Episode 71: Transcript

You are listening to episode 71 of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

Welcome to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

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

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, and welcome back to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I'm your host, Sarah.

I'm super excited to have you here with me listening.

I think that this month's kind of round of topics and what we're going to focus on this month is really important.

Something that I think every woman needs to work on, especially when going through infertility or pregnancy loss, and we'll talk about why that is today.

But before we get started, I am really, really trying to grow the podcast this year.

My goal is to support more of you women listening to this and supporting you on your journeys and helping you through the process that is a fertility journey.

So if you haven't, I would be so grateful if you would take just a quick second to go to whatever podcast player you're listening to this on and leave a review for the podcast.

the more of those reviews that I can get, the more likely other women are gonna be able to find this podcast.

So that's really the main reason that I ask for those is to help spread the message, spread the word about this podcast, but also I read all of them.

So if you leave a message and you give feedback or advice or ideas, I read those and I will take those into account for future episodes.

So I really appreciate it.

If you haven't already, please leave a review would be mean so much to me, make my day, and without further ado, let's get into today's episode.

So it's February, it's the month of love.

And so I was thinking about how could we use that to our advantage for our topic that could be really meaningful and helpful for us on this journey, and I couldn't not think about self-love because it is so easy on a fertility journey, whether you're navigating infertility, whether you're navigating pregnancy loss, to become very much, number one, just disconnected with your body, but number two, even start to form what I call like self-hatred of your body.

And maybe that word feels a little bit strong, but most women I talk to, form some version of frustration, anger, annoyance at their body for how it's functioning, for how the fertility journey has gone, and kind of like start to get into this blame game cycle of why is my body not working appropriately.

Why am I being put through this.

I'm starting to hate my body for putting me through this.

And so really what I want to do is I wanna dive into that and talk a little bit about like why that's happening.

I think that's important.

And we'll go there.

I think that's important to go there, but then like that's not where we're gonna leave it.

That's one of my biggest frustrations about what do you wanna call it.

Like the infertility or fertility struggle space is that when we're in the heat of it, when we're feeling highly emotional, a lot of times that can leave us going to this kind of self-deprecating, like humorous place, where we just talk about all the bad things about this journey, and then we leave it there.

And like, yes, there's bad things about this journey, there's hard things, but like if we leave it there and we don't give any advice on how to get out of that, or overcome that, or think about it in a different way, that's super defeating for someone to hear and listen to.

So my hope is that I can share like why this happens to help make you feel number one, less alone, less broken, less whatever it is that's happening as you kind of have these thoughts about yourself and your body.

But number two, like give you a option to get out of this feeling, right.

Like to not feel so negative, to not feel so heavy because why would we want to just like say like, yep, infertility stinks, pregnancy loss stinks, it makes me hate my body, nothing else I can do about it and move on.

That feels like super defeating.

So that is really what I hope to get out of this month is to help you see that that's not necessarily the whole story.

So yes, there is so many reasons why we have a convoluted experience and conversation with ourselves about our body and it makes total sense that that's there but we can keep moving past that.

I can share this from my experience that it's really easy going through loss, going through negative cycle after negative cycle, after negative cycle, experiencing friends and family and people around you coming and telling you, "Hey, I got pregnant.

Oh, I barely tried and I got pregnant.

Oh, my husband just looks at me and I get pregnant.

" And start to have you just create stories in your head about how broken you are, how something's wrong with you, how, you know, this life is unfair, how something has really taken away your body's ability to work to function, right.

It makes total sense that we would call that into question on this journey.

and really question like why is my body not working.

Another thing I found is the disconnection piece.

The more grief and pain and heaviness that I went through on my journey, the more difficulty I had going through all of that, the more I tended to want to kind of almost pull out of my body and disconnect as if my body was separate from myself.

Because to imagine having to feel all those emotions and process all that grief felt impossible.

And so I think both of those things are happening.

You're starting to question your belief, your trust, your love of your body, and you're starting to kind of like separate from your body, if you will, because you just feel almost as if it's easier to get through the day to day and not go through all of the emotions if you avoid being fully connected within your body.

That's how I see it.

That's how I see the disconnection showing up.

So that may resonate with you, that may be a little bit different than how it showed up for you.

But just really like think about for you on this journey, how has your self love, your self trust, your self belief in your body and your abilities evolved.

And how connected do you feel to your body.

Really, like I said, is there so much out there just like emphasizing this fact that like we begin to hate ourselves.

We've been going to hate our body.

We begin to feel disconnected for our body and then it stops there.

And that's just the beginning, right.

We're just a couple of minutes into this episode.

My goal is to move on from there to talk about the next steps.

I truly believe we don't have to be stuck there.

I truly believe we can find self love through this journey.

I truly believe that we can find compassion for ourselves on this journey.

I truly believe we can reconnect to ourselves on this journey and it doesn't have to be a super difficult process and it doesn't have to be like a fake process where we're telling ourselves we love ourselves even when we really don't.

What I want to focus on is providing you guys some ideas of how you can weave more of that into your day to day life even while going through something really tough like infertility or pregnancy loss.

And the first thing that I want to say is that the thing that I get a little bit frustrated about is that people kind of tie up the term self-love or me time and all that stuff kind of with these concepts of romancing yourself, right.

Like taking yourself off for a nice dinner, letting you have a glass of wine, taking a warm bath, these types of things.

And it's not to say that you can't do those things.

But I think that there's a deeper purpose here.

I think there's deeper work to be done than just those surface level kind of activities.

And if you do that deeper work properly, then I think those surface level activities become part of your day to day habits rather than like forcing yourself to do those activities.

They just become part of what you want to do with your day because you are connected to your body.

What I like to think about, it's actually something I got from one of my mentors, is we have really technically three relationships with ourselves.

And that sounds kind of funny, but we do.

We have a relationship with our past.

We have our relationship with our present self.

And we have a relationship with our future.

That is very well something that we see in the infertility space because we cannot go a day without thinking about everything that's happened to us in our past, all the negative tests we've been through, all the loss, all the grief that we've been through, that relationship impacts how we feel about ourselves now in the present moment as we're going through whatever we're going through right now, whether that's being on a break, whether that's, you know, going through treatments, et cetera.

And then we have this relationship with our future where we see where we want to be, where we see this goal of where we want to go.

but now we're not even sure if we're gonna get there, and our future does not look like the future we thought it was gonna look like, because this has taken longer and been more painful than we would have ever expected.

And so the future we had originally thought we were hoping for is not even possible anymore, and now we're coming to terms with a new future and having a relationship with that future.

I think that seeing ourselves through these three lenses can really help us create a better understanding of self-love.

And I really think the word that I relate to the most that is self-love is actually compassion.

How can I show myself compassion through this life on this journey.

How can I show my past self and everything that she's been through compassion.

How can I show my current self, everything that I've been through and what I'm trying to do now, compassion.

How can I show up for my future self with compassion.

That is how I like to kind of think about it and approach it and the lens I like to go through when making decisions.

If we think about kind of like where to take this, where to go from here, I just want to make the comment that sometimes we think things are out of compassion.

We think things are out of self-love and they're not quite true.

So what do I mean.

There have been times on my journey where I have been so frustrated, so upset, so heavy in my grief, so angry at my body that I have gone into buffering mode.

I have gone into overeating, gone into overspending, gone into over like relaxing and watching movies and doing nothing else for weeks on end.

And the way I like to think about it is to be showing up in a form of self-love requires that whatever I decide to do is kind both to my past, my present, and my future.

And a lot of times when we're in deep buffering mode, avoid thinking about all the pain we're going through, avoid thinking about anything else and just like distract ourselves with food or spending or social media or whatever.

That feels like a good thing to do in the moment but if we really think about it, it's not good for our future.

It's not beneficial for our future.

And I have evolved so much of my relationship, especially with my spending from that, right.

Like I used to go shopping just to distract myself from the pain of our journey.

I didn't need anything.

I was buying junk that was just building up, wasting money, and we already know this journey is expensive so I definitely didn't need to be wasting money, and it was coming from wanting to distract myself.

And the more that I was able to recognize, hey, this maybe feels good in the moment to be avoiding and distracting, and I feel like I'm being nice to myself for doing this, But the truth is, this is not benefiting my future.

This is not part of our family's financial goals.

I was able to really realize that I was doing things under the guise of thinking they were kind of me time and really they were actually harming me.

They were not helping me.

They were not versions of self-love.

So I encourage you to kind of think about those things that you feel like you're doing now From a version of self-love, are they really.

Are they really self-love.

Or are they more of this buffering type of mentality that is not going to benefit your future.

And when you make decisions for things to do with yourself, to do for yourself, question, is this beneficial to my past, my present, and my future.

If it is, great, go with it, go for it.

That doesn't mean I'm never gonna go shopping again.

It doesn't mean I'm never gonna watch a movie and relax on the couch again.

There's just a difference between like, hey, I'm gonna watch a movie this Friday night and relax just because that feels like what's good for me versus I'm gonna go into a month long, not do anything, get behind on work, really kind of not take care of myself, not move my body and just live on Netflix.

Those are two totally different things.

and that's really what I wanna caution you about.

So over the next month, my goal is to kinda talk through how you can weave more of this compassion and this self-love and this reconnecting to yourself into your day to day.

You can see that there really is room to do that.

And it can come from a place of acknowledging all the hard that you've been through, all the pain that you've been through.

And I think that the reason that we don't do a great job of it is because that feels scary.

but we'll actually have an episode in a couple weeks dedicated solely to that.

How self love is supporting yourself as you process difficult emotions.

We also have an episode dedicated to what are some things we can do to reconnect to ourselves, to become more present with ourselves, to show up for ourselves.

And I will be finishing out the month with a interview, which I'm excited to have a guest to share kind of her ideas and thoughts about this concept.

So again, my goal today was just to remind you that there is importance in taking care of ourselves and supporting ourselves, in loving ourselves, reconnecting to ourselves, even when we've become so disconnected, it is possible.

And to kind of get your mind thinking about that from this lens of these three relationships with yourself.

And then we'll dive more into that over the next couple of weeks of how to specifically do that.

So start off this week with just kind of checking in.

Where are you on the spectrum of self love.

Are you connected to yourself.

Do you love and support yourself.

Do you show up with compassion for yourself.

Are you making decisions to support all three of those areas, your past, present, and future.

And if so, great.

If you have room to grow, stick around.

That's what we're going to talk about this month.

And I hope you guys have a great, great week.

I will talk to you again next week.

And again, if you haven't already, I'd be so grateful if you would leave a review for the podcast in your podcast player.

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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