Not pregnant yet? You bet!

Not pregnant yet? You bet!
Rimma Efimkina

The book «Not pregnant yet? You bet!» reveals the possibilities of psychotherapy in the treatment of infertility. It examines more thanthirty women’s stories selected by the author from her long-term psychotherapeutic practice. All of them are devoted to various aspectsof infertility, provided with comments that will interest both aninexperienced reader and a specialist in the field of practicalpsychology.

Not pregnant yet? You bet!

Rimma Efimkina

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.

    Gospel of Thomas

Translator Irina Gift

Illustrator Igor Zakharov

© Rimma Efimkina, 2020

© Irina Gift, translation, 2020

© Igor Zakharov, illustrations, 2020

ISBN 978-5-0051-7791-9

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Table on contents

Foreword

There are many reasons why people can’t have children. According to the dominant in our society materialistic point of view on childbirth the issue is of purely technical nature and can be fixed like fixing a car. However, cases described in this book show that these issues have psychological reasons. And they can be fixed if we see the meaning of what is going on and understand it. Usually, if we do, any medical interventions become unnecessary.

I own a whole collection of babies’ photos born by “infertile” women as a result of our both individual and group psychotherapy meetings. I’m really proud of my collection. Besides, it is a piece of “evidence” proving that psychotherapy works. “Impartial” doctors diagnosed these women with fertility issues. The diagnosis included infertility, missed miscarriage, repeated miscarriage. These were numerous sad stories from very different women of childbearing age. And all of them had a happy ending.

It’s not such a wonder after all, when you know how to work with psychosomatic health issues. The main thing here is to listen attentively to their stories. I listen to a woman telling me about her symptoms, I watch for non-verbal cues, I observe if what she says matches what she does, and look for mismatches, inconsistency, incongruence. These are signs of internal conflict that is represented on the physical level in the form of blockage in the body. Catharsis is what happens when we find blocking mindset and replace it with activating mindset. Grateful for this, the body starts working as Nature and God intended it to. When I say God here, I don’t imply religious, but metaphorical meaning of this word – the Creator. If God made humans in his image and likeness, in this case everyone can be a creator. Any woman is a creator, because she can create people in the image and likeness of herself.

In this book I tell more than thirty stories of my clients. At times I quote my colleagues’ cases and observations, works of fiction, as well as women’s discussions of these issues on the Internet to illustrate my interpretation of a particular case. What I would like to show with the help of these stories is how holistic approach – which says we are whole mentally, emotionally and physically – works in childbirth.

I did not mean to dedicate this book to childbirth alone, because it is just one aspect of psychosomatic health issues. However, subconsciously I knew it was going to be a book, otherwise why would I write down by memory all these psychotherapy sessions each time I came back from my workshops? And now I opened my folder titled “Infertility” and read through the stories I had collected over 15 years of psychotherapy practice. Most of the woman became mothers and gave birth. It’s time my child – this very book – saw the light.

As I was writing this book there were numerous synchronous events that helped me ponder over the subject I was writing about. For example, the beginning and the end of the first draft coincided with the beginning of pregnancy and the due date of out five-year-old Siamese cat Kate. Very much to everyone surprise it gave birth to three black kittens. Although their father was a white blue-eyed cat named Deposit. I guess this can be interpreted as “man plans, God laughs” and regardless of what my initial plan for the book had been it turned out to be not quite as “white” as I thought it would.

Another synchronicity blast came from the women whose stories comprise this book: they reappeared in my life after being absent for several years, so I could discuss their stories and ask for permission to publish their cases with their names changed. Most of them were very enthusiastic about my idea of the book, and I’m very grateful for that. My sincere gratitude goes to all of you – for your courage to share your story with me and the readers of my book. This book would not exist if it wasn’t for you, you are its part and parcel!”

I couldn’t help but try to have fun and include humorous Internet memes as epigraphs, because they convey the meaning in a creative humorous way. Besides, I singled out blocking and activating mindsets and put it at the end of each story, as they sum up the essence of each session. They are easy to understand even if you have no special training in psychology and they are useful just as they are.

Chapter 1

Becoming a mother: psychological initiation experience

“It’s hard to get through”

Give a hungry man a rod – not a fish!

    Proverb

I received an email from Marina who was my client for three years:

– Rimma, I’m pregnant! I’m so grateful to you every day of my life!

I rejoiced when I read this: yay-yay-yay! At last! I knew it would happen! But then I remembered that Marina left her husband two weeks ago. I tapped on the keyboard excitedly:

– Marina, but who is the father? – and then I remembered I had forgotten to congratulate her, I wrote hurriedly: – I’m so happy for you anyway, congratulations!

– Thanks. It’s my husband. I try to keep it a secret. I had stopped myself from writing to you three times, but then I did it anyway.

Of course one wants to share their joy. I also feel tempted to boast that I was part of this miracle. My bad, I know this is not the right thing to do. We, psychotherapists, create conditions so that the client could increase the level of their consciousness, but nothing is guaranteed. It’s their work, their choice, their life, not ours. However, when my clients have breakthroughs like this – this is my reward for the contribution I made. I rejoice together with Marina and I recall what happened three years ago.

It was the first day of personal-growth workshop. Participants introduce themselves and told whatever they thought fit about themselves to the group. Marina was thirty-four, styled, red-headed, she told about her achievements and then she stopped abruptly when she came to the issue of being a mom, her face turned red. Her husband and her had been married for more than ten years, but couldn’t have a baby. To my question: “What stands in the way?” Marina snaped at me with her brown eyes wide open:

– Why? Should I go into medical stuff?!

I’m not surprised by this kind of reaction, it’s rather typical. Our people go in therapy when all traditional ways of solving the problem didn’t work. They wasted a lot of their time, felt a lot of pain and suffered a lot, spent a lot of money. My question takes them back to square one where they started, so it is viewed as being arrogant and they feel irritated and even angry.

Difference between patient and client

People are so dependent on doctors, medical research, vaccines, and their faith in pharmaceuticals; and so afraid to take responsibility for their own lives.

    Tatyana Demidova

Why do I think the medical approach doesn’t always work? For starters, when dealing with doctors, a woman is called a patient. The word patient comes from Latin (patiens – one who has to be patient, to suffer) meaning a person undergoing medical observation or some kind of treatment because of some disease. Apart from the emotional component (suffering) the word patient has another one, and this is a person being passive, treated like an object. This way a person is supposed to wait while someone does something to change the situation.

Psychologists prefer calling the people they work with clients, not patients. In Ancient Rome a client (comes from Latin cliens, pl. clients) was a free citizen protected by their patron. Client is a general word for a person using some kind of service.

People have been taught by our mass-culture that someone will do something for their wellbeing. They expect that someone will solve their problems, give advice, sympathize with them, write a prescription or judge their offenders. However, if we agree that a person subconsciously created the situation they are in, there should be other ways to help them deal with the consequences of this situation. What would be helpful is activating their internal resources, so that they could deal with the situation all by themselves. This means giving them a rod, not a fish – that’s the way they can become mature, independent and self-sufficient.

When I ask my client a question on what the doctors said, I would like to hear her version of the story, so that I understand how she interacts with people. There is one and the same strategy underlying her interactions with people and interactions with her own body. If this strategy is not efficient, she could change it, and then – and only then – do both her interactions with people and her symptoms change.

“Don’t see any obstacles”

Take responsibility for the things that are coming to you from fate.You can find the principle and learn something, and you can do this in every aspect of your life.

    Ruediger Dahlke

I explained this to Marina and the rest of the group as well as I could, and she agreed to investigate her symptom. I asked her to tell about it in her own words, not medical terms, or – still better – show. Marina told that an egg won’t come out of the ovary, that is why it cannot be fertilized and go down to the uterus. Marina asked all members of the group to stand in a circle representing an ovary, and she was an egg inside this circle. She easily broke through latched hands of the group members and came out. Then I asked her to show the rest. She just “jumped” to the uterus. I was surprised at how that was even possible. Then she remembered that she had to go through the tube first, so she arranged the people and went through. She took some group members to make a uterus, chose a midwife and “was born”. Nothing about that was difficult. I was surprised and told her:

– I don’t see any reasons why you cannot get pregnant. Look for yourself: the egg came out of the ovary, no problem after this either…

– Well, yes…