I was too busy ‘being strong’ to really understand and connect with my wife’s feelings from infertility – that was until I found out I was infertile and then I suddenly got it.
I was lucky enough to interview one of the world’s experts in the mind-body link and women’s health, particularly women’s fertility, Alice Domar. I will be making the interview available here soon. We were talking about stress and how stressful infertility can be.
Alice has carried out research in this area and the stress levels of infertile women compares to levels of woman with cancer, AIDS or heart disease. That’s massive. I look back and I don’t think I acknowledged this enough with my wife on our journey. She wasn’t looking for me to be strong, she wanted me to understand her fears, anxiety, anger, jealousy and all the other emotions that I was choosing to bury as I thought one of us needed to ‘stay strong’. Wrong strategy, however perhaps that story is for another time.
Alice runs a mind-body program at a IVF clinic to help couples, particularly the women, let go of stress and negative thoughts to help them with their fertility and chances of success.
We all relax in different ways, a long hot bath works for some but doesn’t appeal to others. I find a number of relaxation techniques work for me, different ones appeal to me at different times. I also love using relaxation hypnosis tracks such as the one you can download here.
You can find a selection of relaxation techniques here that I hope you will find useful on your journey. Play with them as it can take a few goes to get more in to it. The more you do them the quicker you will relax and more relaxed you will get.
If you are undergoing infertility treatment such as IVF then being relaxed during the IVF embryo transfer can be critical to the success.
Enjoy!
Russellx