Welcome to IVF This, Episode 144 IVF and Emotional Stagnation

Alright, I want to talk to you today about the emotional stagnation zone which is the term I use to describe where a lot of us find ourselves emotionally speaking as IVF’ers. Now, you guys might be asking yourself, what is emotional stagnation, em? Fair question. So, I’m going ot tell you what it is, how it shows up in your IVF journey, and how you can start to break through emotional stagnation. 

Let’s start with the boring definition: Emotional stagnation refers to a state where a person feels stuck or unable to progress emotionally. It's characterized by a lack of growth, change, or development in one's emotional state or responses to life events. Emotional stagnation can manifest in various ways, such as feeling numb or disconnected from one's emotions, experiencing persistent negative emotions without resolution, or feeling apathetic and unmotivated to address or process one's feelings.

And as you listen to this I want to make sure you know that I do not want anyone to feel bad when they listen to this or feel badly I guess I should say. I don’t want you to feel badly, in fact I really hope you'll extend a whole lot of compassion to yourself. It’s no wonder that we end up in the emotional stagnation zone that I am about to describe to you, because first of all, we were just never taught how to allow our emotions. For most people that is news, that we just weren't taught. Our parents showed (mostly) us how to avoid our feelings or react to them. 

They might have yelled at us when they felt angry instead of role modeling what it was like to allow anger to pass through. They might have told us we had a big display of emotion that we should just go to our room and that it's best to handle that alone. Or how many times have you heard a parent say, “You’re going to cry. You want me to give you something to cry about?” 

These are the lessons that many of us grew up with around emotion. And so it stands to reason that we would already be at a slight disadvantage and would not have any other way of allowing emotion to pass through. Then we add onto that, grief, we add onto that a much higher amount of intense emotion than most of us are used to even needing to process. I mean I can't quantify it but you know it's a lot of emotion. So we have a lot of emotion combined with no skills to allow that emotion. 

And then let’s add on top of that, what we have been conditioned to believe, which is that feelings are problems. And then we’re exhausted and we throw in what’s happening in our body, our hormones and our sleep, and all the things that grief can do to a human body physiologically speaking. So we’ve got all these things stacked up against us. The very last thing any of us really want to do at this point in time is allow, or handle, or bring on anymore intense emotion. 

This is not what we want. So it makes perfect sense that we would then start doing things to avoid more intense emotion. And that looks differently for different people but sometimes that means we’re using a behavior to get away from emotion. So maybe we’re using our phones or scrolling. We’re not with the people who are in the room with us. Or we’re not even with ourselves. We’re distracting ourselves from ourselves and our own emotional experience even when we’re alone when we’re scrolling. 

Or maybe we’re turning to food, or shopping, or maybe we’re even cleaning, researching (that’s a BIG one in IVF) organizing and just trying to stay busy. Because when we get silent that’s when the emotion comes and we don't have the tools or the perceived capacity to handle anymore of it so we shut it out. We shut it out. Then conversely, we actually start limiting the amount of ‘positive emotion’ we could be feeling. If you know me, you know hat I put positive and negative emotions like those phrases in quotes-because I think positive and negative are just labels that we have given emotion. 

Regardless, there might be something that we have the opportunity to feel, connection, accomplishment, pride, joy, something that we would say is on that positive side of the spectrum. We have the opportunity to create that for ourselves but then don’t because in order to do so we have to risk feeling something that we would say is negative- a baby shower or gender reveal, something in that vein. Now you certainly don’t have to attend any of these types of celebrations. Even if it feels like you can’t say “no,” I promise you, you can. But let’s just say that you decide you want to attend and feel a connection to your friends, group, or community- whatever that looks like for you. There is something positive that you are seeking. But also there is the potential that you could get rejected (and in this scenario that would look like everyone else talking about their babies or pregnancies, that would be a form of rejection), or exposed to like a painful trigger. 

So if we don't believe that we have the ability to handle the emotions that we might feel if it doesn't go the way that we want it to go. Then we will avoid putting ourselves in that uncomfortable place at all, which means we virtually guarantee that we don't get to experience the positive emotions that we want. Because we aren’t willing to risk the chance that we might experience the negative emotions. So what happens is that over time we start using behaviors to avoid negative emotion and we start using inaction, which then prevents us from feeling positive emotion. 

So, we end up in this place of stagnation, this emotional stagnation, this bucket of yuck,  in the middle. If we lined all of the emotions up and we stacked them from the lowest vibrations to the highest vibrations, from despair all the way up to joy and ecstasy. We end up no longer in despair but also limiting joy and ecstasy, and all the other good stuff. We have less of the bad stuff but also less of the good stuff and we end up in this band in the middle, the emotional stagnation zone. This is where it's not too terrible, it’s not horrible, it’s tolerable but it’s not great. It’s definitely not amazing. 

It's like beige, you know that color, just meh? Stagnant, no growth is happening there. No risk is being taken there. No new things are happening. There’s nothing vibrant. We’re not available to dream dreams, and pursue goals, and open ourselves up to new possibilities in that stagnation zone- and there’s a little more to that bc we feel like we have to put our lives on hold for IVF BUT that contributes to this stagnation zone.

But listen, it’s kind of tempting because it feels safe, it’s familiar. It's not great but it’s familiar. And you’ve heard that phrase, ‘the devil you know’. It’s the devil we can end up really knowing and being familiar with and not wanting to leave. 

It's the space that part of our brain, that primitive part, that part that really doesn’t want us to get rejected or hurt, kind of thinks is desirable and wants us to stay in because it's known. It’s quantifiable. It’s safe but it’s also not living. Emotional stagnation is not living, it's not thriving, it's just surviving. It’s just surviving. And what makes me so freaking sad is that I know there are many IVF’ers who are not listening to this podcast and they are in that emotionally stagnant place and they don't know any better. They don’t have me in their ear or somebody else. 

And a lot of them have just resigned themselves to the way that it is. They have just decided that that is a byproduct of losing infertility and IVF, and then that’s probably their new normal and so they tolerate it. Because they don't know that it doesn't have to be the way that they live. And if this is you, let me tell you, this is not the way any of us have to live. Now, there's nothing wrong with it. If you want to be there, I get it. If you just need a break and you really just kind of want to checkout sometimes, I get it. Sometimes I do too. 

But in terms of our broad full life, that's not where we want to spend it. That’s not where we want to live it. That’s not living, really living, the kind of living that is available to us. We don't believe that we have the capacity to allow it, so we turn to a behavior to avoid it. We pick up our phone. We check out with Netflix. We start shopping. We start working. We start distracting. We start doing something to get away from it. And what that creates for us typically if we do it long enough is a result that we don't actually want. Maybe the first time we pick up our phone, it’s not that big of a deal. But ultimately, after a while in excess it will probably reach the point where we are not actually spending our time the way that we want to spend it. 

We are not present with ourselves, we’re not present with the people we care about. And then we now have more reasons to feel bad and more importantly, less belief in our ability to manage feelings, to allow them to pass. We actually believe we’re less capable of letting feelings flow through every time we end up falling into the behavior that we really don't want, to avoid our feelings. Like the TLDR is: The emotion isn't the problem, it’s what we do when the emotion shows up. 

It's the pattern that we create when we decide to avoid the emotion and it's usually a very unconscious decision by the way. It’s not something we are actually choosing in the moment with our prefrontal cortex. It's just a habit, but we avoid, we create something we don't like. We have even more reasons to feel more strong emotion and less belief in our ability to handle it. And this is how we get into this place of emotional stagnation over, and over, and over we do that. 

Then though, the way out of this is we’ve got to reverse this cycle of starting to feel the emotion and then resisting, avoiding, or reacting to the emotion. We’ve got to do it differently. So imagine cycle but this one goes counterclockwise, the sort of strong emotions still starts. We don’t change that, the strong emotion is still there. But instead of avoiding it with the behavior we actually allow it to pass through us. We actually consciously intentionally follow the process that I teach, the NOW process, Name, Open, Witness. 

You can check out episode three if that’s new to you, Name, Open, Witness. This is sadness, open up to it, give it permission to be there and then witness what is it actually like in your body. And then it flows through. Now, this takes practice. And I’m not saying it’s easy and your primitive brain won’t like it. It will feel counterintuitive. You won’t want to do it. Sometimes you will get confused. You will start to do it and then you’ll end up in the sad thought spiral and you will think that's feeling a feeling and it's not, I promise you that. 

So it does take practice and it's not easy. And I know you know this, if you’re listening to the podcast, and this is one of the many things I teach in my 1:1 and group programs. 

And we do that because I want to be there to help you with it. I know that it's not easy. I know that it’s counterintuitive. I know that it goes against all of your programming. And I know that your brain won’t want to do it, or at least part of your brain. So we account for that and we provide a supportive container for that. So that you can get enough repetitions in that you develop the skill of strong emotion starts, allow it to pass through. 

Then we are creating a desired result. We’re not now creating something we don't want because we avoided our lives. We’re creating something we do want because we stayed engaged. We did the thing. We didn’t let the emotion distract us, we didn’t let it derail us. and more importantly when that happens what we come away with is actually an increased belief in our ability to allow emotion to pass through. We're literally developing the muscle of allowing emotion. 

And we do it enough times that we stop seeing feelings as problems and we start seeing them as experiences that all we need to do is allow. There’s something to learn there if we want, but there’s never a problem to solve. It is not a problem when we have a strong emotion. And we increase our own self-belief in our ability to handle it. And then guess what? When we believe we can handle emotions, unstoppable, because all the things we want require us to feel emotions, don’t they? They do. 

If you get good at feelings you will get yourself out of the emotional stagnations place- that emotional rut you feel like you’ve been in, you will be able to experience the full range of emotions. 

And you will believe that you have that skill and you can take that with you for the rest of your life and for all the big dreams that you might not even be giving yourself permission yet to be dreaming about.

And that is what I have for you this week, my friends. I hope you have a great week, and I’ll talk to you soon.