Hello everyone! Thank you for joining me today. I hope you are all doing so well. 

I want to remind you all that I have free mini-sessions available right now. If this is the first you’re hearing of me talk about it, a mini-session is 30 minutes of 1:1 coaching, me and you, sis. Where you bring one specific thing you want to talk about and we get to work. 

This is great resource! If you don’t have any previous experience with coaching or you just don’t really know what to expect when it comes to working together, that’s a perfect opportunity to get in on a mini-session. To access my scheduling link, you can go to my website, www.ivfthiscoaching.com and you will see towards the bottom of the page where you can select “mini session” to schedule or on my SM profiles, which are both IVF This Coaching, there are links for the mini sessions as well. Book a mini-session and lets get some shit DONE!

Ok, onto todays topic!

I got a DM on Instagram from a woman asking me about why she is constantly comparing other women’s IVF journey to her own. That when she does this, she ends up feeling worse about her situation or guilty because someone has it worse. 

It’s a shitty game we play, called “who has it worse? Who has it better?”

And the prize for this terrible game? You guessed it either feeling worse or feeling guilty. 

There is no effing upside to this!

But what it is really called? It’s actually called comparative suffering and that’s a concept that I am going to break down for you all today. 

Comparative suffering happens when we try to make sense of our own pain by comparing it to other people’s pain. This is a pretty universal thing, it’s not specific to the infertility community but the infertility community has a shit-ton of suffering, so it makes it ripe for this type of behavior. 

I think the infertility world has probably always had an element of this woven throughout and it’s now that there is such an online presence for it on FB and IG, it’s like comparative suffering on steroids. 

If there’s one phrase that sums up comparative suffering its, “Well, it could always be worse.”

Who has heard that before? Growing up my dad would say this a lot. Along with, of course, the dreaded but slightly funny dad jokes. 

That was the sentiment that his generation, and generations before and after his, embraced as almost a badge of honor. Now, that thinking didn’t originate with his generation, it’s been with us for centuries. It’s a very human thing to do, to compare. But it doesn’t mean it is helpful or that it serves us in any way. 

So, what does comparative suffering look like? It comes up in many ways but here’s a couple of examples:

Well, I’ve only had 1 egg retrieval, but she’s had 4

I had a failed transfer, but she’s has three miscarriages

OR

Oh, she’s only had 1 egg retrieval, but I’ve had 4

In this example we actually can judge people that we think might not have “paid their dues” – mind you, this is not a conscious thought, but it can still be back there in your brain. 

My cycle was cancelled but she just had a miscarriage.

Or 

I just had a miscarriage, but her cycle was JUST cancelled. 

At least my miscarriage was at 6 weeks, I know someone that delivered stillborn. 

No, ladies, just no. 

I had a client that had gone through two retrievals and by all accounts had had very successful rounds and had SEVERAL embryo’s frozen. She would tell me that she didn’t feel like she had any room to complain (even though she had suffered 3 miscarriages, because other women that she knows don’t have nearly as many, or even any, frozen embryos. 

It was like there was no way for her to feel good about her IVF success, because she was comparing it to other women’s lack of success. AND it minimized her experience of miscarriages because of the same reason. Literally NO UPSIDE! 

Comparative suffering requires that you’re either minimizing someone else’s experience or you’re minimizing your own. 

And you want to know the worst part? It doesn’t effing WORK! It doesn’t make your load any lighter. It doesn’t make your pain any less painful. In fact, it makes the load feel heavier. It makes our pain feel MORE painful because we are not allowing ourselves the opportunity to actually grieve what we are experiencing. When we spend time pitting it up against something that you either perceive as worse or better than someone else, there is no prize at the end of that game. Only more suffering. 

I’ve talked about my boo, Brene Brown, several times on the podcast (of note, I am putting this out into the universe, I WILL meet Brene Brown one day and fangirl all over her and completely embarrass myself and it will be AMAZING, anyway, Dr. Brown describes comparative suffering as:

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. My husband died and that grief is worse than your grief over an empty nest. I’m not allowed to feel disappointed about being passed over for promotion when my friends just found out his wife has cancer…” That’s from her Book, Rising Strong.

She’s amazing, right?

The thing that sticks out to me the most is the fear and scarcity. 

Let’s talk about fear. There’s a lot of fear during infertility.

The fear that you’ll never get pregnant.

The fear you won’t be able to stay pregnant. 

The fear that you will never have the family you want and have dreamed about.

When doing fertility treatments, the fear doesn’t go anywhere. It morphs a little to include:

The fear of spending money and it not working.

The fear of not having control over the process.

The fear of the treatments failing. 

Many of us experience a perpetual state of fear throughout infertility and beyond. 

For so many of us, parenthood is one of the most desired and valued goals of adulthood. It’s part of the expect life course. Many of us think about becoming parents from the time that we are very young. I can’t tell you how many women have told me, “I’ve always dreamed of being a mother.” 

Within that context, it’s totally reasonable why fear is so present during infertility. 

It’s not just that we fear we will never get pregnant, although that is certainly there, we also fear the potential loss of that entire experience. The loss of our imagined life. 

So, what about scarcity? Fear breeds scarcity. Scarcity is this belief that there is not enough. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough opportunity, not enough resources, and for the client I described above, not enough embryos. 

This “not enough-ness” is a recipe for disaster yet so many of us think in these terms. 

I can tell you, a place of scarcity that I am continually working on is time scarcity. 

It can be within my business, like, “I’m not doing enough.”
 I can have a day packed with things to do, like writing or recording podcasts, client calls, Social media posts, and the same old tune of “You’re not doing enough,” or “You should be doing more” will play in background of my brain. 

As it relates to my infertility, time is a huge factor. I have a lot of thoughts around the fact that I am 36. Thinking, “If we’re going to do another round we need to hurry to do it because I am not getting any younger, or more appropriately my EGGS aren’t getting any younger. 

For some of my clients, time scarcity can come up in the same way. Reproductive health lends itself to perpetuate that with terms like “Advanced Maternal age” or “geriatric pregnancy” thanks so fucking much for that, guys. But that time emphasis reinforces that scarcity mindset. 

Another way is with this idea that “we should’ve started sooner.” I hear this one a lot. People will tell me this, as if they have missed some important threshold for when the “right” time would be. But there is no objective measure of “the right time” because the right time is the time that you began your fertility treatments. Not a moment more. 

If you have multiple embryos and you fear that you don’t have enough. Ask yourself, “what is enough?” what is that magic number that you would have where you would feel secure? Most people don’t know it. Because there isn’t a “right number” that will make you feel secure, just like there isn’t a “right time”. 

I think this also comes up when we see pregnancy announcements. Especially when you have friends. The FOMO is REAL with pregnancy announcements. That scarcity mindset of being left behind or I want what they have, I don’t want what I have. 

This is a lie that fear and scarcity tries to tell us. That there is a right way to do things. A right time to do them. A right number or benchmark that we need to hit in order to feel secure, but it’s not true. None of it. 

What is true is that compassion and empathy are the antidote for comparative Suffering. You might’ve also head me say that in the episode about shame. Noticing a pattern, here? It’s all connected. If we can break free from treating ourselves like an asshole, things in our lives start to shift. They start to get better, even easier despite our infertility. Despite IVF. 

It is possible to keep our struggles in perspective. And allow ourselves to feel however we feel. Conversely, we can keep our struggles in perspective and still allow OTHERS to feel and express their own feelings and pain.

Remember, there’s no prize at the end of the Who has it better, who has it worse, game. None. 

But bringing in empathy and compassion. That’s a different story. Empathy and compassion towards ourselves in probably the most challenging, because we are not practiced at it. It is not something, I believe, as women give ourselves permission to feel. WE are socialized to be more attentive to other people that we are to ourselves. That everyone else comes first. And this is another shining example of that. When we cannot extend compassion to ourselves it is difficult to truly show up in compassion for others.

When we give ourselves permission to feel, whatever the hell it is we are feeling- without judgment. Without qualifiers, or anything else. When we give ourselves permission for those feelings, when we release ourselves from our struggle, we automatically offer support to other people too. It’s a beautiful thing. 

Think about airplane rules:  Put your mask on, before assisting others. Help yourself so you can help others. Disappointment and hurt look different in every individual life. Each time we honor ourselves, we water our personal soil – ultimately, growing our ability to share kindness with others. 

So, comparative suffering- we all do it, but it never helps us. It never serves us. It makes us feel worse. 

Compassion and empathy are the way out. 

Self-compassion is the answer to so much of the heartache we experience during infertility and IVF so I will never stop preaching about it!

Have a beautiful day, my friends. And remember, I adore you and you’ve got this.