Welcome to IVF This, episode 52 A year of IVF This

Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends

Today’s episode marks 52 weeks of podcasts- that’s a whole year, ya’ll.

Whoa, I got REALLY Texan on that one. But it is kind of blowing my mind that it’s been a whole year.

We’ve covered a lot of topics throughout the year and so I thought it would be nice if we went through what I think are the 4 Most important things for ANY of us to remember throughout our journeys. 

So this is like the IVF This Cliff’s notes edition.

So the first thing is- our thoughts create our feelings. This is the framework that I use in my coaching practice. Our thoughts create our feelings, every time. Things happen, all the time, and it doesn’t mean anything until we have a thought about it. 

This is such an important topic that I covered in in the very first episode of this podcast. 

What we think, creates how we feel, based on how we feel we take specific actions. Based on those 3 things, we create 3 types of results in our lives: results that mirror our thoughts, results that are the opposite of our thoughts, or the result is that we create more evidence to support the thought. Let me give you some examples.

So if your thought is that you are terrified of injections. When you think that you maybe feel anxious. When you feel anxious you ruminate about all of your fears, you fixate on the physical or perceived pain of the injections, you start forecasting all of the terrible things that could happen. So then your result is that you remain terrified of injections- so that’s mirroring. Some people call it a thought loop- it’s the same thing. 

So the second example is when you create the opposite- so that’s like telling yourself I HAVE to eat perfectly leading up to a cycle. Well when you think that you HAVE to do something, anything, most of us feel pressured, overwhelmed, or something similar. When we feel pressured or overwhelmed we will often do things that we find comfort in- eating, watching Netflix, drinking, etc. Then we berate and judge ourselves for the completely human reaction and the cycle continues. The result is that you will likely NOT be eating “perfectly” #1 because “perfectly” doesn’t exist. It never has. Perfection is subjective. What is perfect for me is not perfect for probably anyone else in this world. So that’s about 7 billion different ideas of what “perfect” is. But also, and this is SUPER important to remember. It is damn-near impossible to take positive action from a negative feeling. Does that mean that people cannot, say, lose weight when they hate their bodies? Sure. Most women, in particular, are used to white knuckling their way through life and certainly dieting. But white knuckling has a shelf life and it’s about as long as an avocado that is ready to eat. Ore often than not, you get caught back in the cycle of eating or drinking or whatever to feel better because you’re spending so much time bullying yourself. The behaviors you don’t like are behaviors you are using to get a reprieve, from you. 

And finally, this last one- building more evidence, is probably one of the most common results that I see.  So let’s take the thought of “my body can’t do the one thing it’s supposed to do” which is probably one of the most common things I hear from our infertility community. So when you think that you might feel like a failure, disgusted with yourself, hopeless, or resentful or something I that vain. So then your actions are you scrutinize every perceived “failure” that you or your body have. Like the worst cataloging in the world. Oh you forgot to bring your lunch today, well, you’re a failure. You had two drinks the day before you started stims- failure. You’ve thrown yourself head-long into the “It starts with the egg” lifestyle philosophy and find it unsustainable- failure. 

When you catalogue anything, you’re building evidence to support that belief.

Our brains are collectors of information, that’s what they were designed for.  So you give your brain a directive, which is a thought, like “I’m alone in this journey” – well then your brain is going to roll up it’s sleeves, ask someone to hold it’s beer and get to work finding and curative evidence to support that belief. All the ties you have physically or emotionally felt alone- all of it, your brain will go through all of it, like an auditor. 

And this brings me to point number 2:

We spend FAR more time listening to ourselves and we do, talking to ourselves. It’s like 90-95% we’re just listening to the constant barrage of BS that our brain throws out. Our brains have taken in decades of stimulus, social and cultural messaging and media influence and then you couple that with thousands of years of evolutionary biology that had molded the brain to think in an inherently negative way, to keep you on high alert for danger (hello anxiety), and then you add in trauma  which fundamentally changes the structure of the brain and your ability to comprehend and cope- ladies it’s no effing wonder why our brains can be such assholes. 

90’ish percent of our thinking is subconscious. The subconsous part of our brin is where all of this stuff resides. The subconscious part of your brain is like the drunk ass hole at the sports stadium- just throwing out random and often insulting phrases and commentary. Now, we NEED the subconscious part of our brain. We need most of the things that we do to just run automatically in the background. If everything we did required the energy and attention of what is required when we’re say, learning a knew skill, then our brains would explode. They would fry out and we wouldn’t be able to function. 

So the fact that this is happening is not a problem. The problem is that when that drunk idiot in our brain start spouting off the BS, we just believe it at face value. We don’t even think to question it. What’s that you say brain, I’m broken- yup you’re right and here’s all of the ways that’s true. Oh, you’re right maybe we are too old to have a baby- that’s true I googled it and the average age a woman has her first child is 29.3- so at (whatever age you are) you are too old. IT can absolutely be anything that your brain offers you and we just gobble it up without a care in the world. THIS is why we feel like garbage most of the time. And that’s why we need to TALK to ourselves more than listen. And by talking to ourselves I mean, reminding yourself that it is ok to feel grief or sadness without blaming it on yourself, that YOU did something wrong. Cause that’s what your brain is going to try to focus on. So TELL your brain, we don’t have to blame anything- we can just feel sad or really whatever the emotion is. Tell your brain, hey, I know why you’re telling em that I need to do more, or be thinner, or eat this way, or whatever “should” statement is in the background- but “should” are not truths. More often than not, they’re social messaging that we receive to fit this specific cultural mold that is unattainable and unsustainable. Tell your brain and today you are going to focus on these things (whatever they are, gratitude’s, goals, whatever). And you can even tell your brain, which is probably my favorite thing to tell it, “oh, my love, we don’t talk to ourselves like that anymore.” Now, does that mean I’m never an asshole to myself? Hardly. The goal is never perfection. But I’m a lot less of an asshole to myself than I was, even 1 year ago. So, that’s certainly something. 

Now, number 3- feelings are not the enemy. 

Anxiety, grief, shame- and the multitude of others. They are not the enemy. We don’t like them and they don’t feel comfortable in our bodies, but they are not the enemy. We have been taught that we should feel good and happy all the time- which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. IF that were true- I mean I guess you could really try to feel good and happy all the time but that means that you would need to feel good and happy about things like miscarriage, failed transfers, failed cycles, death, murder, rape, racism- all of the horrible things that do exist in our world. In order for us to be happy all of the time, we would have to feel happy about these things. IDK about you, but when we had our failed transfer, I didn’t WANT to feel happy about that. Not even a little bit. I wanted to feel sad, I wanted to feel that loss. That’s how I knew I wanted it so badly. That’s how I knew how much I had already loved and mothered that embaby. It was the price I was willing to pay for that love. Did I want to pay it- not really, it felt terrible. I cried a lot, and I’m not a cryer. I shut down, I was sad a lot. It and what followed was one of the most challenging times in mine and my husbands marriage. But to pretend to be happy would have been a completely disservice to myself and that little life. 

Another aspect fo this is that feelings are not a monolith- meaning that we don’t usually feel ONLY one emotion at a time. For instance, after our failed transfer, I felt sadness AND love. Going into a cycle, we can often feel anxiety AND excitement. Hell, even when a loved one dies we can feel grief and relief- maybe they had been sick for a while, or whatever. The point is that so often we tell ourselves that we should feel this way or that- one feeling. But anytime my clients have told me this and we dig into it, we find that they often DO feel that emotion, it’s just tangled up in other emotions- because that is the emotional complexity of being human. 

And the final point I want to make about amotions is that we do not need to judge them. This kind of speaks to that last point I made about emotions not being a monolith. That probably would not need to be said, if we didn’t judge ourselves for how we feel. Oh I’m a terrible person because I am jealous of this person- no you’re not. You’re a human that wants something desperately and that person is REMINDING you of what you want and reminding your of your grief. That doesn’t make you a terrible person. Feelings do not make people terrible. They make people human. One of the ways we create more of whatever negative feeling we are experiencing is by judging it- I shouldn’t feel this or that. I hate that I feel this or that. If you stop and just drop the judgment, you’re already going to be experiencing the emotion differently. You’re already going to be experiencing LESS of whatever it is. Because you’re not fighting against it. You can even tell yourself that this is not an emotion you enjoy experiencing but here you are. Emotions don’t need to be fixed. They just need to be felt, experienced and then they move through you. 

And finally, the single most important thing. The thing that will help you the most during this time- compassion. You knew it had to come at some point, right. Its my favorite thing in the world. Compassion, compassion, compassion. 

Compassion for how you think. 

Compassion for how you feel. 

Compassion for the pain.

Compassion for the grief.

Compassion for the jealousy.

Compassion for you. All day long. 

Compassion for the days when you don’t change out of your PJ’s and watch Netflix all day. 

Compassion for when you eat all of the things. 

Compassion for when you yell or are grumpy with the people you love. 

Compassion for when something is ok for other people but you are incredibly hard on yourself about it. 

Compassion. 

The point has never and will never be that you don’t have negative emotions. That nothing terrible ever happens to you. The point will always be how you can learn to love yourself through it. In any moment, whatever is happening, you always have the option of stopping and asking yourself “what is the most loving thing that I can do for myself, right now?”

Speak to yourself as though you were your best friend, your most treasured and beloved person in your life. 

The way that we bully ourselves, specifically how we bully our brains is so harmful. We tell ourselves that we hate how we think, That we hate our brains for doing EXACTLY what they were designed to do. Thinking the exact way they were designed to think. 

Think of your brain as like this3, 6, 9, 12 year old- you’re telling that child “I don’t want you,” I hate you, youre broken, youre defective. You’re miserable. WE would never speak to a child like that, right? Yet, that is often how old we are when we form a lot of these thoughts that stick with us and the ones that we hate so much. You’re that 6 year old that just wants to be accepted and loved. You’re that 12 year old that is terrified of rejection, of disappointing people. Remember that when you’re so quick to bully yourself. How would you speak to a child? How much compassion would you extend them? How much grace would you offer? How much love would you show them? 

THAT’S the lens through which I want you all to see yourself. 

And that is what I have for you, this week. Thank you for making this the most fun year of my life. We’ve got so much coming up in this second year. More stories to share, most ways to help you understand yourself and your brain. And of course, more compassion. 

Have a beautiful week, my friends. I’ll talk to you next time.