By Helen Adrienne
Infertility involuntarily changes your life. You’re not in the driver’s seat and the roller coaster climbs slowly and plummets quickly. With all this mental and physical motion and commotion, every day can seem like a year when your quest for a baby is thwarted.
If you relate to this description, take note: You may not realize that you can turn this crisis into an opportunity. Really! With the right mind/body coping options, you can be empowered to intervene in the dizzying effects of that roller coaster.
Okay, I admit that it takes work when you’re least in the mood for another “job”. It involves laying out a map of all the stumbling blocks of the infertility journey and turning them into building blocks. You can empower yourself—really empower yourself—with new or enhanced choices of how to cope when you’re thrown yet another curve ball.
The map allows you to discern:
- What the impact of infertility is on you?
- …on your relationship?
- …on friendships and family interactions?
- How to Normalize depression and anxiety
- What the mind/body connection is?
- The difference between problem-solving coping and letting-go coping
- How hypnosis can be a powerful tool
- Where you stand spiritually
- How you can get to know yourself in a deeper way?
- The upside of infertility—yes there is an upside!
- Your potential for giving birth to a new, improved version of yourself
If you read my book, On Fertile Ground: Healing Infertility, you can see how over 2 dozen of my former patients developed the patience to slow down the feeling of frenzy and get under the turbulence of infertility. It allowed them—and it can allow you—to develop the benefits of enhanced mind/body coping. Each chapter ends with proven mind/body exercises which, if learned and practiced, will strengthen your confidence, mitigate your confusions, normalize your upsets, enhance communication skills and solidify the bond with your partner.
Life is full of curve balls. The really good news is that if you zoom in to the territory within the above map, you’ll be set to deal with whatever challenges come at you for the rest of your life.
Most of all, I wish everyone the best of luck in pursuing your dream.
About Helen Adrienne
Helen Adrienne, LCSW, BCD, has been in private practice since 1979. She enjoys forming therapeutic alliances with women, men and couples who are struggling with a mental, physical or circumstantial logjam. Helen is an expert in the issue of infertility and is one of the few clinical hypnotherapists in the country who applies Ericksonian clinical hypnosis to infertility. She runs mind/body stress-reduction groups for infertility at NYU Fertility Center.
A graduate of Rutgers University and Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service, Helen has taken advanced training in mind/body therapy at Harvard and clinical hypnotherapy at The Milton Erickson training institute in New York City, for whom she now teaches. She is an approved consultant for the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis and is an associate trainer in Ericksonian hypnosis with Dr. Jeffrey Zeig. She also teaches the sensitive management of infertility patients and mind/body interventions to other professionals at national and international conferences. Helen has authored many articles for the infertility patient which can be found on her web site, www.mind-body-unity.com, where you will also find her Baby Manifest-O™ Blog. She is also a blogger for Psychology Today (www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fertile-ground). Her book, On Fertile Ground: Healing Infertility, launched as a #1 best seller on Amazon on 1-11-11.
