Welcome to IVF This, episode 77 the Burden of knowledge

Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends. I hope you’re all doing so, so well. 

The summer is in full force and the heat is pretty unforgiving in Texas. IN Austin, there’s we’ve already experienced like 10 out of 12 days over 100* or something and we haven’t even gotten NEAR the hottest time of the summer. I don’t want to even think about how August and September will feel. I am never, ever emotionally ready for the summer’s here and I’ve had, well, 38 of them- just goes to show you my level of weather adaptability. 

Anyway, before we get started I want to let you all know that I have opened up my schedule some more to make room for more mini session bookings. The mini session are my no charge intro coaching that I offer to anyone. It’s 30minutes of straight coaching- at the end of the all we can talk about how to work together and what that would look like but that conversation is totally optional. You still get the session and the coaching, at no charge and no obligation. 

Also, In a couple of months, I will be kicking off another round of my small group coaching program. It’s a group of 5-10 women. It’s 13 weeks and I’ve got some special surprise goodies and guest coaches in mind for this round that I am super excited about. It is a FRACTION of what I charge for my 1:1 clients so if you’re interested, make sure you get on my email list for the upcoming details. You can get one my email list in a couple of different ways 1) go directly to my website, www.ivfthiscoaching.com and on the home page, about halfway down, you will see information about my free mini-course called 3 steps to manage your anxiety. Its like a 15min video and it’s based on all of the stuff that I talk about all of the time, so if you’re a fan of the podcast, it will sound really familiar. The second way is on my SM profile, there is a link directly to the mini-course. Both roads lead to the email list; so check it out. 

Ok, so today’s gonna be a bit of a quick hit but it’s something that’s come up a lot with my private clients so I wanted to take a but of time and talk about it. 

How many of you have ever said to yourself, “I wish that I could feel the way that I did when I first started TTC.” Or, maybe if you’ve experienced loss or failed cycles transfers you might thnk, “I wish I could feel excited or hopeful about my upcoming transfer or beta or something. 

Maybe it’s that you have a friend or family member that is pregnant or just starting TTC and you see their excitement and wish that you felt that way. 

So, let’s refresh for a moment and remember that excitement and hope are feelings. And all feelings are related in your mind., by your thinking. Every time. Excitement and hope don’t get free passes. Its all the same mechanism. Now, that does not mean that circumstances don’t influence our thinking. Think of circumstances, which are things that happen to you and around you, the things that are completely neutral- I want you to think of those things as things that give you the opportunity to have a thought about. 

A lot of our thinking, in fact most of our thinking is automatic and unconscious. So every circumstance gives you the opportunity to have a thought- there’s no good or bad, either. Thoughts are just sentences in your brain. We don’t need to assign a moral value to them.

It is important to remember that your thoughts are like an amalgamation of your socialization, culture, family structure, upbringing, and experiences. 

And that’s where The Burden of Knowledge comes into play. Some people call it the curse of knowledge, I prefer burden, it doesn’t mater what you call it, it’s just important to be aware of it. 

So there’s a couple of ways to think about the burden or curse of knowledge. The first, and probably the most discussed, is what happens when you are communicating with someone and you assume that the person with whom you are communicating has the background knowledge to understand. Most of us have experienced this- maybe you are chit chatting with someone and maybe you’re talking about your job or something you’re really interested in or they are and maybe you or they are using jargon to describe it- even for something that you might consider “common knowledge” that might not be. My husband loves to do this when he tells me about his work- for reference he’s a PhD economist and the one and ONLY economics course I took was a summer semester in high school when I was trying to get credits out of the way in order to graduate a year early. You can bet that not a whole lot of that information has been retained in the 20+ years since then. But we will talk about things with this confident belief that I would know what an ISLM curve is- yeaaaaa. I know there is at least one other PhD economist that listens to the podcast so she might find that funny. Anyway, it’s this assumption that the person you’re speaking to has more knowledge than they might have. 

Another aspect of the burden of knowledge, and this is the one that I typically reference to my clients is when you have had an experience that kind of shifts how you see certain things. 

So my background, as many of you know is medical social work. I worked in a lot of different settings, oncology, physical medical rehabilitation, hospice, hospitals, all kinds of things in 15 years. And There would be certain things that you would hear or see and you would almost immediately have this sinking feeling because you had seen it before and knew that it probably wasn’t going to be good. It wasn’t that you were like prophetic or anything, but you see certain things and you are able to make like an educated guess that something might be up. 

Ok, so those are the two aspects of knowledge burden that I wanted to kind of explain. 

So let’s go back to the example from the top of the show. For those of you that wish that you could be as excited about TTC as you were when you first started- that is the burden of knowledge. 

When you talk to some cute TTC Noob and they’re practically giddy and you’re like “Well, I wish you the best of luck” and you’re kind of envious or even amused by their naiveté – THAT’s the burden of knowledge. 

Having difficulty believing you could actually be pregnant after a positive beta or HPT because it’s been such a long journey and maybe you’ve experienced loss- yea, that’s the burden of knowledge. 

You have experienced things that have colored the way you view things- in this case, the family creation journey. 

Don’t want to have a conversation with your boss about a possible promotion, because you’ve talked to them before about it and have been blown off?

That ex that kept trying to crawl their way back into your life and you kind of went back and forth on it but you were pretty sure they weren’t going to change?

One of my personal experiences is related to the recent loss of my MIL. My husband, my beautiful amazing husband has lost both of his parents by 40. His father passed away very unexpectedly in 2011 and it was an enormously traumatic time. It was 4 months before we got married and it was excruciating watching my soon-to-be and eventual husband navigate this trauma and grief- not that I didn’t have my own but it was certainly not near the extent that he experienced. So when we found out my MIL was so sick, this was back just a couple of months before she actually passed, my immediate thought was about how difficult the first year or so following my FIL’s death was for my husband and really just wanting to wrap him in protective bubble wrap and save him from that type of hurt. Now, obviously I am not responsible for my husbands feelings and there is no protecting ANYONE from that kind of hurt but I think you understand what I’m saying. I had that burden of knowledge, that experience of watching him grieve you know 11 years prior. Even though the situations were very different, she was acutely and severely ill, while my FIL’s passing was completely unexpected. My husband had time to say goodbye and spend time with her where he was not afforded that time with his dad. With his mom there was a lot of anticipatory grieving vs his fathers passing. 

Right the situation was completely opposite but I continued to think about and anticipate what that would be like because of that knowledge, that experience. 

There are TONS of examples of how this plays out in our lives.

Now, there are a couple of really important things to keep in mind. 

1. Your beliefs and thoughts aren’t facts. Just because you have a burden of knowledge and this is something you’ve experienced or seen play out time and time again, doesn’t mean that it is destiny. Again, it’s not a prophetic gift or something, it’s experience and experience, while valuable doesn’t equate to certainty or facts. A lot of times we think we know how something will go because of that burden and then we end up not doing it because of like “what’s the point?” Your knowledge burden doesn’t mean that something will never work- it’s just like data. It’s data to use in making a decision. 

And 

1. If you are having difficulty with the whole, I want to go back to when- whenever that was, before a loss before you started trying, before whatever. Our experiences, our knowledge burdens carry with us. Even if we put you in a time machine and sent you back 3 years, you would still have that knowledge. It doesn’t go away. So holding on to this thought of, I just want to go back to when, or I wish I could feel how I felt when- those are unfair fantasies that are kind of keeping you locked in to feeling terrible in your current situation. 

I think for some of us, this idea of I want to go back when, is a way of resisting or rejecting the current situation. Like fighting against acceptance. And it makes sense, most of us believe that in order to accept something we have to like it. And I am here to tell you that is categorically false. Acceptance isn’t false positives, toxic positivity, forced gratitude anything like that.  

Acceptance is about letting a situation be what it will. 

I had this incredible session this week with one of my long-term clients and we were talking about acceptance and how she felt like she had accepted tha this was where they were in their journey and that she felt this peace and calm and then the very next day someone very close to her announced a pregnancy. And so of course, she wasn’t feeling that peace and calm anymore and we talked about all ofthat. 

But it’s important to remember, in terms of acceptance, that it’s not like a switch you flip and it just stays in that on position and you always get to feel that peace and calm moving forward. 

Acceptance is a lot like grief. The feelings associated with it ebb and flow depending on what’s happening in your brain. 

Acceptance is an emotion and out emotions change based on our thinking. 

When I was talking about all of this with my client and we kind of broke down how she thought she would get to feel once she accepted her journey, she kind of expected to feel that calm and peace for the reminder of her journey. Which is think is a very human thing to kind of expect,a lbeit unrealistic. So for her we had to expand out her definition of what acceptance was. 

And here is what she came up with and I love it so much that I have to share it. 

allowing an experience to be what it is and not to try to make it be something it’s not. And that might change throughout different aspects of an experience.

And experience isn’t just one thing, it’s going to have it’s ups and downs. 

We kind of expanded her definition of acceptance to include accepting all the emotions that come with this journey, too. Because you aren’t going to escape the feelings so we have to take into consideration all the circumstances and thoughts associated with your experiences- the good and the bad- because it’s all part of the process. 

Having a burden of knowledge is not a bad thing. It’s just having it. 

And then people will say, well I hate it because it’s like the bad stuff just plays in a loop in my brain. Yea, that’s your brains job. Our brains have three fundamental jobs and it’s the same for everyone: seek pleasure, avoid pain, be as efficient as possible. 

So playing those greatest hits of awful has a purpose. Your brain is not your enemy when it does that. It’s kind of saying, “Look this hurt a lot or was really scary or whatever and we don’t want to feel that way again so we’re going to remind you of this thing over and over so you know to try to avoid it.” That’s the unconscious primitive habit brain, it’s GOING to do that. You can expect it. But you also have that beautiful prefrontal cortex that you can use as like the adult in your brain. 

You can acknowledge, yup, I see you brain. That did happen. It did hurt/ was really frustrating/ really painful/ whatever it was. It doesn’t mean it will happen again, it could, but it’s not certain. And you can even throw in a thank you to your brain- like thanks for trying to keep me safe, even if in an ass backwards way. 

And I think that’s kind of the last thing I want to cover is an extension of this part and that acceptance piece. I think for a lot of us we start to view our brains as our enemies. Your brain is not waging war on you, I know, I know that it feels that way. It’s not. It’s doing all of things things that it has evolved to do and to keep us safe. 

Ok, so what I want you to remember having a burden of knowledge is not a bad thing. It’s experience. My mom always says, “Education comes in many forms.” And I’ve always loved that because experience is education. Now, this is probably not the experience that you would have ever wanted. None of us want this. But, what we don’t need to do, what never helps anything is to bully ourselves for how think and feel. Nothing good comes from that, only continued suffering. 

This process is painful, but you don’t have to suffer. The suffering is always optional. 

Ok, that is what I have for you this week. Have a beautiful week and I will tlak to you soon.