Episode 53: Transcript

You are listening to episode 53 of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

Welcome to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I'm your host and fertility life coach, Sarah Randell.

Join us each week as we walk through navigating your trying to conceive journey.

My mission is to share the skills of managing your mind, processing emotions and living a full life to create a more authentic path to motherhood.

Hello, hello.

Welcome back to this week of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I am super excited to have you on here with me listening.

I am just really having fun diving into some, what I consider like important foundational topics because I think they can make such a huge impact.

I actually went and met with a couple people locally here in town that support women through infertility.

So there was a massage therapist there that does fertility massage.

There was an acupuncturist that does fertility acupuncture.

And then there was a therapist that works with women with PTSD.

And we were really just talking about, you know, a lot of the support and resources that women going through infertility need.

And it is just really validating to hear from them what they're going through and what their clients are going through and what my clients are going through, just how it doesn't always have to be the most complicated crazy treatments or things out there.

It really can be back to basics.

And so I think that's really what I'm trying to focus on over these couple weeks.

So as I shared last week, I want to focus on some of these smaller, more actionable skills.

And if you can build them and work on them over time, it truly can make the infertility process more bearable.

So last week we talked all about self-trust, building self-trust, and how honestly building self-trust is our only ability to create certainty in our life.

And interestingly after I recorded that episode I had a call with a client and we talked exactly about that topic.

We were discussing how the best gift that she really could give herself, she was coming to terms with, was that she now has the belief that no matter what happens on her infertility journey in life, that she's going to have the ability to walk through it.

And she even indicated like that doesn't mean it's going to be fun, right.

It doesn't mean that it's going to be easy or without pain.

And I reminded her, it doesn't mean that you can't ask for help along the way, but she believes deep down that whatever life deals her way, she's gonna be able to get through it.

And I just think that that's so beautiful to be able to have that belief and carry that belief.

That is what it makes you willing to get up and take a risk every day.

That is the belief that makes people willing to go out and try new things, build new businesses, risk their heart being broken with a new relationship, risk grief by trying for another cycle, in the infertility journey.

And it's because deep down, we hope for the good outcome of course, but we know if there isn't a good outcome, we're gonna be able to work through it.

And one of the really important things that we have to be able to work through is all of the emotions.

So that's what we're gonna talk about today.

I find this to be honestly one of the most important topics to really spend your time working on in the infertility space.

One that I have absolutely touched on many times over the past year of the podcast.

I cannot believe we were just a couple weeks away from a year anniversary of the podcast.

And I really, really think that if you were to focus on one thing, this would be the thing that I would focus on.

And because it's that important, I'm that willing to talk about it many times.

It's something I've brought up many times in the podcast and will continue to bring up many times because you can hear it a million different ways and sometimes you just need that one right way to hear it to really make it stick with you and be willing to try it out and work on it.

And so I hope to do that for some of you today.

So what I'm really speaking about is the habit or the skill of building emotional resilience, the ability to navigate whatever emotions life throws at you.

So if we're being honest, infertility is called the emotional roller coaster by everyone, right.

Anyone who has been on an infertility journey knows that it is a roller coaster of emotions.

And the emotional turmoil that infertility creates or negative tests after negative tests creates or the financial stress of navigating infertility or having the new diagnosis or maybe having the lack of a diagnosis with an unexplained title or having to go through another loss or dealing with a complication, any of that is hard and is going to bring up painful uncomfortable emotions.

And the truth is When we are fighting against the fact that we have this scenario in our lives, it's truly because we want to avoid feeling all that pain.

We want to avoid feeling all that grief, right.

We want the life where we get pregnant easily, that it's calm, stress-free, no anxiety.

We want to have a healthy baby that comes to us easily, and we want to be able to enjoy the love that is being a mother.

And so you can see that what we want to avoid is uncomfortable emotions and we want to go after is really nice, comforting, happy emotions.

And that is really what drives us.

Every single decision we make, every single thing that we do.

And when I talk about being willing to take the risk, the risk is your brain knowing, "Hey, I'm going after this in the hopes of the happy emotions but knowing the uncomfortable ones may come up.

That's the risk.

And so that's what we have to work on is how the heck do we deal with all of that, right.

How the heck do we process all of that.

And unfortunately, you know, going through this journey isn't just some emotions that affect you.

They affect you.

They affect your spouse.

They affect your relationship.

They affect your family and friends, they affect those relationships.

They affect your career.

They affect your hobbies.

It weaves its way into every other area of life.

And that is really the overwhelming and unfair part of infertility, is that being dealt this hand, having to deal with this and work through this, innately means you're going to have tough emotions.

You're gonna have hard times.

it's going to affect many areas of your life.

And that's just part of it.

I can't erase that, right.

Like I wish I could wave a magic wand and we could just eliminate it from your life.

But that's just not possible, right.

Like I can't do that.

And the truth is, even if you were able to wake up tomorrow and be done with infertility and just get pregnant with ease and have a healthy baby, there would still be moments in your life of emotional pain.

You can all think of someone in your life who does not have infertility.

They still have moments of emotional pain.

They're in different areas of life, right.

There is no way to go about the human experience and avoid pain.

It's just part of it.

It comes with the territory, right.

The other thing is if I weren't able to make you wake up tomorrow and get pregnant with ease, you would still be carrying all of the emotional pain, baggage that you've gone through your entire infertility journey with you, right.

We just had that episode last month talking about going through pregnancy after infertility.

Just getting pregnant doesn't magically erase all of those feelings.

They're still there.

We're still walking through them.

And that's important to acknowledge.

That's important to know, because I think that that helps to explain why investing in your ability to navigate those emotions is truly so important.

So if we know that this is the case, we know that we're gonna be having to deal with these, and we want to continue trying.

We want to continue on this path and we want to put ourselves in that risk, knowing that emotional pain is possible.

We've got to learn how to manage it.

We've got to learn how to work through it in a way that feels trusting of our ability to do it, right.

Back to the self-trust, not in a way where we feel like screw it.

I'm going to try.

I hope nothing bad happens.

If it does, my life is over.

I'm not going to be able to manage it, right.

That doesn't create confidence.

What we need to do is we need to get to a place where we feel confident in our ability to manage our emotions.

And that's what I call emotional resilience.

Emotional resilience is a skill I am grateful to have, a skill that I truly wish everyone was taught as they grow up.

And one that I will continue to be working on for years to come.

I'm not just like magically fixed and I'm never going to have an issue with my emotions.

It's something that I will always be thinking about and working on, but something that truly has transformed my ability to navigate not only my infertility journey, but my entire life.

So as I said, I consider this one of my like foundational skills that I think all should focus on while going through their infertility journey.

And why is that the case.

Because the number one thing I see when it comes to managing infertility, dealing with infertility, walking the infertility road is avoidance measures.

Right.

This shows up like, veggie out watching TV, distracting yourself, reading books.

This shows up like, distracting yourself with so much anger at what you're going through.

You forget why you're even doing it.

Distracting yourself with frustration at the clinic, the finances, the ethics of it all.

The, all of that, that you don't even have the ability to focus on really why you're even here and doing what you're doing.

Distracting yourself from two week waits, going on vacations, thinking that, you know, a week in a way, having fun and drinking some alcohol will at least let you to stop stressing about infertility.

These are the things I hear.

These are the things that people come to me and tell me that they're doing.

This is not me saying your life needs to be 24/7 infertility.

I don't think that's the case.

I don't wish that on anyone.

I want you guys to have a life where you can enjoy, where you can have passions and hobbies and jobs and careers and relationships that don't have to do with infertility.

But I will say the avoidance is not working.

It's not.

We think it's going to prevent us from having to feel the pain as much.

That's what we've been taught.

I know I was taught it.

I was taught, oh, stop crying.

Don't do that.

Here's a popsicle.

Oh, it's okay.

Let me come over here and you can watch some TV, We teach this to children.

You probably grew up just in culture learning things that taught you to do this.

School taught us to do this.

There's avoidance type of mentality, and I'm telling you it's not the way to be.

It doesn't solve the problem.

It doesn't eliminate the pain.

The pain is still there.

And often what happens when we start to do these avoidance measures is the pain builds up even more so, even more so, and it becomes overwhelming.

When I did my podcast episodes about the foundational skills, I talked about how you can literally become someone who is just full of unprocessed emotions, and you feel surrounded by them.

You feel like you can't escape them.

You feel like you're spiraling out, thinking about all of your stresses and worries and anxieties and frustrations and griefs and sadness, and you just don't know how to get out of it, I'm telling you, it's coming from avoidance.

And I get it because when I tell a client on an early call, hey, we're gonna open that up and we're gonna start dealing with those emotions, I get a lot of crazy looks, right.

I get a lot of big eyeballs saying like, "Uh-uh, I can't do that, that's Pandora's box.

Like, I'm not gonna open that up.

" But trust me, when I say allowing those emotions to come up, allowing yourself to learn to be with them is truly a life-changing skill.

And so what I wanna finish up this episode talking about is how do I go about doing that.

And the truth is, is it comes from practice, right.

You're not gonna be an expert at feeling your emotions overnight.

I wasn't.

It's taken me years of practice and thinking about this to get to where I am today, but it's worth it.

I'm telling you, it is so worth it.

And it doesn't mean that you do this for years and you have no impact, you do.

But the impact just keeps getting greater, truthfully it does.

And so what does this look like.

This looks like actually carrying how you're feeling, checking in with yourself, ask yourself, How am I feeling today.

What's going on today.

Consider what it's like to live in your body today.

What have you had to go through recently.

Have you had an appointment recently.

Have you had some test results.

Have you had a good outcome.

Have you had a bad outcome.

Have you and your partner been getting along.

What emotions are coming up for you.

And I find women tend to fall in one of two categories.

One is they can like describe it all day, but they can't name an emotion.

And the other is a category of people who can name the emotion, but they can't really tell me why they feel that emotion.

So just, you know, acknowledge that you may be one or both of those people.

When I first started practicing this, I literally had the emotions wheel hanging on my wall with all of the different emotions in the world because we typically like crunch ourselves down to like happy, sad, angry, surprised, like some very simple emotions.

And there's so many more out there.

And it can be really helpful to have that wheel and really see all the emotions that you could potentially be and help you put words to how you're feeling.

And so really that is step one.

It's not bringing up old news.

It's not opening Pandora's box.

It's just checking in today.

How am I feeling.

What's going on.

What's it like to be me today.

And we don't give ourselves the grace of that time.

We really don't.

And that can be so meaningful.

And I'm not telling you to do some meditation practice It's an hour long in the morning to do this.

It can be two minutes.

It doesn't have to be so extensive, but that two minutes of checking in and seeing how you're feeling can truly, truly make a huge difference, right.

If you wake up and you give yourself two minutes and you acknowledge, hey, I'm more anxious today, I'm feeling a little bit worried about this upcoming cycle and you just acknowledge that.

No judgment, no frustration for how you're feeling, no running away to avoid it.

You may decide, hey, I'm gonna do the day a little bit differently.

I'm gonna do things that are gonna support me knowing that I'm on the anxious side of things right now.

That can make a huge difference.

And what I think is really cool about this is starting with just these little check-in moments.

It doesn't have to feel so scary.

It doesn't have to feel so overwhelming.

It doesn't have to feel like it's gonna be something that's gonna be really difficult or really painful.

It's just checking in with how you're feeling.

Another important thing when it comes to presence that I think we all should be doing is notice when you're checking out.

Notice when you're in avoidance mode.

So what am I talking about.

When you're watching TV for hours on end, when you're scrolling your phone over and over and over and you put it down and you pick it back up when you go to the same app, when you are out shopping for things you don't even need, when you are eating food, when you're not even actually physically hungry, when you are working all hours of the day because the thought of going home sounds terrible.

Those are just some examples.

But I want you to notice areas of your life where you're doing that, where you're avoiding.

And if you recognize yourself doing that, ask yourself, why.

What am I feeling that I'm not willing to feel.

What's going on that I want to avoid thinking about.

And these two things, checking in with how I'm feeling and noticing when you're avoiding, will be the start to you being able to have emotional resilience.

This is what happens.

You do this for weeks, you do this for months.

You will start to notice times when you're anxious, times when you're sad, times when you're happy, times when you're frustrated, times where you feel totally hopeless, whatever the emotions are for you, you will notice them.

And what will be amazing is even in the most painful and difficult of emotions, you will realize you will still move on for another day.

You will still wake up, you will still have new experiences, you will still have other emotions.

And what happens, what happened for me is those emotions that I felt terrifying to have.

For me that was anxiety, for me that was grief, loss, and fear.

Right.

Fear that the future was never going to work out for me in my motherhood journey.

And when those emotions came up, I felt terrified.

My instinct was to run like the cheetah away from them.

Because I truly felt so afraid of feeling those emotions.

But as I started to practice just checking in for a couple minutes and recognizing hey I'm anxious today but I was able to sit and feel it for two minutes and it wasn't the end of the world.

Nothing bad happened.

I'm having heavy, heavy grief after this loss.

But guess what.

I'm weeks out, I'm months out, I'm years out.

I still grieve the loss, but I'm still a functioning human and I'm still moving forward.

What this does is it starts to make these emotions that used to feel so scary feel less scary and that is so important.

I tell people your goal is to begin to become comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.

We see it as a problem when we're having our negative emotions come up.

We see it as an issue if we're feeling down, depressed, angry, anxious.

And what if it wasn't a problem.

What if it was totally fine.

What if it was the totally right emotion you should be feeling right now and nothing has gone wrong.

Your life is still on its track.

Things are still happening as they should be happening and it's going to be okay.

What if that was possible.

So this is what checking in and being present can do for you, is it can help you build the skill of it's safe to be with myself when I'm in pain.

I don't have to check out, I don't have to overeat, I don't have to distract, I don't have to avoid.

I can just be with myself.

And something different happens, right.

When you're going through grief, but you're doing everything to avoid feeling it, versus when you're going through grief and you let it happen, two totally different things happen there.

A super common example of this is anxiety in the two week way.

So many women in the two week way are anxious as can be.

They're constantly grinning and burying it and trying to avoid thinking about the anxiousness the entire two weeks, and it makes it miserable.

But with the women that I work with, the women that have my two week wait workbook, who are checking in just a few minutes every day and letting themselves acknowledge how they're feeling, acknowledge their fears, acknowledge their anxiety, acknowledge their doubt.

They actually have moments of hope.

They actually enjoy the plans they made for their two week wait.

And the difference is because they allowed their emotions.

We think avoiding them is what's going to help us avoid dealing with them.

But interestingly, opening up to them, allowing them in.

That is what allows us to manage them, be with them, deal with them and have room for more and have room for positivity and have room for hope.

And so that is what I encourage you to do.

Open up to your emotions.

What I want to do is I want to close out this episode with a poem.

It's a very famous poem.

You may have heard it before, but I really truthfully think that the impact that this poem is trying to make is something that we all can accept more of and believe more in.

And I really want to leave you with this as you consider how can I bring more presence and acknowledgement of how I'm truly feeling in the day-to-day and that poem is called The Guest House by Rumi.

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all, even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its floor.

Still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

As I said, this is what I hope for all of you.

A willingness to open the door.

Let the emotions in.

Be with them.

Sit with them.

Experience them.

Find a place where you can acknowledge that it's not dangerous to be with them.

notice your life open up in so many new ways.

So I really hope that you guys will consider trying this.

Think about this, work on this.

This work, as I said, is so important to your infertility journey.

This is what I help women do on a weekly basis on our calls, is learn how to acknowledge, respect, and be with their emotions.

So if this is something you're dealing with and you're ready for support, reach out and I hope you all have a great week.

Hey there, Inspired Mama.

If you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to leave a review in your podcast player.

This helps to share the message with so many more women just like you.

Also, if you know of another hopeful mama on her path to motherhood, please share this episode with her.

I would love to get this into the ears of anyone who needs to hear it.

If you are ready to step this work up and not only learn these tools but to apply them to your unique story, head to the link in the show notes to apply for a free consult call.

I would be honored to help you.

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