Welcome to IVF This, Episode 26- Curiosity vs hope

Holy crap you guys, I just said Episode 26! That means that I’ve been doing this podcast for SIX months!

This is so crazy to me. It has been the most fun I’ve ever had, and also some of the most excruciating time putting this together. 

I wouldn’t trade any of the blood sweat and tears, and yes there has been blood because one time I got a paper cut from my notes when I was recording so that totally counts. 

I wanted to do some listener love, because it’s been a few episodes since I’ve done that so, 

Here is a review from Anonymous:

This podcast was found at the most perfect time of my life and I didn't know how much I needed this until I started listening. The topics hit home in more ways than one. And as a bonus, Ms Ginn speaks from personal experience and examples, and with verbiage and tone that makes it 100% human and personable. Extremely glad I found this and I have already shared with several other people. People who have also instantly commented on how thankful they are to have this podcast to listen to.

Anonymous, I am so glad you found the podcast and that you have found it helpful during your journey. Thank you for taking the time to write a review. 

As always, if an episode resonates for you, I would appreciate it if you would share it. If you’re in any of the infertility or IVF GFB groups and think someone could benefit, please share it. 

If you’re on SM and you want to take a screenshot and share it on you page or in your stories- feel free to tag me-@IVFthiscoaching on IG and FB.

Now, lets get to today’s topic. So the title is curiosity vs hope and this is one of my favorite things to talk about. 

Now, I will be using the words hope and positivity interchangeably today so I don’t want to confuse anyone. So within the context of what I am talking about hope and positivity mean the same thing. 

Hope is such an interesting thing to talk about during an infertility journey. Because when we layer things like toxic positivity, cultural and social messaging, what we hear from friends/family, and other members of the infertility community we hear that hopeor positivity is the ONLY way through this journey.

Like we HAVE to have hope for this to work.

We have to have hope in order to keep going.

We have to have hope at every point of the process.

We have to think positively 

We have to 

We have to

We have to

And for so many of us, this is such a tricky thing.

Because hope, like any emotion, is created by our thinking.

This is what I teach, I teach the think, feel, do cycle. I talk about it in the very first episode of this podcast so if you haven’t listened to that go check it out or if you need a refresher, go check it out. 

But hope and positivity are created by our thinking. Our thinking creates all of our thinking.

I know that’s not what were taught.

That’s not what we see modeled to us.

That’s not how our culture and society recognize things.

I concede all of that, but just because those things are true doesn’t make the think, feel, do cycle not true. 

So, hope is a feeling. 

Now, lets talk about hope within the context of what so many of us have experienced.

Maybe you have had a cycle that did not result in a pregnancy, or multiple

Maybe you have experienced pregnancy loss, or multiple

Maybe you have had some conversations with your reproductive endocrinologist that wasn’t what you’d hoped. 

Maybe ovarian reserve isn’t great

Maybe egg quality or quantity is not where you wanted it to be

Maybe sperm quality or quantity is not where you’d want it to be

Maybe there’s a structural issue like fibroids or something

Endo/ Adenomysosis

Right, there a million different scenarios that we could go through 

So when thinking about those and thinking about it, and understanding that our thinking creates our feelings, hope or positivity might be a REALLY difficult emotion for you to access. 

To access an emotion, any emotion, we have to have the thoughts that create it. 

This is why it’s impossible to force a feeling. 

Have you ever tried to force yourself from anger to happiness?

Or gratitude in the face of grief?

Contentment in the face of resentment?

Yes, it doesn’t work my friend. 

You can’t force your emotions 

So, if we take the scenarios that I mentioned or whatever your scenario or situation is, you’re thoughts might be more in the vain of, “this will never work” “this probably won’t work” 

“I’m never going to get my baby” “I’m never going to be a mom” or “this is hopeless”

When those are your thoughts, well accessing hope or positivity is what I call “a bridge too far”

It’s too big a leap to go from “this probably won’t work” to “this will absolutely work”

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t say that or think that, it’s totally fine. But don’t be surprised when it doesn’t make you feel better. When it doesn’t make the other thought go away. 

And this is a little aside but this is why I have a bit of a love/ hate relationship with mantra’s or ive talked about the pseudo-empowerment culture. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with mantras or affirmations in and of themselves. But they’re only useful if you believe them. 

Which I don’t think is something that we talk about. People think that by reciting them that the other thoughts are just going to go away or you’re going to feel better. 

In my work we begin to build belief by using “ladder thoughts”.

So, let’s say the starting thought is “I’m never going to be a mom”

Right, I think if you’ve experienced infertility for any period of time, that crap-tastic thought has creeped in there somewhere. 

So can we try to go from I’m never going to be a mom to I will absolutely be a mom or something like that. You can try. It might work for a few minutes, or hours, or something but unless we deal with the deeply rooted thought we won’t gain much traction. The new thoughts won’t be believable. 

So a ladder thought could be, “I don’t know if I will ever be a mom” right we went from “I will never be” which has so much certainty that we can’t POSSIBLY know or that it implies there’s only ONE path to motherhood, to a slightly less certain thought. We would practice that thought until it felt really believable. 

Then we would add another rung on that ladder, “Maybe it’s possible I might become a mother”   right, we will just throw ALLL of the qualifiers in there. Just poking holes in the certainty of that original thought. 

Right we just keep going up and up to that aspiration thought of “of course I will be a mom, I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, but I know it will happen”

And there’s so much we can do with that but it’s about building belief. Showing your brain that the thought isn’t automatic truth just because it popped into your brain. 

Ok, so refocusing on hope vs curiosity.

When that type of thinking, the “this won’t work” or whatever your thought happens to be, butts up against what society, culturally, or infertility community tells you you’re “supposed” to feel- hope or positivity. Well, that’s like a breeding ground for shame. 

So what happens when we can’t access hope? Which is a VERY real probability at some point during your journey. You will probably NOT feel hopeful or positive all the time. 

I know you want to. I know that. But I’m preparing you for the likelihood of it not happening. Of it not being an emotion you can readily access. 

When we cannot access hope or positivity, and when get all of this BS messaging that this is the ONLY way to do infertility is to be hopeful or positive then we turn that against ourselves. We make it mean all kinds of things about our desire to have children. About our dedication to this pursuit. About us. About like who we are fundamentally. 

I want to normalize that hope and positivity can be difficult to come by. If that’s you, you aren’t doing anything wrong. You aren’t, there’s nothing wrong with you. It doesn’t say anything about you as a person or a mother, or a future mother that you cannot get there. 

But when were confronted by this messaging we can experience pushback from friends/ fmily/ and the infertility community. “Well, you’ll never get pregnant with that attitude” “you have to thin positively or it won’t work” “why would you even do it, if you didn’t think it will work”.

That might be my favorite one to hate, well, all fo them really but that presupposes that positivity is the secret sauce to getting knocked up. Right?

Positivity is not the secret sauce. If that was the case then everyone listening to this would already have their children. If positivity got us a baby there would be no need for reproductive endocrinologists. Positivity would literally put those medical professionals out of business. 

I want to acknowledge that when we get into this, there is so much internal and extranl emphasis on hope and positivity which plays into the guilt and shame that so many of us experience. 

If we’re told that we should feel a certain way and we can’t well then damn that really easy to use that against ourselves. 

I believe that infertility, in a lot of ways (in our minds) just confirms the worst things that we believe about ourselves. That we’re not good enough, we’re a failure, we’re not worthy, we’re disgusting, we can’t do anything right. 

So this is just some sort of assurance of our shortcomings. 

Which is why it is such a painful process for so many of us. 

So, If our thoughts create our feelings, and our thoughts are not in line with hope and positivity then what feeling CAN we access?

Duh duh ta da.. I present to you, curiosity

Curiosity is one of my favorite emotion to access because it doesn’t hold the same negative connotation. Curiosity is such a beautiful emotion because it strips away a lot of judgement. Without judgement there is not really an opportunity for shame.

Genuinely dropping into a place of curiosity around your infertility and any treatments is much more about getting information than it is about blame. 

So if by trying to get to hope or positivity and you can’t get there you judge yourself. What if you were more curious about the potential? What would change about your experience? What would change about your relationship with yourself? 

Now, I’m not saying that you won’t EVER feel hopeful. Like all emotions we will probably wax and wane through hope and inter weave it with other feelings- that’s part of being human. 

But it’s when we expect ourselves to only feel a certain way. Or we think there’s only one way to feel—that’s where we get into trouble. 

Now, when you are doing this work, trying to navigate the water between hope and curiosity, there will be people (family, friends, rando’s on social media) that tell you to be or think positively. There will be people that tell you you “have to” or you “should”- that’s fine. If they tell you that, it’s not a problem. Again, you don’t have to use that against yourself. All that it means is that is true for them. It is their thoughts. Just as your thoughts are not automatically truth, the same things goes for someone else’s thoughts. That might be true for them. They might think the only way THEY could get through it is by thinking positively or being hopeful. They might think that, especially if they’re NOT experiencing what you are, that is the only emotion that you can access. The point is that whatever anyone says to you, is a reflection of their thinking- not gospel. 

They don’t have me as their coach, like you do. They don’t know that there are OTHER emotions that might be more helpful in that moment. They don’t know that their thoughts create their feelings. They have not experienced the same infertility trauma that you have. And that’s ok. 

Doesn’t mean they’re doing anything wrong and it ABSOLUTELY doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong. It means we’re all messy humans, is all. 

In a lot of ways, I am doing this work for my own journey. 

WE are in the middle of doing our 2nd IVF round. We’ve had one full round and two frozen transfers (1 successful and 1 that is not).

One of the things that I think about is that I am 37 years old, I have one ovary, my antral follicle count is 7. So if you’re not familiar your antral follicle count of AFC can be seen on ultrasound and correlates to the likelihood or potential number of eggs that you have left. So for me, going into this stimulation cycle, the MAXIMUM number of eggs that can be retrieved is 7. Four years ago, our last cycle was 12. So I’ve lost a little over 1 per year, which is pretty typical as women age but my reserve was cut in half when I lost my left ovary now 8 years ago. 

So, between age, male factor infertility (which in a lot of ways is addressed by our IVF and ICSI -where they inject the sperm directly into the egg), and my female factor infertility the diminished ovarian reserve. I’m not terribly hopeful that this round of IVF will yield the same results as the last one. Last time we ended up with two chromosomally normal embryos. The first transfer was successful- he is now a very feral three-year-old. And I was 4 years younger and all of the things. My doc has added a med to my protocol, so we went from two meds to three and she’s seen a lot of success with that added medication particularly with DOR but hope is not my prevailing emotion. 

Curiosity is. 

I wonder if this will work. I wonder if we will get one embryo out of it. I wonder. I wonder. I wonder. For me, right now, curiosity is a much more useful and accessible feeling than hope or positivity. 

Being curious vs hopeful doesn’t make me want to try any less. It doesn’t mean that I’m doing something wrong. It doesn’t mean that I want a baby any less. No! I still want that, more than anything.  It just takes the shame out of the equation. It gives me more of an opportunity to explore the possibilities of what could happen and what might not happen- without kicking the crap out of myself for not “being positive”. It allows me the opportunity to be human. 

It means that I don’t weaponize not feeling positively or hopeful against myself. 

And that, my beautiful friends, is what I want for you. 

Hope and positivity are beautiful emotions. But they aren’t the ONLY ones available to you during this time. 

There’s no one way to do any of this, so it stands to reason there isn’t ONE way to feel during this time, either. 

Open yourself up to that possibility. 

Turn towards you, instead of away from you. 

That is my wish for you.

And that is what I have for you today. Always remember, I adore you and you’ve got this.