Testimonial: Meeting with a psychologist: awareness and readjustments

I always believed and hoped that my journey in a fertility clinic would be short and quickly successful (like all couples who go there I imagine, no one wants to imagine leaving that it will be long and arduous!). After this 3^E failure, I saw that I would need help if I wanted to persevere.

The psychologist I met listened to me on my journey. I had complaints as much about my work, about our expansion, which was stressing me out, as about my efforts in a fertility clinic. One thing that I learned from the psychologist, about my numerous visits to the fertility clinic, was to try to make these moments pleasant ones. Wow, what a challenge!!! But in life, there is only one thing that is real: the present moment. The past no longer exists, the future is uncertain. So, if the present moment is making you sweat, try to change it to make it more acceptable. So, for the rest of my follow-ups at the fertility clinic, I always brought a book that I liked to read, I bought myself a magazine that I liked that I didn't normally buy, or my boyfriend and I went to eat in a restaurant that we liked following these appointments. When possible, I tried to find a moment of happiness in these steps. A little awkward anecdote, about me taking the psychologist's advice a bit too literally. Try to be well in the moment: during insemination #4, in preparation for the moment when I knew I would have to lie down for 10 minutes, I brought my own blanket and a dog, who had already accompanied me during a hospitalization. In general, during these 10 minutes, we are left as a couple, the staff does not come to see us. But this time, that's when the nurse chose to come and ask us a question. The vision she had, that of a 4-year-old girl with her pink stuffed toy and her ladybug doggie, must have surprised her, because the face of astonishment she made was worth $100! And that made me very uncomfortable! (I didn't drag my kit out the next few times!)

I achieved 3 things with this therapist.

The first: I didn't want kids at all costs. I had heard too many stories of couples who had lost sight of each other, buried in all these procedures. For me, my relationship has always been more important than my desire to have a family.

The 2^E What I realized was that getting pregnant was a way to reach my goal (the goal was to start a family). The pregnancy itself was not the end, there were plenty of other ways to reach my goal, adoption for example, or using a surrogate mother. In other words, I understood that there is nothing gained when you become pregnant, it is to bring the pregnancy to term that is important. Some women can put a lot of energy into getting pregnant, so much so that they seem to forget that it's just a way to start a family, not the end in itself. The disappointment is all the more terrible when, for example, they have a miscarriage. For my part, I knew that I would rather never get pregnant than reach this intermediate goal and have a miscarriage. It's a deal I made with life (knowing that if it happened to me one day, I would have no choice but to face it).

The last thing I realized was that I was relying a lot on pregnancy to get me out of my work that I no longer liked. Oops, dealing with this thought is not easy... Once you are aware of this reality, what do you do with it? My boyfriend is a student, so he doesn't work, so everything falls on my shoulders... We do jobs that require money, so everything falls on my shoulders... We want a child, it requires money, so everything falls on my shoulders...

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