Hello, Hello, Hello my beautiful friends. I hope you are all doing so, so well today. 

I’m just gonna jump into the topic today. This is a more specific kind of supplement to last weeks episode, The role of fear. If you haven’t yet, I want you to go back and listen to that. The goal of that episode was to pull the veil back from fear. I think everyone in the world, and specifically for us those of us experiencing infertility and going through IVF experience a lot of fear. So I anted to help you all better understand what fear is, and what it is not. 

Today, I want to talk about one of the most common THEMES I hear around hope and that is the fear of hope. I hear a lot of phrases like, “I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” “I cant get too excited, too hopeful.” And so this episode speaks specifically to that. I think most people can relate to saying something like that at some point in our lives, but those phrases are like on REPEAT in the heads of IVF’ers.

Let’s start with hope. When you hope for something, you yearn for it, but you don’t know if you’ll actually get it. That makes it different from optimism, which is a strong belief that you’ll get it. When you hope for this something, you’re giving greater importance to it than you did before you began hoping. As a result, your potential disappointment over the loss of that thing becomes more intense the more you hope for it. The higher you go up the hill of hope, the farther you think you could fall because you’re making that goal more and more important as you pursue it.

Another way I’ve heard hope described is that hope as a kind of investment. If you have a goal, you have to invest in that hope or goal for it to be realized. That means you have to invest time, maybe money, maybe social capital to convince other people to help you. Then you have to invest your faith that the world, and for IVF Science, will support your hopes.. Then you also have to risk your own feelings of self-worth because if you risk moving toward an important goal, there’s a chance your investment might not turn out the way you want, and then you end up feeling bad about yourself. And that’s where, for us, it gets really tricky, because any perceived or actual “failure” we tend to internalize as a reflection of ourselves. We personalize my eggs, my uterus, my ovaries, my womb, my worthiness of being a mom or a parent. 

And then to add to that, within the Infertility/ IVF community Hope is touted as this like magic elixir that is required for success. That if you don’t feel hopeful then you are clearly doing something wrong, or “it” won’t work for you. And for many of us, there is no nuance in terms of our feelings. What I mean is, if we feel like we should feel hopeful- what we tend to interpret that as, is that I should ONLY feel hope. Or that I should feel hope 100% of the time. Which BOTH are very unrealistic expectations and when you can’t possibly maintain that, then you again start to internalize that as a failure- when in truth, it’s just that you’re human. You were never designed to only feel one emotion at a time, you were never designed to feel 100% unwavering anything, let alone hope. 

So when you take all of that into consideration, it makes complete sense, why when you’re faced with failure after failure, and some of us even more after that, you develop a Fear of Hope. 

I think ultimately the fear of hope comes down to a feeling of helplessness. So you have  have decided to have a child, or more children and this is something important that you  feel you need or lack, but then you’re doing everything you can to make that happen and  it’s not working- for a variety of reasons. As this happens repeatedly over time, we develop a deep sense of helplessness, an entrenched belief that we can’t get our needs met – not only in one or two specific cases, but in all. Because our brain can be really unhelpful in these situations; it will take what we’re struggling with and it will kind of convince you that because this is true in this part of your life, then every or most parts of your life you are also helpless or longing or not having your needs/ desires met. So, Naturally, we want to avoid this incredibly painful feeling. And we decided, understandably so, the best way to do that is to not hope, because hope takes us back to the possibility of losing something again. The experience is traumatic, in a sense.

Dr Ross Ellenhorn has done a lot of research around hope and in one of his research studies he found that people who have a fear of hope experience a wide range of psychological challenges: increased rates of depression, increased rates of anxiety, difficulty with emotional regulation, low self-esteem, and low optimism- to name a few. In his words, “They lack positive resources while they have a surplus of negative states.”

Some of the most painful situations that we experience, in our lives not just infertility and IVF,  are when both hope and fear of hope are high. Dr Ellenhorn also found that high hope and high fear of hope are more strongly correlated with anxiety than low hope and high fear of hope, or—obviously — high hope and low fear of hope.

What I’ve noticed is how the combination of high hope and high fear of hope ( To use Dr Ellenhorn’s words) affects what are called “counterfactuals.” I did a podcast episode on counterfactuals but essentially, it’s the way we look back at decisions we’ve made in our lives. So take someone with a history of smoking, they might not smoke now but lets say they did about 10 years ago, and they’re going through IVF now. They might say, “If I had never smoked, I wouldn’t be here.” We don’t know that to be true, there’s no way to know that it was true, and MOST importantly, it’s not helpful because we can’t go back and change the past. But very often we ruminate on things like this. “I shouldv’e gone to a doctor earlier,” “I should have lost weight, or exercised more,” -whatever the counterfactual might be, those tend to be the things that we ruminate on- aside from trying to see into the future. That kind of rumination seems to be especially prevalent for people who both have hope and fear hope. People who don’t fear hope and don’t have hope don’t experience the same type of rumination. Now, I will fully acknowledge that is anecdotal data from my observations and experience, but I think it’s relevant, nonetheless. 

I will even notice this when I ask my clients that have a high of fear of hope to think about their future. How many positive things can they imagine happening? It’s a big challenge for them. It’s as if they can’t allow themselves to think about positive events.

And it’s from that, that I want to talk about how we can start to ease our fear of hope. 

Now, from like a neurobiological perspective, the circuits in our brain for fear and hope are counterposed, I think that’s the word for it. So, when I was finished with my bachelors degree and working in my first big girl social work job, I lived in this old brownstone apartment. I loved that apartment so much, but I could not run the hairdryer while the over was on. The oven would overpower the hairdryer. Now this wasn’t like a big inconvenience bc at 22 I was much less interested in cooking than I was going out when I wasn’t working.  

BUT this is what happens with hope and fear. They cannot really be online at the exact same time. Or at least what tends to happen is that FEAR is more likely to overpower hope. So it’s like when you turn the hope circuit on, the circuit will trip if fear is introduced and then you don’t really have access to hope. So, in order to unlock or untangle some of that fear of hope, you have to intentionally think about things that can create excitement for you, leading to a feeling of hope. 

Like setting aside time to be intentional where you allow yourself to feel hopeful. I call it equal air time. The fear is not going anywhere, that’s not the goal. The goal is to allow yourself to experience hope and fear in equal measure- because everything in life is 50/50- 50% beautiful things, 50% hard things. 

So let’s say we start small- you can journal about this, talk to yourself outload, or just spend some time thinking about it. If you’re new to this type of work, I would probably encourage you to write more than think, it allows you to kind of stay on topic more- but maybe that’s just a “me thing.” But you’re going to intentionally decide for two minutes I’m going to acknowledge my fear, ok “I am feeling fear around”.. and list those things. You don’t have to logically challenge them, you’re just acknowledging them. Then, for the same amount of time, I want you to think about all the possibilities for two minutes- yes, literally set that short a time, so it doesn’t feel dangerous. That time constraint allows you to 1) acknoeldge what you’re fearing and where that fear lives in your body. This can be a very validating experience because most of us tend to try to ignore our fear and push past it. And you get to enjoy the feeling of hope, without needing to knock yourself down with the “oh I can’t let myself go there” thoughts, because you have already acknowledged them.  

And then you just repeat this exercise, increasing the time, until hope doesn’t feel so dangerous. Because that’s the point. Hope isn’t actually dangerous. If you have a failed cycle or a failed transfer, or a miscarriage it’s going to hurt. It’s gonna hurt like hell. Cutting yourself off from hope isn’t going to lessen the blow. It just means that you won’t get to experience any of the good vibrations that hope can provide, during the other times. Fear of hope, and cutting yourself off from hope never does what we think it will do. It never makes disappointment and pain less painful- it makes it to where we don’t get to feel any hope or any peace. Because, I’ll leave you with this- - Most importantly healing and processing your fear of hope isn’t to handle your fear or grief. You know how to do that, if you’re listening to this podcast you are learning more and more how to do that. You’re healing to allow hope, to allow joy- because you deserve all of that, and moe. 

Ok, that is what I have for yall today. Have a great week and I’ll talk to you soon.