Emotional aspects of infertility
After many months of waiting, of so many hopes that never lead to a positive outcome, a visit is made to the specialist and afterwards comes the diagnosis of infertility. The diagnosis provides relative calm, as it gives different causes and reasons that may give an explanation as to what has not been understood until now: what’s the matter with us? Why us? Why have we been waiting so long? Why have we been giving priority to other aspects of our lives? Don’t we deserve to see a child grow up with our love and care at home?
After identifying the problem, a range of possible treatments opens up that may help make the dream of being parents come true. But until this step is taken, many couples live with the pent-up anxiety of this wish that does not come true. Feelings of sadness, rage, guilt, and frustration appear, and this comes as a frightening surprise. Mostly, this problem is met with silence in family and social circles, thinking that something so personal and intimate is the couple’s business. This is where the difficulty arises in taking the decision to see a specialist and somehow talking about and sharing their personal, emotional and sexual intimacies with third parties, thereby breaching the couple’s limits.
Such is the cocktail of feelings that they surprise themselves throughout this whole period. They give different excuses not to attend some family or social engagements with old colleagues, friends, and cousins who are of the same age and so have formed a family – a family with children. Moreover, they feel assailed by an infinity of babies, baby buggies, pregnant women, adoptive families, and so-on that they come across in such striking numbers that they are made to feel like they are the only ones that have not managed this and that the situation they are experiencing is unfair.
But knowing that there are many more couples that suffer from this problem, that share this same difficulty in becoming parents, and that feel equally overcome, sad, vulnerable, and tired, calms them down and puts them at ease to some extent. They realise that this is a more common problem than they thought at first, and a problem for which there are various kinds of treatment with good chances of success.
Hence, the first step is to open the door that is isolating them from the rest and to allow a group of professionals to listen to them, assist them, advise them, care for them, and accompany them through the diagnosis and treatment phase. This phase is not without its ups and downs but has one clear aim, which is none other than to help on the way towards the desired pregnancy.