Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (93 page)

Integrative Program to Enhance Fertility

If fertility is an issue that concerns you, I highly recommend that you explore the mind-body connection thoroughly. The steps below will get you started.
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I’d recommend that you have your journal ready as you read through this so that you can write down any thoughts, feelings, or beliefs that arise as you go through the steps I’ve outlined. Your responses will be an invaluable guide on your journey toward healing your fertility.

The mind-body approach to fertility is based on the premise that knowledge is power and that a change in perception based on new information is powerful enough to effect subtle changes in your endocrine, immune, and nervous systems. Regardless of what you’ve been told about your fertility, know that your ability to conceive is profoundly influenced by the complex interaction among psychosocial, psychological, and emotional factors (basically your thoughts and emotions), and that you can consciously change these to enhance your ability to have a baby.

The first thing that’s needed in the area of fertility is a new lan guage. Few labels are more damaging to women (or to men) than the label “infertile.” It strikes at the very heart of one’s self-concept and self-esteem and results in a punishing internal dialogue in women who are going through this experience. Many feel inadequate, guilty, and to blame for their condition, which creates a vicious cycle inside them. The word
infertility
conjures up images of barren, dry, sterile earth that can’t bear fruit. If you currently carry this label, try replacing it with the following: “I am a sensual, sexual, fertile being with a great deal of love and nurturing to give to others—and to receive for myself,” or “My body is a wide-open channel for new life and new love.” Internalizing the feeling that goes along with these words will help you change your self-concept (and physiology). Remember that changing your is a process, not an event. Give it time.

Step one.
Look at the big picture. Know that you’re not alone— millions of women are charting new territory when it comes to balancing their personal and professional lives. Your fertility situation may, in part, be the result of the sweeping psychosocial forces that have unconsciously influenced an entire generation, with very real physiologic effects.

Step two.
If you are over thirty-five and want to become pregnant, examine your programming about your biological clock. The popularity of and widespread publicity surrounding assisted reproductive technologies have made it seem as though every woman over the age of thirty-five is apt to have problems conceiving. But this just isn’t true. Here are the statistics: About one-third of women who defer childbearing until their mid-to late thirties will have a problem with fertility. But fully two-thirds won’t have any problem. And 50 percent of women in their early forties won’t have a problem, either.
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Though statistically a woman’s fertility decreases with age, it’s important to keep in mind that statistics are based on the experience of an entire population. Within a given population there are very big individual differences. For example, the oldest spontaneous pregnancy in modern times recorded in
Guinness World Records
was in a woman in Portland, Oregon, who delivered at the age of fifty-seven. In earlier times, it is reported that a Scottish woman delivered six children after the age of forty-seven—the last one at age sixty-two.
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Interestingly, Brant Secunda, an American-born shaman trained by the Huichol Indians, who live in a remote region of Mexico, reports that Huichol women routinely get pregnant in their fifties and even in their sixties.
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(Perhaps because they haven’t been told that their eggs are too old, their fertility doesn’t suffer much with age.)

This information is evidence of just how miraculous the human female body is when it comes to fertility. Things are not always what they seem. Indeed, research from Jonathan Tilly, Ph.D., and colleagues at Harvard Medical School found that female mammals are able to create new eggs even into adulthood.
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This preliminary research has exploded one of the most sacred tenets of reproductive biology. When it comes to fertility, there’s a big difference between chronological age (age in years) and biological age (age of one’s tissues). We all know women in their early thirties who seem to be going on fifty and women in their forties and even fifties who look like they’re no older than thirty.

Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control for 2007 show that the birth rate for women ages forty to forty-four was the highest it’s been since 1968. The total number of births in 2007 for women ages forty and up is more than 112,000.
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A lot of women over forty may not realize how fertile they are. Fifty-one percent of pregnancies that occur among women in their forties are unintended.
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This may be one of the reasons why women over forty are second only to women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five in frequency of abortions. So who says your eggs are too old?

Step three.
Make the connection between your emotions, your family, and your fertility. The crux of the mind-body approach to fertility is discovering how the messages you internalized from childhood are currently affecting your ability to conceive. It is very clear that your physiology may well be responding auto matically and unconsciously to situations directly related to your early childhood and family conditions. Though most people, especially other family members, may believe that it’s easier and healthier to forget painful childhood experiences, and may urge you to avoid emotionally volatile subjects, your willingness to remember and release your emotional ties to past experiences will free up energy that will help you heal your fertility. Please remember that recalling painful childhood experiences is not done at the expense of happier memories. Usually, you’ll find that this work will be a mixture of profound joy and sadness that ultimately leads you to a place of greater love and forgive ness for both yourself and your parents.

To get started on this, construct an
ephistogram,
an emotional and physical family health history that diagrams family patterns. It was developed by Niravi Payne as an adaptation of the genogram used by family therapists. It can help you understand what circumstances, over many decades, may have caused you to experience reproductive problems. “Filling it out,” writes Niravi, “is a powerful method for creating new pathways for healing, conceiving and carrying a baby to term.” To create an ephistogram, you use the same diagram you would use when drawing a genealogy, or family tree, except that in addition to the names of your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings, you also put in any illnesses or physical symptoms they had, any emotional patterns you remember, and any reproductive difficulties they may have had. This is like detective work. Another fascinating resource is the aptly named book
Wombology: Healing the Primordial Memories and
Wounds Your Grandmother’s Daughter Gave to You
(
iUniverse.com
, 2009) by C. J. Johnson, Psy.D. Remember, for better or for worse, your family served as the model for your current intimate relationships. Ask yourself the following questions about each member of your family tree: “What message did I receive from this person about having children? Was it positive? Was it negative? Did I internalize any of it? What did they lead me to believe about the process of conception, pregnancy, labor, and birth? Were there any family secrets, such as miscarriages or pregnancies that were kept hidden?”

Niravi points out something very empowering: “The real freedom from our negative parental conditioning occurs when we stop denying that we are like them. Rather, asking ourselves how we feel, think, act, and react like our parents is the beginning of our separation and healing process. When we look at our lives in this way, it is easier to bring to light multigenerational ambivalence about conception that the ephistogram outlines.” And this brings us to the next step.

Step four.
Name your ambivalence. It is perfectly normal to be somewhat ambivalent about having a baby. It is possible to very much want a baby and be terrified of the process at the same time. Why wouldn’t you be? It changes your life permanently and in ways that you can’t really plan for. I certainly was ambivalent . . . so much so, in fact, that when I was pregnant with my first child, I didn’t buy a single baby item until after she was born! And I went about my duties in the hospital as though nothing were happening to my body. Ambivalence is a problem only when it isn’t acknowledged and worked through. Many women desire pregnancy but are unsure about raising a baby. Others want children but don’t want to go through a pregnancy, believing that it will be too painful, too damaging to their figure, or whatever. Others are afraid that they will treat their children as they were treated by their parents. These feelings of ambivalence need to be brought to consciousness so that they won’t interfere with conceiving. Ask yourself the following and write the answer in your journal: “Why don’t I want a baby?” Be completely honest when you do this exercise.

Other Factors to Consider

Stress

Unabated emotional stress results in high adrenaline and cortisol levels. This leads to imbalances in other hormones that are important for optimal fertility, including thyroid hormones, progesterone, and estrogen. One of the most tried-and-true ways to decrease emotional stress and its physiological effects is with guided imagery, meditation, breathing through the nose, and relaxation. A wide range of well-documented modalities is available to help with this.

Mindfulness meditation and techniques such as Herbert Benson’s relaxation response
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(see page 130) have been successfully used by Alice Domar, Ph.D., to help women heal from the stress of infertility while also increasing conception rates substantially.
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A practical guide to Dr. Domar’s program can be found in her books
Healing Mind, Healthy Woman
(Henry Holt, 1996) and
Self-Nurture
(Viking, 2000).