Episode 73: Transcript

You are listening to episode 73 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 and welcome back to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I'm your host Sarah.

Welcome to another episode all about showing up with more self-love, more compassion in your day-to-day life.

And this one is super important in the infertility process or in just in your fertility journey and that is how to show up with self-love, compassion through the hard times, through the tough stuff, through the pain, through the painful emotions.

Really important, like without this skill, this is where we get burnout.

This is where we question if we can keep moving forward.

This is the key to building emotional resilience is having this skill.

So I'm super excited to share about this episode today.

And before we do, I wanted to just share a little story.

So I had a client recently who was preparing for a transfer and she had had a couple unsuccessful transfers in the past and really was struggling with any sense of hope on this next attempt.

And And I think it comes just from the fact that like in her head, she had progressed to that kind of final step in her mind, which was IVF for her.

And that's the final step and it's going to be the thing that works.

And now here she was with, I believe, three unsuccessful attempts, which I relate to because that's how many I had with frozen embryo transfers that were unsuccessful.

And she was really, really struggling to have any hope that this next one was going to work.

And there was a lot of pressure around it because the way that she had paid for her fertility treatments thus far meant that if this didn't work, they were going to have to come up with a big, large sum of money to attempt another retrieval.

And honestly, she wasn't sure, one, if she was going to be able to come up with that but two knew it wasn't gonna be any time soon.

And so we really worked together diligently over the last couple weeks during our sessions and then in between our sessions, we talked to each other on Voxer of how to create the best emotional experience possible.

That's realistic.

And I think that's the key is the realistic part.

And we talked about this, I shared this in an episode somewhat recently about kind of thought creation and emotion creation.

So we spent a lot of time on emotion creation.

You know, what were the emotions that were important to her that she wanted to have going into this next transfer.

And the first one I loved this was nothing to do with hope or excitement or any of that.

Her first one was to be understanding of the fear.

And I loved that because she knew she wasn't going to be 100% positive.

There was no way she was going to just be a hopeful person through the two week wait.

And so she wanted to ensure that she was being realistic and acknowledging I'm going to be doubtful.

I'm going to have fear.

I'm going to be stressing about like if this does doesn't work, what am I going to do next.

Right.

All of that is going to be coming up.

I'm going to be questioning every single step of the way.

And so I want to be understanding of myself through that process.

And so that was her first one and we went to work on how would we create that.

And then from there, she wanted to feel what she called in control.

And what she meant by that was not in control of the process because we can't be, but more so like in control of her emotions.

Because in the past when anxiety would come up, she would feel very like in a spiral spun out, unable to kind of even keep anything under control.

And so her goal was to just have some control over the emotions that were showing up.

And so for her, this met like, if the fear, anxiety, worry, doubt came up, but she was like in the midst of something important at work, she didn't want it to mean like she couldn't function at work.

She wanted to build believe that like she could do both.

And so we worked on that.

We worked on you know like if anxiety comes up, yes I need to deal with it and I have the skills of how to do that.

We've worked on that and she's doing amazing at that.

But I can tell myself like I'm going to work on that this afternoon.

Right now I need to focus on me.

I need to take care of me and part of that is prioritizing not just my fertility journey but my actual job.

I need to do what I'm working on now.

I'm in a big meeting and that's important to me and I want to show up for this meeting and then I can focus on the rest later goals really had nothing to do with like creating hope possibility like I I am the first person you know to think that those are really important but again goals need to be realistic this emotional creation process needs to be realistic and She knew that the things that were gonna be heaviest for her was just dealing with the hard of the emotions that were gonna come up.

And so we prioritized there, and then from there, we went to, how can we weave in even the tiniest sounds of hopefulness.

How can we weave in some calm through the process.

And we created ideas for that, and she went about her journey.

And I share her because she reached out this week just to say, you know, like, I'm still in the two week wait, I don't know any answer yet, but having gone through this now, and like being in the midst of it, it's going much better than I expected.

I definitely don't have as much hope as I did with my first one, but I'm okay with that.

I'm understanding of that.

I'm taking care of myself through that.

I'm able to create these emotions.

And she's gotten to a place where she believes like it's okay to have both.

It's okay to have some hope and it's okay to have some fear.

There's no need for us to like stress about like, oh, you can think yourself out of a pregnancy.

That's not the case.

And so I just thought this was such a beautiful win, right.

Like a win that has nothing to do with about the outcome, but just truly like how she's feeling that I wanted to share it with you guys.

And hopefully we'll have some news soon, but I'm just proud of her for creating such a safe place to experience this really high pressure situation.

That is a two week wait.

That's, you know, really been something that's really stressful for her.

And I think that's really important to see that ability of our brain to protect ourselves through that process.

And one of the key tools that she's using through this is processing emotions.

And so that's really what we're going to talk about today.

That sounds kind of funny, processing emotions, but that's the focus of today's episode.

And that is that showing up, having compassion, being emotionally resilient, being able to manage when negative emotions come up, having our own back when life gets hard, that is the truest form of self-love that exists.

There's nothing else that's a stronger version of self-love.

And so for me to have a month dedicated all about self-love meant that I had to have a whole episode where we really dive into this one topic.

And that is when life gets hard, when the journey gets hard, when you get bad news, when stress comes up, when anxiety comes up, when fear, when disappointment, when grief, whatever the uncomfortable negative emotion is that comes up, are you able to have your own back.

And that's what I call emotional resilience.

That's really the key to the work that I do is I help women learn that skill.

And so that's what we're going to talk about today.

So I have shared this topic in different ways over the last year and a half because it's that important and hopefully today hits you in a little different way or you just need to hear it another time to really buy into the fact that it's worth working on.

I think the first thing I have to sell women on when it comes to this process is that yeah, opening up to our uncomfortable emotions is scary because it's just not something we've been trained to do.

It's not something that's been commonplace for us.

For our whole life, we've been taught to avoid and run away from our emotions.

And now I'm telling you to do the opposite.

So it can very much feel like a scary process, a vulnerable process to even consider doing.

It can feel kind of like opening up Pandora's box and I totally understand that.

I can relate to that.

But I'm here to be the person to tell you it doesn't have to be that scary.

And we can start small.

You can start with one small emotional experience and move from there.

It doesn't have to be every single thing.

It doesn't have to be every single painful emotion that comes up today.

It can be just for two minutes.

And we can like close the lid back on it.

It doesn't have to consume you.

It doesn't have to consume your day.

And we can build up to this skill, right.

Like it doesn't have to be that we process every single negative emotion from now to the end of time.

It is okay to have this be a skill that we grow into, that we practice and we slowly get better at and we do more and more of, and then it just innately becomes part of our day to day life and that we trust, hey, when tough stuff happens, when tough emotions happen, I'm going to have my own back.

But that takes time, that takes months.

That's not like an overnight process.

So I just share that to say like it doesn't need to be scary to start this process, but it's worth it.

I promise you it is worth it.

To really begin, what I think about is like I said, reflecting just on what has been our brain's natural way of working, and that is that we've really been trained to avoid.

We've been trained that when scary negative uncomfortable emotions come up to distract ourselves with social media, with food, with whatever we can work, whatever we can to avoid thinking about it.

If we think about when we were kids and we were crying and upset, like our parents did things to help us not think about being upset.

They were like, here, have a popsicle, here, you know, watch TV, watch a cartoon, do something to make yourself happy, go outside and play, like whatever it was.

It was a distraction mechanism.

Now, the thing that I think we don't realize is that when we do that distraction mechanism, we don't release the emotion.

Now as an adult that shows up is when I was going through the grief process, I thought if I could schedule a vacation, you know, bury myself in work, dedicate myself to a workout goal, overeat, do any of those things that maybe I wouldn't have to deal with the grief of what I had just gone through.

But that isn't true.

The grief didn't go away.

So I really think that just knowing that and noticing our tendency to do that can help us see that there could be a better way to go about this that is better than just distraction mode.

And so knowing that our goal then is like, what do we do.

Right.

Like when these uncomfortable emotions come up, when anxiety comes up, when fear, when doubt, when grief comes up, what do we do.

The first thing is to just learn to sit with it.

We can give ourselves trial runs of this.

Research actually shows that a wave of an emotion, like an experience of an emotional input, typically lasts 60 to 90 seconds.

So what I always encourage women to do is to start off practicing, sitting with whatever the emotion is for two minutes.

Like I'm not asking for all day, just for a couple minutes.

Now, nobody says we're only gonna get one wave of that emotion, we can get multiple waves back to back to back, but to begin this process, to begin this skill, all I'm asking is for two minutes.

So sitting down when you have an emotion come up for two minutes and just sit with it.

Quiet your head quiet your mind and your thoughts and just listen to all the craziness spiraling that happens as that emotion kind of comes through you and That is really step one.

It's just doing that Over and over again and the reason that that is so important and the reason that is step one is because Over time over the next couple weeks of doing just that you will learn, oh, I have been absolutely terrified to feel doubt.

I have been absolutely terrified to have anxious thoughts, but I've sat with anxiety.

I've sat with doubt for two minutes five times this week and I'm okay.

Nothing bad happened.

I'm still alive.

If anything I've actually started to notice, I noticed the anxiety less often, ironically.

And so this kind of starts to build and remind your brain, hey, it's safe to sit with your emotions.

So this is really step one is to just remind and teach your brain it is not as dangerous as we think it is.

I always reflect back on my first miscarriage.

That grief was so heavy, I would have never, ever believed that I would have been able to make it through that grief again.

Honestly, I truly believe like subliminally, I didn't say this, but subliminally, I think I believed like that grief was potentially able to like kill me.

What that showed up as is me distracting every possible way I could to avoid feeling that grief because it felt so terrifying.

And now look at me seven years later in all the amounts of grief that I've been through that I have had the ability to process in a way that I didn't have that skill then because I've learned it's not dangerous to be with your emotions.

From a scientific perspective, an emotion is simply a sensation in your body.

So what do I mean by that.

When your brain thinks thoughts, "I'm upset I had a loss, I'm upset this cycle didn't work, this isn't fair," whatever the thought is, "I'm worried this cycle isn't gonna work.

" When you have a thought that triggers emotions, feelings.

So thoughts create feelings.

And those feelings show up in our body via a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters, et cetera, that are released.

And then we feel that emotion as a sensation, a feeling within our body.

The one that I think we can all relate to is, at least I can, is when a cop happens to like turn its lights on behind me, even if it's not for me.

And I instantly feel that like dropping my pit in my stomach, like the tingling in my fingers, like heat, right.

From the fear of, oh my God, I'm being pulled over.

And then they like drive past me and go for somebody else.

That is a very quick, oh my God, I'm being pulled over is the thought.

Emotion of fear, the fear setting in my body, creating those sensations.

That's an example.

So same thing here.

We have thoughts.

They create emotions of anxiety, of doubt, of grief, of sorrow.

Those emotions create an experience of sensations in our body.

And so what we're doing when we sit still and just let the emotion be there is we're just noticing what it feels like to be doubtful.

what it feels like to be anxious, what it feels like to be hopeless.

And the key here, the big important thing is the difference between when I distract from that emotion versus when I sit with that emotion.

When I distract from that emotion, the emotion doesn't leave my body.

I still have that sensation present.

I'm just trying to avoid it.

It needs to be processed later.

When I sit with it and allow it to be there for a couple minutes, it's almost as if I relieve some of that energy of that sensation and release it from my body.

And so then I can go about the day to day with less anxiety, less hopelessness, less whatever the emotion is.

And so I see time and time again, someone feels they can't escape anxiety.

They're trying their hardest to distract their self throughout the day to avoid the anxiety.

And it feels like a hundred pound weight on their back all day long, seven days a week.

And if we just practice checking in with what it feels like to be anxious for two minutes every morning, all of a sudden they have long stretches of the day where they don't feel anxious because they've actually been able to release some of that sensation.

And so this is why this is so important.

This is why this is the truest form of self-love is to be able to release that emotion so that you have room for new emotions.

That is such an important skill for your life but but especially for your fertility journey.

And that's really the goal, right.

Like that's the goal.

And what I always say is the more we can release the negative, the more we can release the uncomfortable emotions, the more likely we actually have room for some positive ones.

I believe a lot of us get so full of all of our negative emotions that we haven't processed.

We don't have room for hope.

We don't have room for possibility.

And it's not until we allow some of those painful emotions to process through us that we are able to open up to those positive emotions.

Doesn't mean the negative emotions are never gonna come again.

They're gonna keep coming.

Life is 50/50.

But if we practice the skill of continually checking in, being with ourselves, being connected to our body, that's why connection to our body matters so much.

acknowledging how we're feeling, acknowledging those sensations, that is what creates the potential for us to actually become an emotionally resilient person.

So step one is just what I call sit with the emotion.

To build on that is to kind of be a little bit more nuanced or specific with the emotions.

And so for me, this is, looks like honestly like questioning, Like having, forcing myself to describe what that sensation feels like.

Like when I feel heavy amounts of fear of will my future ever look like I wanted it to look, I would ask myself, what does that feel like in my body.

You know, and I would describe it as this heaviness in my chest.

And I, you know, my mentor always talks about describing an emotion and what it feels like to experience that emotion, as if you were describing it to someone who had never heard of the term fear, who had never heard of the term anxiety.

And you couldn't use that word, right.

Like you had to describe it by how it feels in your body.

And the cool thing is, and I have learned this from working with all of you, we all experience emotions differently.

I have a way that anxiety shows up for me, that fear shows up for me, that doubt shows up for me, and they're totally different than how they show up for one of my clients.

We all have different ways of describing and experiencing these emotions.

But doing that process of describing them and like explaining it actually is like what's forcing you to sit with it for a couple minutes and let it be there.

So it's a really great tool.

You can do that by literally just describing it out loud, just sitting there by yourself and thinking about it, journaling about how it feels.

Again, taking a walk and describing how it feels, I find a lot of my clients end up doing walks on a regular basis with their partner, and this is something they can open up about, is I've been feeling anxious, and this is what that feels like for me, and describing it to their partner.

Another thing you could do is, again, back to the connection to the body of yoga that we talked about last week.

Being in yoga could be a beautiful place to open up to what negative emotions are you holding onto right now, and what do they feel like.

So what I encourage you to do this week is to just notice what's one of the main uncomfortable emotions that are kind of coming up for you throughout the week.

Identify just one, we don't have to do it all.

And just give yourself a couple minutes throughout this week to experience what it's like to sit with that emotion.

What it's like to describe that emotion.

And we do this practice of sitting with in processing our emotions on a regular basis, it helps us build the skill, and we do it over and over and over again, and we keep doing it and we keep doing it.

And the key is that we don't have to do it in the moment that the emotion comes up every single time.

Life is happening.

I've gotten very difficult phone calls while at important speaking engagements or meetings or something.

And I've had them call and say, your cycle, your beta is negative.

And like I have to give myself 30 seconds to a couple minutes to like allow that disappointment to be there.

And then acknowledge like, I know it's not gone.

I know I'm not done being disappointed about this, but I will come back to this later.

I will talk this through with my partner.

I will sit with this later, but right now I need to go get done what I was gonna get done.

So it's okay to distract or put things on pause.

with the intention to come back to them.

That's okay to do.

We just have to come back.

We have to do the emotionally resilient skill of allowing the emotion to be there at some point.

And what's really cool is over the next couple of weeks, months, as you practice this, it starts to teach your brain, oh, I'm actually pretty good at this.

Like, yes, hard stuff is happening, difficult emotions are happening, but like, I'm actually able to like be okay with those emotions, sit with them, let them be there and kind of keep moving forward.

That is where the magic happens.

That is where you start to believe, oh, I can make it through this.

Even if bad news happens, I can make it through.

I trust myself to make it through.

I trust myself to have my own back.

I trust myself to show up with compassion and care for myself, even if this experience is painful.

And that is what makes me willing to keep going, to risk the negative news.

That's the key, that's the key to emotional resilience.

It's such a beautiful skill to have.

And it's just one that we just don't teach, right.

Like I wish we taught all kids this skill in school, 'cause it would really, truly transform our experience of our life, not just our fertility journey, but our life.

We get to learn the skill through our fertility journey, but trust me, you will use this in other places.

So I hope that you kind of take these ideas and use them to kind of reflect again.

What is one emotion that's been coming up for you that's uncomfortable this week.

How can I just practice sitting with it for a couple minutes this week and see what happens and kind of build from there.

And again, this is the work that I do with my clients.

We practice this skill.

We reflect on how it went and we keep growing in this skill.

And so I would be honored to help you in that process.

If you're ready to do that work on that level, go ahead and message me and we will schedule a time to get you on the coaching schedule and get you the support that you're looking for.

I hope that you all have a great week and I will be back with you next 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.

[MUSIC].