Not pregnant yet? You bet!

– Let’s play this again, what if we missed something?

We played the scene again – no problems this time either. Then I asked her to choose a stand-in for herself and watch the scene from outside. Marina, one hand on her hip and the other touching her chin, frowned at the scene as her stand-in broke through the vicious circle.

– Marina, what part of your life does this scene remind you of?

She pondered a while and then answered:

– This reminds me of my relationships with my mom. She overprotects me. It is difficult for me to get through my mother’s restrictions.

– Chose someone to play the role of your mother and tell her this.

We played a scene where Marina talks to her mother that she feels fear and anger, when she controls her grownup daughter, but her feelings weren’t expressed as eagerly as one might have expected. Obviously, this wasn’t anger. To intensify her feelings I offered to play a fantasy scene and chose someone to play the role of her own child. This was just it: her eyes watered immediately. Marina felt overwhelming bitterness when she projected her relationships with her mother to her future relationships with her unborn child. Marina said that the baby was a girl, so both scenes – her dialogue with her mother and with her daughter were the same.

Without even realizing it, the first thing Marina told her daughter that she would take care and protect her, so that she wouldn’t get hurt. The group laughed at this – it was amazing how the mother’s pattern of behavior that made Marina suffer was precisely mirrored in her relationships with her daughter, I suggested exchanging roles. When Marina felt like a little girl overprotected by her mother, she felt like protesting and rebelling: “I don’t want this!” – “And what do you want?” – “I just want to be loved!”

Marina barely moved when she was watching stands-in playing this same scene from outside. I asked her if she wanted to change something in the scene. She answered that she wanted mother and daughter to give each other a hug. Stands-in were relieved to do so, later they said that this was exactly what they wanted to do themselves.

– And now try on the roles of the mother and of the baby and experience how close they are.

At the end of the session Marina took all the roles off the group members. When she came back the next day, she shared a story. She was staying at some friends of hers who had a two-year-old daughter. Once, when the girl fell down, Marias startled so abruptly that she actually scared the girl whose parents were more relaxed about her falling down. So the girl avoided Marina. However, when Marina stayed at her friends after our psychodrama session, the girl suddenly changed her attitude towards her: she sat in her lap for the whole evening playing with her. I joked about it:

– See, if you can tempt other people’s children into coming to you now, one day you will “tempt” your own baby into coming to you!

“It’s hard to get through”: commentary

– Hi, mom, I’m coming home. Should I buy anything?

– Yes, buy your own apartment and move the hell away from my house!

    Internet meme

So, what happened during marina’s session? I believe that subconsciously a person interacts both with people and inanimate things according to a pattern. This means that if Marina’s mother controlled her daughter, Marina learned that this was the way to interact with people, this is why she controls her close ones. And she does the same to her own body. If we take her phrase “An egg won’t come out of the ovary”, and replace the word egg with Marina’s name, we’ll get that Marina herself won’t come out of the boundaries once set by her mother.

Now, when the reason the interaction fails is clear, it’s time to do the hard thing – to change one’s behavior. In Marina’s case it is necessary for her to grow up, and cross the boundaries, cross the metaphorical threshold, and let her future children cross the threshold as well. There are several such “thresholds” in our lives: egg comes out of the ovary, embryo comes out of the uterus, child comes out of their parents’ care and out of their home, soul comes out of the body… These are the great transitions, and it is really difficult and scary to go beyond into the unknown. We will get back to that.

“It is hard to get through”: post scriptum

The disease represents your unfulfilled longing. So, above all else, use your illness to set yourself free to do what you have always wanted to do.

    Barbara Ann Brennan

We had this session when Marina was thirty four. Now she is thirty-seven, and many things changed over the years. When I wrote this down it’s was just as if I knew that I would need these notes for this book. Now it’s funny to read the words about crossing the threshold. Step by step Marina came to be independent. A year ago she made her own workshop for participants of a psychotherapy retreat and when she came back she started her own business – her beloved brainchild.

Finally, her third bold step was to question her own marriage that lasted more than ten years, but still had not resulted in having children. Marina decided to leave – she rented an apartment and moved away from her husband – literary crossed the threshold! She said she wanted to live alone for a while and try to understand who she was, what it was that she wanted, what she could do. She found the apartment for just a penny after one phone call – some friends of hers were going away for a long period of time and asked her to watch over their two-bedroom fully furnished place. All of it was very easy to do. It is in the quiet emptiness of her friends’ apartment that she understood that she wanted to live with her husband and with her husband only. She chose him unconsciously back then, but now she knew: he was the one she chose all by herself.

One week after she came back to her husband, she found out she was six weeks pregnant. It seems like the decision to be independent was already there, so, when it happened, the woman was able to be fully creative.

When the first emotions went away, I asked her a question:

– So, now what?

– What do you mean “what” – I came back. I understood that people do to me exactly what I was doing to people. I did not value my husband, the efforts he made trying to keep our relationships together. When I moved, we talked for two hours on the phone per day. When I realized I did not value him, I cried all day, and then all this happened… It’s amazing how things turned out, I’m shocked both with what happened and with myself.

– Does your husband know?

– Of course! He COULDN’T be happier, he asks what he should do to take care of me and to support me.

– Marina, I think it’s great!

– Rimma, it’s a MIRACLE, I cry when I think about it. I tried like 154 times and nothing. And now it happened just like this, it’s wonderful! My business, my pregnancy! I wanted to share this news with you. I thought you will be happy too.

– I am! But I don’t agree that it all happened just like that. You made it happened, you pushed your limits – you changed the way you think!!!

– I believe I should change it more in the future, but this is the whole other story. Thank you for helping me.

By the way, try and guess the sex of the baby Marina is expecting. Of course it’s a girl!

Infertility reasons: psychological and medical points of view

The obstetricians say that menstruation is the weeping of a disappointed uterus.

    Eric Bern

As mentioned above, psychologists and health professionals view the reasons for infertility differently. Health professionals imply a more materialistic approach approaching conception as a result of biochemical factors and seeing uterus as a lab with good conditions for the fetus to live in. They take childbearing under control (and preferably, the conception as well) as soon as possible to prevent any malfunctions in baby-making process.

Those malfunctions are accounted and pigeonholed just as well. Medically speaking, there are seven physiological reasons why women could be infertile: blockage in or lack of both fallopian tubes, adhesion process in the pelvis, endocrine disorders, pathology or lack of uterus, endometriosis, antibodies to sperm, chromosomal abnormality. This is the text I took from Wikipedia shortened by the factor of one hundred.

However, I copied the eighth reason carefully: “Psychological reasons for infertility could include both conscious and subconscious wish not to have a baby. Sometimes it’s fear of pregnancy and giving birth, sometimes it’s the man the woman does not want to see as the father of her children, sometimes it’s resistance to bodily changes pregnancy could lead to, etc.” I’m glad that they do not discount the eighth – psychological – reason, although they make it sound overly simplistic and thus nonessential. However, if there was no this psychological component in creating new live, women could long be relieved of pregnancy and its side-effects and replaced by mechanical uteruses.

I had a lot of thoughts in this regard that strived to be written down for a long time. I noticed that even though health professionals are aware of psychological reasons for infertility, generally they do not account for them, still treating it in medical and not psychological ways. For instance, even if a woman is healthy, but does not get pregnant within a year or two, health professionals prescribe pharmacological treatment or a surgery. It is not entirely fair, because they take the bread out of our mouths. I’m not offended, however, because women who have some of the seven reasons mentioned above do get pregnant and do give birth after psychological sessions. And sometimes even after huge medical interventions, which I would personally put as a whole separate reason for infertility: medical control on its own might make conception and childbearing problematic.

This same Marina I mentioned above is a great example. When she came to one of the groups twenty weeks pregnant, the members of the group were excited to hear her story, Marina told her “medical history” in her own words:

– I always had troubles with my periods. Ever since I was nineteen I took hormones to keep them going. However, as soon as I started my own business it magically came about all on its own!

I smiled as I was listening to Marina. This is so obvious that now Marina is the mistress of her own business and her own life. She does not work for an employee as she used to, she creates according to her life task.

Speaking about the hormones, to be honest I’m really concerned about hormonal therapy. The word “hormone” itself kind of sounds like the word “harmony”. I know that etymologically they are different, however, the right hemisphere of our brain does not think logically, it uses images and associations: so, hormones regulate certain processes in different organs of our body to sustain the homeostasis, i.e. harmony. When a woman stops counting on her own system in sustaining homeostasis and turns to external ways to sustain the homeostasis, she gives up her responsibility for her own harmony and becomes dependable. I believe that the healing process should be about taking back the responsibility for one’s own body and environment. Organizing her own business was for Marina her way of sustaining homeostasis – it was her brainchild causing her a number of feelings, both negative (anxiety, fear, anger, sadness) and positive (joy, pride, believing in herself).

When Marina came to my psychological retreat this summer, her periods stopped again. She was shocked, but it did not occur to her that this could be pregnancy. The group was amazed at this:

– But why? This is so natural: no periods, you go buy a pregnancy test!

– Well, yeah… It is natural for you. When I don’t get my period for me this means my hormones are failing me yet again, and this means hospitals, doctors, yet again. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was. I tried everything for the 14 years! I even had laparoscopic ovarian surgery[1 - Laparoscopic ovarian wedge resection is a surgical technique performed to reduce the amount of androgen producing tissue in women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). It is used to improve the effectiveness of other ovulation induction treatments. The surgery involves a cut of the ovary tissue in the form of a wedge. It raises a chance of pregnancy in many women (70—80%).], but it didn’t do me much good.

– Having perfectly healthy ovaries cut?

– They say, it helps some women to get pregnant.