At some point during the seven-year journey I took to have a child, I started to think that people who had experienced reproductive trauma were like war veterans. One person may have landed in Normandy on D-Day, another shot at while flying Catalina patrol planes in the South Pacific, but they had all fought in WWII.
One day, on one of the rare occasions that I lifted my gaze from the magazines I always tried (unsuccessfully) to read in the waiting room of the “high-risk” OB, I made eye contact with a patient across the waiting room and we traded stats. Me: “six rounds IVF, miscarriage, incompetent cervix, stillbirth.” She (an attractive woman about my age who looked like the picture of health with a loving smile and creamy caramel skin): “spontaneous aborter more than three miscarriages in succession, incompetent cervix, preeclampsia.” Our experiences were different, but we knew—like one soldier who was sent in to liberate Auschwitz meeting one who’d gone to Dachau—that the pain, the shock, the trauma we’d seen in the war- was the same.
For almost seven years, I carried shame and despair inside my body, the the leaden dense weight of a bowling ball. I didn’t understand that speaking about the trauma, the grief, the pain could be healing and that connecting with other people who had walked the trip wire-laden path of infertility was a way to set me free.
Since writing a book about my fertility experience and the miraculous way my son came into the world (my sixty-year-old mother carried him as our surrogate), I’ve been asked in talks and interviews to give advice to people going through a reproductive trauma. The first time I fielded this question, I felt reticence. So many things people said to me during my own experience were unhelpful— (“everything happens for a reason”, “this must have been God’s will”), when what I wanted to hear was: “I am sorry you are going through any of this—you definitely do not deserve it.”
In reply to the question, I shared what helped me: yoga, trauma therapy, grieving the loss of our twins, meditation, abstaining from Facebook, long walks in nature- emphazing these are just techniques and tools I liked- that I know how different we all are. I shared my “favorite things list” and then I talked about shame.
In her much-viewed TED talk, psychologist and researcher Brene Brown said that shame is one of the most corrosive energies on the planet. After ten years of studying shame, she also discovered that there is an antidote, one that she sums up in four words: “You are not alone.”
I’d read that the fertility field was a growing industry. Researching my book, I read that one in six US births involved some sort of fertility procedure. I heard later about the film and Return to Zero community-which grew quickly to thousands of members.
The numbers were undeniable, but knowing the stats alone didn’t heal me. It was hearing the women and men who were experiencing similar pain that held the alchemy I needed. I could not sit in a room of people who had experienced what I had and feel the same hatred towards them that I had felt about myself (that I was impotent, not a woman, broken, a failure). These were not people who had done some unknown awful thing and were being punished by a fertility crisis. When I heard them speak, I felt overpowering love—and, as I loved, I softened to myself.
A support group may not be everyone’s healing agent, but I believe something out there exists for each person. In the midst of uncertainty and doubt, we can look and experiment until we find that thing that tells us in a way we can feel that we are not alone, that the war will end.
After WWII, Winston Churchill said: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Some days, the only thing I could do was breath, and continue. A colleague friend of mine who teaches fertility and pre-natal yoga told me she believed there is a way for each person who wants to to have a child. I couldn’t believe her statement in full but I felt better and more open to possibility each time she said the words. Words of faith in redemption and possibility, hearing others stories, knowing I am not alone- I see these as lifelines that can heal us and guide us forward as well. And when we find our lifeline, we can grab on hard, tie it around our stomachs—and hold on tight until it leads us home- to the fulfillment of our dream.
Sara Connell is an author and life coach with a private practice in Chicago. Sara has appeared on Oprah, NPR, WGN, Good Morning America, Katie Couric, Rickie Lake & The View and her writing has been published in: The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Parenting Magazine, Elle, Psychobabbble, Mindful Metropolis and Evolving your Spirit magazines. Her first book, Bringing In Finn (Seal Press) was nominated for 2012 book of the year by Elle magazine.
Visit Sara @ www.saraconnell.com
