Welcome to IVF This, episode 125, IVF and tolerance versus acceptance. 

Hello, hello, my beautiful friends. Oh, that felt like a good one today. I hope you are all doing so, so well. 

I'm in a little bit of a giggly mood, I gotta be honest. So bear with me today. We're doing pretty well over in the IVF This corner. We're gearing up to launch another. round or another cohort of the IVF, this group coaching program. So when you hear this, it'll be a couple of weeks before we launch. And I would invite you to, and I've said this on previous podcasts, so you're not gonna miss anything out. We're hoping to get to a point where we can launch maybe a new group every single month or every other month. So this is not going away anytime soon, I promise you. But if you're a long-time listener or short-time listener, if you enjoy this podcast, I wanna strongly encourage you. to go to my website, www.ivfthiscoaching.com, and sign up to my weekly newsletter, whether it's the coping ahead information, or if you're doing the IVF mindfulness journal, the IVF this mindfulness journal, I should say, then you're gonna get information on the group coaching cohort. The group coaching is a fraction of what I charge for one-on-one clients. Now both are beautiful things, right? For one-on-one, you get very individualized. conversations, we talk about really things that are really specific to you, we have freedom and kind of range to explore a lot of different things, but it also doesn't allow you to learn a lot necessarily just depending on what we're talking about on how to coach yourself, right? And that's what the IVF, this group coaching is all around. I have different lessons week to week where I teach you how to do, how to apply all of the concepts that I talk about on this podcast. with my clients how to do this for yourself. I'm a delightful person. I'm sure you do not wanna spend the rest of your life with me. So learning how to coach yourself is one of the best gifts you can give yourself, okay? So that's number one. 

But I also, and I think I talked about this last week, I have a YouTube channel now, amazing. We have about eight or nine episodes already and I'm so excited. My wonderful podcast producer and friend Anthony has been working tirelessly to make this a beautiful presentation for you guys. So I hope that you go to YouTube, it's IVF This Coaching. That's the channel. Check it out, subscribe to it, leave comments, leave feedback, make it more discoverable for other people who maybe have never heard my voice, who have never been exposed to the type of things that we're talking about in reference to IVF, and so that we can maybe make people's lives just a little bit easier, right? Because that's the goal. I can't take away the pain, I can't take away the uncertainty, but we can make this process a little bit easier. 

And so what we're gonna talk about today, acceptance versus tolerance. I've talked about acceptance a lot on this podcast. I know I have. And what I'm finding is that whenever I talk about acceptance to most of my clients, I'm gonna be honest, most of my clients are like, yeah, Emily, that sounds like a really good thing. I just don't know that I can get there. Like either people have like a working definition of acceptance as like, it's a really passive, like a resignation sort of thing, or whether you just... it's too far of a bridge. It's just a bridge too far. You can't cross it. We're just not quite there yet. So I've been toying about this idea, this concept about acceptance versus tolerance. And so I'm just wanting to present it to you today. Just see what you think about it, okay? 

So the way most of us, and I alluded to this just a moment ago. Well, a lot of us have a working definition of what acceptance means, and it doesn't really feel super good, right? A lot of times, acceptance for most people feels like, well, I can't do anything, so I might as well just accept it. Or they have this idea that acceptance is like a thing you check off on your to-do list, and once you've accepted, you can just wash your hands of it and be done. And acceptance is not a passive process. And what I mean is acceptance takes a lot of effort and acceptance takes a lot of consciousness and a lot of fighting against it and it's not just a one trick pony, it just doesn't happen, it's not a flash in the pan and then it's over, you never have to worry about it again. Acceptance is an ongoing process, right? And so that can feel very overwhelming to people. So when I talk about tolerance versus acceptance, because again, everything... on IVF This is all cafeteria style. You're gonna take what works for you and you're gonna leave what doesn't. If acceptance works for you, that is beautiful. If you're not quite ready for acceptance and maybe tolerance sounds a little bit more doable for you, that's beautiful too. And that's what we wanna get to. I don't want this to be so aspirational that it is out of reach for you. That is honestly the opposite of what I'm going for here. I want it to be the most accessible. I want something to be the most reachable, attainable thing for you. And so if tolerance is more attainable, then that's what we're gonna go for, okay? 

So tolerance, I want you to think of tolerance and acceptance as tolerance is something you're willing. And I did a podcast recently, I remember, maybe five or six episodes ago, about the feeling of willingness and how that can be kind of the bread and butter. that the special sauce, the secret sauce, whatever, about going through IVF and managing those things is your willingness, right? So I want you to think of tolerance as your willingness to tolerate the existence or the experience of something without necessarily liking it. When I started thinking about tolerance versus acceptance, I started thinking about, of course, as I always do, my own IVF experience. And I started thinking about how, you know, at the very beginning, Em, you were not so accepting. This was not a practice what you preach sort of situation. You've gotten to acceptance after a lot of hard work. I absolutely have. But that was certainly not where I was when we were first going through infertility, when we were first, you know, doing medicated cycles or timed intercourse or any of the other stuff, right? Acceptance wasn't there. Far from it, my friends. I was probably the most resistant person that you have met, but I was tolerating it. I tolerated it. I was willing to go through it because I wanted the thing at the end. I wanted children, I wanted my family. 

So I was tolerant of the experience. I was tolerant of the emotions that were coming with it. I was tolerant of the uncertainty. I was tolerant of the pain, the inevitable pain. One of my most common not necessarily best liked taglines or things that I tell my clients is very often there's not really a path without pain. Certainly not what we're talking about here. There's going to be pain in continuing to do IVF. There's going to be pain if you decide to stop. There's going to be pain with continuing on with your own eggs or your partner's sperm or something like that. There's going to be pain with deciding to choose a donor. There's even gonna be pain in the form of continued anxiety, physical discomfort when you do get pregnant, right? There's not really an option without pain. So if you can tolerate that, if you are willing to accept that is part of the process, then we don't necessarily need acceptance right away, right? We can move through this process without accepting. We've talked about tolerance, now we're gonna talk about acceptance. And acceptance as a word has multiple meanings, right? But what we're talking about is an individual's agreement with the situation, recognizing the process. or condition without like protesting it, without trying to change it. In a sense, acceptance is similar to tolerance, but they're not synonymous, right? Because acceptance goes beyond tolerating. You're agreeing that this is the situation, that it's like a wholehearted. If you think about tolerance as like this, you will tolerate it, but maybe you don't like it or don't agree with it, but you'll keep quiet and you won't like be aggressive about the situation or anything like that. But acceptance, acceptance is starting to kind of welcome it actively as a part of the process, right? I don't know that I... I ever, even when we were going through the process, I don't know that I ever like, with open arms accepted IVF. I don't think that I ever, until recently, right? Within the last several years, I don't think that I ever opened my arms up and accepted that infertility was a part of our life, right? I have now, I actually have a beautiful relationship with my infertility. I have a beautiful relationship with my IVF experience. But I gotta tell you, when I was in the thick of it, hell. No, and I'm using the word hell very graciously. It's gonna be a different word, but I wanna keep this less explicit, right? You can tolerate something without accepting it, but you cannot accept something that you have not tolerated. Right, so if your goal is to get to acceptance, if your goal is to... find that relationship. It doesn't have to be. You don't have to be like me. You don't have to find a way to have a beautiful relationship with this experience. That is not... You don't have to buy into that. That's fine. You can stay in tolerance. This wasn't what I thought my life was going to look like. I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do the shots. I'm willing to do the doctor's appointments. I'm willing to accept the pain. I'm willing to accept the feelings. I don't have to like it. Right, acceptance, and I think that's where most people get tripped up. They think to accept something, they have to like it. It's not necessarily the case. You don't have to like it, but it's an agreement. It's an agreement that you have with the situation. And maybe you don't wanna agree with it. Damn it, maybe you don't wanna agree with it, but you're willing to tolerate it. So I found, and as I've talked to my clients and as I've kind of... really mold this concept over in my head over and over and over again, maybe acceptance isn't the thing that I thought it was. I thought it was because I had gotten there. But I don't know that when I was thinking about that and when I was talking to you guys about acceptance in several of the podcasts or even in my previous coaching, prior to the last year or so, I had been there. And I do think that is probably an ideal place to get to because you get the power of releasing some of that, but I don't think it's the only way. Like many things, there's so much gray in the world that this is one of those gray areas. So I don't want you to think about acceptance as the Shangri-La or the epitome. of mindfulness or the goal of this experience or the goal of coaching or therapy, you don't have to. You don't have to agree with it. You don't have to embrace it. You don't have to love it or build a relationship with it like I have. It's not necessary. When I look back on my experience, most of what I did was tolerated, not accepted. I don't think that my claims previously, you know, in that 124 previous podcast episodes were disingenuous, not in the least, right? Because I had gotten to that place and that's fine. But I don't think I was taking into consideration the nuance of what acceptance could be. And that maybe for a lot of us, tolerance is more comfortable. I used to think about how I would kind of walk in, and I naturally have kind of a bubbly personality anyway. So I would go into my reproductive endocrinologist office and I would greet the office staff and my medical assistant, Ricky, I still love her to death, my doctor, you know, hey doc, how are you doing? We would exchange pleasantries, all that. But it wasn't like I was shooting rainbows out of my ass going there. I wasn't thrilled that I would have to fight Austin traffic to go downtown. you know, three or four, however many mornings in a row leading up to like a retrieval or anything. I wasn't happy. I didn't embrace that. I was willing to do it, which is tolerance. But I didn't have like this beautiful relationship with it. I didn't agree with it. I didn't say, yes, this is exactly how my life is always meant to go. No, I did it. I tolerated it. I eventually got to acceptance. But that doesn't mean that you have to either. That doesn't mean you ever have to. But I think tolerance is the middle ground. Tolerance gives you the ability to go through this process without making it so hard on yourself. You know, I talk about that all the time. How do we make this process easier on ourselves? How do we just make it incrementally, even if it's 1% easier? 2% easier, that's the goal. And maybe that's more tolerance. Maybe I was wrong. It's been known to happen, although infrequently, just kidding, it happens all the time. Maybe tolerance is the thing that's been missing. Putting a word to it, naming it as that, rather than acceptance, which, you know, in terms of what we're experiencing and the pain that Many of us have gone through the losses, the mental, financial, emotional capital that we've spent in pursuit of this dream. Acceptance might be so far, like light years away from us. So maybe that's not the goal, at least for right now. You always get to decide. You always get to decide how you show up and how you wanna experience life and how you wanna feel. You always get to decide that. But maybe acceptance is too far. Maybe tolerance feels more familiar. Tolerance feels more acceptable. It feels more comfortable. It doesn't feel, maybe you don't have the same working definition. of tolerance that you have around acceptance. Maybe it doesn't feel so stigmatizing to tolerate something versus accepting it. I don't know, I don't know what your working definition is. But I think that might be somewhere easier to get to. Maybe you're already on the path of acceptance. So this isn't necessary, this isn't a necessary step for you. And that's okay. If tolerance is a necessary step for you. That's okay too. You're not missing anything because you're exactly where you need to be right now. And I think that that's the key to tolerance. In social work, I've been a social worker for, God, ooh, 18 years? Oh, I don't, nope. Don't even think about it, Emily. Don't put the numbers to it, Emily. I've been a social worker for a long time. And one of the basic... core tenants of social work is you meet the client exactly where they are. Not where you think they should be, not where they think that they should be, anything like that. You meet them exactly where they are. And I wonder if that's another way to view tolerance. This is exactly where I am. And again, I'm not going back on what acceptance means and what it could mean. I think there's room for both. I think that both. are a beautiful testament to yourself. I think that both can serve you beautifully. You know, as long as you're not using it against yourself, that's fine. But I think that there is room for both. I think there's the possibility for both. And one might just be closer to you than the other. So, let me know what you think. I wanna hear from you. What is, for you, what is the difference between tolerance and acceptance? What feels better? What feels more accessible? How do you want to experience this? Is acceptance beautiful? It has been for me. I have a different definition of acceptance than some people. Doesn't mean it couldn't be for you, but it also mean you might never get there because of how you view acceptance, right? For seven, eight billion people in the world, seven to eight billion different definitions of what acceptance is. So maybe that's not applicable to you. Maybe tolerance is better. Tolerance is the place you can start with. Tolerance will allow you to access self-compassion. That this is where we are. I don't have to like it. just have to be willing to accept it. That's what I just said, I'm gonna take that out. I just have to be willing to do it until I'm not. Then that's always the key. If you get to a point where you're no longer willing to tolerate what's happening, that's okay. You're making that choice for you to take care of yourself. That is based in self-compassion and based in self-love. And that's the point of all of this. And that's the thing that I want you to find for yourself. Always. It's not gonna look exactly like it looked for me or for anybody else. It's gonna look like what it looks like for you. And that's just what we wanna find. What's gonna work for you. Okay. That's what I have for you this week, my friends. I hope you have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.