brain answer questions. 

What stops your brain from producing answers. 

How to ask high quality questions.

The most powerful question you can ask yourself. 

Mentality plays a huge role in the success of achieving your goals. Understanding which mentality you are carrying around with you is important to uncover where your mindset might be hindering your progress. This episode addressed the mentality choices available when dealing with infertility. 



Mentality comes from the thoughts running through our heads. Sometimes we are aware of them and other times we are not. There are three mentality types that play out with infertility. 



The most common mentality with infertility is the victim mentality. The entire infertility industry thrives on promoting this way of thinking. It gets perpetuated by blaming someone else for the way you feel. This could be blaming a coworker for making you feel sad after she announces her pregnancy or blaming a fertility clinic because the price of treatment is a stretch for your budget. All of these scenarios place you into the victim mentality by recycling the same thoughts that outsource the way you feel. When you look to other people to decide how you feel, that is the victim mentality. It is essentially giving them all the power for how you feel emotionally during the experience of infertility. 



The second mentality is the hero mentality. When you adopt this way of thinking you take reasonability for the way you feel 100% of the time. You understand that your thoughts create you feelings and lead to your results. People operating int eh hero mentality feel empowered in their lives because they know that no one else is responsible for the way they feel. 



The third mentality is the understudy mentality. This is when someone is learning the tools of mind management and learning how to implement them in their lives but hasn't fully stepped into hero mentality. This a very common mentality for people who begin working with a life coach and doing thought work for mind management. 



Enrollment is now open for the spring for the Mindset To Motherhood coaching program. To apply for an opportunity for one-on-one life coaching for infertility support go HERE. 



 

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER



The role mentality plays with success during infertility.

How the victim mentality is perpetuated.

Why focusing on your mentality and mindset is valuable.

Why you need to understand which mentality you possess now and how it is impacting your progress..

Fear is a dominant emotion during infertility and drives many decisions. There are many things to be fearful of when undergoing fertility treatment but none is more prominent than the fear of the unknown.



This episode covers the role fear plays in our path to motherhood and how to deal with fear of the unknown especially if you have unexplained infertility.



Fear is an emotion created by thoughts in our minds. Emotions are vibrations in our bodies caused by our thinking. During infertility it is easy to create thoughts that conjures the emotion of fear. Infertility is structured around the emotion of fear, either feeling it or trying to avoid feeling it.



We create a story during infertility with a series of thoughts that drive the experience we have. The thoughts we use  often reinforce our infertility status and keep us stuck where we are at. Many times we are fearful of the unknown future that is possibly ahead. The fear of the unknown can be paralyzing to the point of keeping us confused about what we should do. Confusion is an emotion that never serves us to indulge in and it will never help us get to our end goals.



The future is unknown but fearing the unknown is not helpful to overcome the obstacles in your path. The emotion of fear is not harmful if you allow it. Using fear as an excuse to not go after your goals will never help you get where you want to be.



Fear will always be present in the infertility process. To get through it we need to learn now to live with fear and not amplify its influence on us. We musts keep taking action towards our goals, knowing that fear isn't a reason to stop pursuing them.



Grab your copy of the Infertility Mental Health Checklist. It covers nine life coaching tools that can help you get through the struggle with your sanity.

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER



Where the emotion of fear comes from.

The role fear plays with unexplained infertility.

How confusion will undermine your momentum towards your goals.

Why you need to move forward even when fear is present.

Failure isn’t a new concept with infertility. In fact, there is something to fail at with almost every step of the process. A failed cycle, failed retrieval, failed transfer, failed beta, let alone the multiple tests your body can be measured against to fail in comparison.



If you are going through infertility you have had a good dose of failure already to get to your diagnosis. However, to get through it and onto your ultimate goal you must be willing to continue to experience failure. In this episode you'll learn how to deal with repeated failure while continuing to move forward towards your goal.



Failure comes down to recognizing that something we intended didn't turn out as we expected it to and the outcome was something different than what we wanted. To combat the feeling of failure people lower their expectations so that they will not experience it. This does two things: detracts from us achieving our goals and protests us from something we have complete control over (our emotions).



Essentially we want to avoid failing because we don't want to experience the feeling of failure. We are afraid of a feeling - a simple vibration in our bodies. The truth is that we are in complete control over having the experience of failure at any moment because it is a feeling being driven by the thoughts we are thinking. We can control what we think when we don't meet our own expectations and therefor how we feel in the process.



 

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER



What failure actual is and how it influences your actions.

How to recognize the story you tell yourself around your failures.

Shifting what failure means to you.

The role of self love in the process of failure.

Why you need to refocus your attention to your ultimate goal to keep going.