Fertility and Family Building

What this can involve

For many clients, fertility is where their sense of control over their body and timeline starts to come apart. What begins as trying to conceive turns into tracking, testing, waiting, and making consequential decisions with incomplete information, all while you're expected to continue life as normal.

Cycle days. Bloodwork before work. A phone call with a number in it that dictates how the rest of your week goes. Over time, the emotional toll can become a significant factor in deciding whether to continue treatment.

“This wasn't on my bingo card"

This is a phrase I hear often from clients going through fertility treatment.

IVF can initially feel like a clear process: take hormones, retrieve eggs, create embryos, transfer one, have a baby. But while IVF increases the odds of pregnancy, it doesn't guarantee it. Low hormone levels, canceled cycles, low follicle counts, unsuccessful transfers, and many other unexpected developments can come at you from the side. During an already precarious time, these experiences can feel utterly destabilizing.

To people outside fertility treatment, there's an assumption that IVF will work, and work seamlessly. Because treatment can go on for months, and you "seem" fine, it can feel like no one understands how hard it is.

A distant relative's pregnancy news can be deeply upsetting even when you're genuinely happy for them. Well-meaning toxic positivity can be the most invalidating thing in the room ("so-and-so did IVF and now she has a beautiful toddler!", or "everything happens for a reason").

There can be grief in not feeling understood. You may not yet know how you want people to show up for you, which can make it even harder to ask.

What this can look like

Clients often describe moving through cycles of hope and grief. There may be grief over losing the timeline you expected, the ease you assumed, and the version of this experience you thought would be yours.

Anxiety can also become understandably heightened because you know firsthand that things don't always go the way they "ought" to.

Each month without the outcome you hoped and planned for can bring another loss. These losses are often invisible, even as you're expected to carry on with work, relationships, and daily life as usual.

What I work with

Common areas of focus in my work with clients navigating fertility and family building include:

• Grief and ambivalence while trying to conceive, with or without treatment

• The gap between what IVF is assumed to be and what it actually asks of you

• Pregnancy loss and recurrent loss

• Pregnancy after infertility or loss

• Medical trauma related to fertility procedures

• Strain and communication breakdown within a partnership under sustained stress

• Identity disruption when your body isn't doing what you expected

• Decisions about treatment paths, timing, donor conception, single parenthood by choice, or when to stop

• The isolation of infertility, including pregnancy announcements, baby showers, and the group text

• Earlier experiences that resurface during treatment

How we can work together

My role is to help you process the real difficulty of fertility without turning it into a judgment about yourself.

I offer individual and couples therapy for clients navigating fertility and family building.

Sometimes the work centers on grief. Often, it involves learning how to tolerate uncertainty. Other times it involves conflict or distance with a partner who is both going through this with you and experiencing it differently. It may include resentment toward your body, the loss of a version of yourself you expected to become, or a medical experience your nervous system is still treating as present tense.

For some clients, EMDR can help address distressing experiences and negative beliefs connected to fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, or medical procedures. I also draw on CBT, DBT-informed skills, psychoeducation, and a whole lot of validation in my sessions.

Much of this work is also practical. We may work on how to tell the people in your life what would actually help, especially while you're still figuring that out yourself. We can also focus on how to manage the two-week wait, which is its own particular kind of endurance and rarely gets treated as a skill you can build.

I also work with clients after treatment has ended, whether or not it resulted in a pregnancy, to process what happened and consider what comes next.