Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends!! 

Welcome back to the podcast, I hope you’re all doing well. 

And if this is the first episode you’re hearing WELCOME. We’re all so happy to have you here. 

I’ve noticed a pretty big uptick in listeners lately so I wanted to take a minute and introduce myself, because I haven’t really done that since episode 1.

So, hi, my name is Emily. I am a life coach that specializes in infertility and IVF- although I think if you stick around for a while you will find that pretty much everything I talk about on the podcast is completely applicable to many areas of your life. So I am a Social Worker by training. Before I got into life coaching, a few years ago, I spent 15 years in medical social work. So I have a bachelors and a masters degree in social work. MY areas of expertise were in trauma and grief and loss, which is pretty remarkable considering how much it’s helped me, now, while working with my clients. I love talking about the things that people don’t like talking about- grief, shame, and trauma, specifically. 

My husband and I had our first inkling that something was not quite right in the Summer of 2013, after we had been trying to conceive for about a year. We started to do a fertility work up and identified that sperm motility and morphology were two issues- for those that are unfamiliar motility is the rate at which the sperm swim, so I joke that his little guys are just kind of standing around looking at each other. But of course, we’re almost 10 years in total, so we can laugh about that now. And then morphology has to do with the shape of the sperm. 

Then we identified, during an U/S that I had a 14cm cyst on my left ovary. So imagine something the size of a grapefruit. It wasn’t painful- which was quite a shock to my dr. 

Shortly after the cyst was identified, I had a complication called an ovarian torsion, where the weight of the cyst on top of the ovary actually caused it to fall over on the fallopian tube and the area tendon- extremely painful, I would not recommend that, so I had surgery to remair it and they drained the cyst.  

We took a couple of months off bc we were moving from Houston, TX to Austin,TX and once we were in Austin I established care with an OBgyn and when we did a repeat US they found that the cyst was back and it was now 16cm’s. Sooooo, that ovary had to go. 

In December 2013 we got pregnant spontaneously, and that is my now 7-year-old. 

In August of 2016, after 4 failed IUI cycles, we moved forward with IVF. In Feb 2017, we had our first positive beta and that is our now 4 year old. In the summer of 2020 we did a transfer of our last embryo and that transfer resulted in a negative beta. We spent several months, talking and thinking, and praying and we decided, even thought the cards were stacked against us with both FFI and MFI we would try one more round, we did another round in May 2021 ended up with 1 normal embry that we transferred in late July and that was successful and we are expecting our last kiddo in April 2022. 

So it has been quite the ride for us. The reason that I decided to coach on infertility and IVF was bc when I was going through it, at pretty much every stage, I noticed 1) there was really NO ONE talking about it (that would be circa 2012-2014’ish) some of the FB groups we have now were just getting started or didn’t exist yet. And There really wasn’t any IG presence for the infertility community at all. And the second thing I noticed was that when the conversation started opening up, it was usually like a trash heap of toxic positivity, trauma was no where to be discussed, no one really acknowledged why they felt so terrible during the process, which I in large part attribute to shame- there were just so many holes in the conversation that I felt were really important for us to look at. So that’s where I decided to show up and work. 

So, IVF This was born. It’s my 1:1 coaching practice and this podcast- I’m incredibly proud of it. 

And that’s the story of me, LOL. I always encourage people, if you like what you’re hearing on the podcast, please rate and review it if your podcasting platform allows for that. The more ratings, and especially reviews make the podcast easier to find for other people. And if you have SM, either IG or FB or whatever, please feel free to share a screen shot of the episode and you can always tag me @ivfthiscoaching. 

But without further adieu, let’s talk about closure. 

So many people that I talk to, whether it’s about a loss, their diagnosis, if a cycle failed or a transfer failed, they tell me that they just want to know why- which I think it pretty normal. We want to understand things. But it’s the second half of that phrase which is, “If I know why, then I can have some closure” right “then I could move on.” 

This idea of closure is incredibly pervasive in our culture. People want that final chapter that sums everything up and helps it make sense. But this idea or pursuit of closure can actually be pretty problematic. The reason it is problematic is because we believe we NEED it to find peace.

So, what I want to offer you in today's episode is that basically everything you think you know about closure is wrong- it’s a social construct that is basically a bunch of crap. I think it's a complete myth, so that is what I will tell you. I will break it down for you and tell you why I think we're wrong about closure, why it's something we don't actually need, and what we really need instead. 

Okay, and before I challenge the idea of closure, I want to remind you that we live in a commercial culture of happy endings and resolution, right? Almost every movie has one. 

There's some sort of emotional story or mystery that ends with a conclusion where we walk away from a movie, typically believing that we understand what happened and why. We feel resolved, concluded, and peaceful, right. We can kind of tuck away our experience in this neat little box because it's been wrapped up with a tidy ending, and we can move on to the next thing in life. 

We like it that way, and since we see it so, so often played out in our cultural narratives (aka film and television) we think our life experience is supposed to be, right? And we really like those tidy endings. Because humans don't like uncertainty, we can't stand not knowing what happened. And salespeople know this, authors know this, television writers know this, great public speakers know this. I mean clickbait is a real thing, and side-note few things in this world piss me off faster than clickbait. But Because what happens when a movie, book, or a TV show doesn't end in resolution and leaves us wondering what happened, or worse, gives us a cliff hanger. 

And, if that happens we are pretty sure a sequel is coming, right? Like even sequels we never knew we needed, or in many cases the ones we knew we didn’t need.  And this works really well if you're a moviemaker. Because if they leave us with a cliffhanger, we're going to be on the lookout for the sequel. We're probably going to be talking about it too, and telling our friends, ah, can you believe it, right? And the TV show, if we're left with a cliffhanger, you can bet we're going to tune into the next episode to find out what happens. It’s great for business in Hollywood. 

If you've ever binged watched a season of anything, it's probably because the scriptwriters did an excellent job of opening loops. And they are making sure that you knew that those loops wouldn't be closed until the next episode. Then, you watch the next episode, and at the end of that episode, they open another loop, and they do that repeatedly. They give you a resolution in the middle of the episode but never at the end. We hate not knowing, and we want those loops to be closed. Humans don't like open loops. 

We want a storyline that comes to a resolution. And we don't like uncertainty. We have no tolerance for it. Think about this; we don't like uncertainty so much that entire religions have been created so that we don't have to be uncertain about where we came from, why things happen, or what happens after we die. Our tolerance for uncertainty is lacking, at best. Right, we don't like it. And this works well for people who are in the business of selling us something, right? 

The scriptwriter appreciates that you don't have a tolerance for uncertainty. The wrongful death attorney, who is selling you on the lawsuit that would bring you peace, appreciates that you don't tolerate uncertainty. The would- be psychic who would tell you what really happened to your loved one, whether they actually know or not, appreciates that you don't have a tolerance for uncertainty. 

The idea is that we need resolution, conclusion, closure to an emotional or traumatic experience. So, that we can move forward can have a lot of us really spinning our wheels trying to find information that we may never get or, worse, holding ourselves emotionally hostage to the peace that we want because we believe the lie that more information is required. 

This is why closure is a myth. Here's the truth, more information doesn't necessarily create peace, does it? Information by itself doesn't create any emotion. Information is just information. It's just data. Our brain is not emotional about data. Data is actually super boring to our brain. So, it's never the data that we receive, the information that we receive, that creates our emotional experience of it. As with everything, it is what we make that data mean.  It is always the story that we tell ourselves about the data. 

So, whether we get more data or don't, it won't be the reason we do or don't experience peace. Think about how many shows you watched that had you completely riveted throughout the series, and then you get to the ending, and you feel completely let down with the way the writers chose to end it. You have the information of what happened, but you didn't feel peace. 

The same is true for our infertility or miscarriages. For instance, I have no clue why my left ovary went completely off-script and grew those huge cysts. My OB called it a “diseased ovary” but couldn’t tell me why. For my husband, there is no risk-factor category that he fell into to explain his MFI. 

Whenever anyone experiences a miscarriage, there are some instances when we can have clarity as to why, genetic abnormality or something like that but does knowing that make the process of grief, easier? I don’t know. It might for some and it might not for others, because it is all based on our individual thoughts around the issue. 

Egg quality, unexplained infertility, I mean we could offer a million examples of how we seek closure on things. In fact, more information will probably make you feel worse while simultaneously not providing you the closure that you seek. Because very often the information we to gather is often anecdotal and we tend to use the information we find, against ourselves. 

The good news is that's within our control because what we choose to make information mean or the lack of information happens inside us. It's something we can control. But what I think is even more important than what prevents us from feeling peace is not lack of information. It is our inability to feel uncertain. The more comfortable we are with uncertainty, the easier it is to feel peace. We don't need "closure" I use that with air quotes because it's a myth, right? We don't need more information to move forward. We don't need the resolution to move forward. We can be okay with not knowing, not having information, and not being resolved. We can. It is completely possible. 

But I also want you to think about the emotional capital you spend- last week I talked about spoon theory. How many spoons do you have to just give away to this closure myth per day? There is a lot of spinning an rumination that goes into the idea of closure, and you could absolutely use that energy elsewhere. 

So the biggest thing problem that I find with the myth of closure is that it perpetuates this idea of there being a grief end-point. If there’s an inherent, unconscious belief that the more information that we have, that we can get this “closure” because once we get closure then we will get to let go of our grief- well, who the hell wouldn’t pursue that? 

But it doesn’t work that way. Grief doesn’t work that way. At all. Grief doesn’t end. It’s not like there’s a fixed line or experience for grief. It morphs and changes and we learn how to continue to walk with it. But I think for a lot of us, which is very normal, that is a pursuit we have- for the grief to end. We don’t want to continue to feeling this way. But then THAT perpetuates this idea of grief ending, and so if you’re in a place where you’re still experiencing grief then you might make that mean that you’re not doing something correctly. And then that just creates a storm of shame.

Grief is our thoughts and feelings about a loss and the loss that happened. So, we're always going to have thoughts and feelings about it. Some of those thoughts will make us feel positive emotions, and some will make us feel negative emotions. And the truth is that most of us wouldn't have it any other way. We don't want to feel positive about our infertility journey. 

IDK about you all but I’ve never been like, “I’m so happy that we have experienced infertility- what a tremendous growth opportunity.” Erm, no. That’s a no from me. We want to be sad or frustrated, sometimes. It doesn’t have to be all the time but there are times that we want to feel “negatively.” Doing grief work does not mean that we are trying to or getting away from negative emotions. Grief work doesn’t mean that we are trying to avoid the negative emotions. Grief doesn’t have a warm, fuzzy, tidy ending. 

So, here's what I want to offer in terms of a mindset switch; the whole problem comes from the idea that we don't know what happened, and we need to. And we don't know why something happened, and we need to. That not knowing prevents us from moving forward. That not knowing prevents us from peace, but that is a lie. That is a myth. Peace comes from deciding to believe that I may never know what happened or why, and that's okay. 

Peace comes from deciding to believe that I don't need to know all the reasons. Peace comes from the belief and choice to believe that I don't need to know. I may never understand. However, I can still keep living according to my values instead of controlling the uncontrollable or insisting on information where none might be available. We can realize that our biggest return on investment is actually to focus on the aspects of our lives that we really do control. This is only what happens inside us and only who we choose to be. 

So, if you've been buying the myth that you need closure for you to move forward, I want to offer that you don't. I want to offer that more information might not actually make you feel better, that how you feel doesn't really have as much to do or anything to do with the information that you have, right? And that you can create your own peace by choosing to be okay with not knowing. By increasing your tolerance for uncertainty, you're not alone if it's hard. It's hard for me too. But that really is the answer that I want to encourage you to pursue. Because the truth is that more information might not actually help, and you may never get the information that you want. 

I will never know why. I won't know why this was our journey. You might not really know why this is your journey. We won’t know why it’s “easier” for other people and not for us. You might not ever know why you lost your baby, or why your embaby didn’t implant, or why none of your eggs fertilized or they stopped developing. We might not know, and when we think we needed to know, then that takes a lot of our energy. You probably want to use that energy to live your life, and you might want to use that energy to stop focusing on something that you can't control anymore because it's over and done, right? And to focus on who you want to be in this world, even though that happened. And that's available to you. But it's going to be hard if you keep holding back until you believe you have closure. 

Ok, friends, that is what I have for your today. Have a beautiful week and I will talk to you soon.