Delia was recently a guest on Fertility Village Live, a weekly show dedicated to honest conversations about infertility, loss, and healing.
In this episode, she talks about the emotional complexity of infertility, pregnancy loss, and stillbirth, and how therapy helps process grief that often goes unseen. Delia also explains how trauma lives in the body, what emotional flashbacks look like, and why grief after infertility is so layered and cyclical.
Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3W1aCq8jjU and read the transcript below.
Erin: Welcome to Fertility Village. This is your weekly live talk show where community and support come together with rotating hosts, expert guests, and meaningful conversations. We’re here to guide you through the highs and lows of infertility. Whether you’re searching for answers, seeking advice, or just looking for a special place to belong, Fertility Village is your space to connect, learn, and because it really does take a village, and we are here for you step of the way.
Erin: Good evening everybody. Welcome to Fertility Village Live. It’s Erin here. I am solo hosting tonight. Ashley is away. I actually do have a little co-host here who you can’t see. My French bulldog is sleeping next to me, so if you hear any weird snoring or sounds coming out of the space that I’m in, it’s, I swear, it’s just my bulldog.
Erin: So we’ll start with that. But we are so excited tonight to welcome Delia to the stage. Welcome to Fertility Village Live, Delia.
Delia: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s so exciting. It’s a pleasure.
Erin: Yeah, we’re so glad that you’re here. And as many know October is pregnancy and infant awareness loss, sorry, infant loss awareness month, which is really just a time to honor the babies that are gone too soon and hold space for all the families that are navigating grief after loss.
Erin: And we invited Delia here because she is a, she specializes in this, she’s a registered psychotherapist. She specializes in trauma therapy and grief support. So we’re gonna be talking about the trauma and complexity of infertility, grief, as well as the healing process after pregnancy loss, stillbirth and reproductive challenges.
Erin: So we’re excited to have this conversation. Bit of a heavy one tonight, but we’re gonna keep it as light as possible. But keeping in mind that this is such an important topic so many people in our community and women specifically who have, and obviously in a couple situations, the other partner would feel the loss, but it’s just different when the woman is going through the loss of this life that they have, or the loss of a cycle or the loss of the hope that we feel when we like, don’t get any embryos or we, there’s so many losses through infertility. So we’re obviously having a focus on pregnancy and infant loss awareness but we also wanna talk about the fertility, the loss of a cycle, the, all the different loss that we go through. So we’re gonna get into it. So thank you for being us here. Why don’t you just start with telling us a little bit about your background and what led you into this work?
Delia: As you already mentioned, I’m a registered psychotherapist and I specialize in fertility counseling, reproductive trauma, and also pregnancy loss.
Delia: I work primarily with individuals and couples who struggle to conceive, and this is what I usually describe is, people going through the infertility maze. And basically what led me to this work is not only my clinical background, but also personal experience. So I know firsthand what it’s like when your life is all about appointments, medications, injections, and that waiting game of trying to conceive.
Delia: So it’s basically this lived experience that really helped me to connect with clients because over the years what I’ve came to realize is this journey isn’t about the outcomes, but also surviving the in-between. And that’s where I found that therapy to be very crucial.
Erin: I love that this journey is not about the in outcomes, but surviving the in-between.
Erin: That’s so powerful.
Erin: Because it is like we have to survive to get to the next phase, we have to survive to get to the next part of the journey. But I know there were so many times on my own journey that I was like, if this doesn’t work, I’m gonna die. Not that I had suicidal thoughts, but I just felt like I’m going to die.
Erin: That was the intensity of the emotion around this journey. And if this doesn’t work, I don’t know how I’m gonna go on. It was just like this, it was so intense.
Delia: Yeah, it can be devastating, right? It’s such a, it’s so complex and lonely when it comes down to it. And you’re right. It’s almost like we cannot imagine a future without having this.
Delia: So it’s, it’s so outside of our control, but yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Erin: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are familiar with grief in the context of death, because that’s what we’re used to. Really like relating grief to, but ultimately, like grief is when we’re in the place of mourning a loss.
Erin: So I think through infertility it’s a little bit less Understood. So how can you explain the kind of grief to your clients when, with regards to infertility? It’s super complex. We would, let’s just talk about grief for a little bit because I think we should get to the bottom of, the, all the shapes and sizes of this thing that we are all faced with.
Delia: Yeah, for sure. And yeah, that’s such a good question, and I find that, with infertility grief it comes in so many shapes and sizes and, like it’s never really linear and it can be complex in the sense that it’s unique to every single individual, right? So we have some people that are more resilient, they’re dealing with it a bit better, but then there’s others that they’re struggling a lot more.
Delia: But basically the way I explain it to my clients is I talk a lot about the invisible aspect of it, right? So when we’re talking about technical terms, this is something called disenfranchised grief. So that is basically the grief that it’s not normally recognized by society. So it’s basically it’s often, it is just happening to the person that is going through it.
Delia: So it’s the grief that comes on the inside and a lot of people can really see it, right? And can be, it can be really silent and lonely. Especially when people aren’t really expecting it or when they’re not sharing their fertility journey with friends or family it’s also the stigma about it.
Delia: So that kind of makes it even more even more complex.
Delia: I also want to bring up what makes infertility grief so complex is that it’s very layered. So I know you said at the beginning that, like you’re not just grieving one loss. So a lot of times we’re grieving, like the loss of the future that we imagine, yeah. A lot of times we grieve the loss of the timeline, right? Like we, we kinda have a certain, timeline or progress in mind that we think, at a certain age we’re gonna finish, university, we’re gonna have our careers, we’re gonna meet our partner, and then, it all falls into place.
Delia: And for a lot of people that doesn’t happen. So it puts a dent into the order that we expect. And it can feel like a lot. And what I would also wanna add to this is that it’s also the loss of innocence. And what I mean by that is that, a lot of the times, pregnancy announcements and baby showers, they ended up becoming more painful than joyful when it comes to it. Because it’s a reminder of something that we don’t have yet and others do have.
Erin: Yeah. Yeah. That part of the journey. And I don’t know if I’ve ever met a woman on her fertility journey through the supports that we provide, who hasn’t been, like baby showers are triggering, pregnant bellies are triggering, maybe the odd one who’s oh, I can like, suck it up or push it down to push through for my friend who’s pregnant or my sister, or whatever.
Erin: But for the most part, it’s still just this reminder that like they’re moving forward and we’re stuck here in this horrible hell of limbo without being able to move forward. It’s so far out of our control for sure. Do you think there’s like grief attached to lack of control?
Delia: Yes, for sure. The lack of control, especially in this journey, and the infertility the infertility maze that I mentioned before, everything is uncertain, right?
Delia: Everything is in the unknown. Yeah. And, like it can really rock your boat when it comes to that. But I wanted to like go back a little bit to what you said that, there are women that they put a face mask on and they they go to the baby shower they deal with the pregnancy announcement in such a way, but deep down they’re still experiencing that sadness.
Delia: And the thing is. When we’re experiencing that sadness, it has nothing to do with us not being happy for the other person, but it’s a reminder of what we don’t have, right? So it’s like that punch in the gut of what happens. So yeah, it makes it complicated. I think this makes it even more complicated than any other type of grief.
Delia: Because there’s no clear beginning or end to this, right? So it’s totally, for a lot of people, it’s very cyclical and it’s reoccurring, every month can bring a new wave of loss. So even if you’re having a month that you feel a little bit better you feel that you’re already grieved and you are on a good path, then something could happen, right?
Delia: Yeah. So it can be that ongoing. Yeah. Heartbreak, no clear endpoint, no rituals, no funeral, compared to other griefs that we have.
Erin: Right. It’s just this cycle that you can never get off. That’s why I used to explain it like it’s a roller coaster. You never know if you’re gonna be up or down or up or down, but like it never stops.
Erin: And even like even after having, if you have, we’ll call it success in the form of a baby and then move forward into postpartum motherhood. There’s still so many triggers, like, why does that happen? Is it because the grief is so complex? Or like we never actually move through it? I think I heard somebody say one time you never actually get over grief, like grief, never really finalized.
Erin: As you just make more space to absorb the grief. It was, I totally botched that. Yeah.
Delia: I like that. Yeah. And I, the thing is I actually talk about this with clients as well. The thing is, having a child doesn’t cure infertility. Yeah. So even if you do get to that end goal that you always dreamed of, you are still gonna have those, like open wounds basically, that you get triggered sometimes.
Delia: So it could be like 10 years after when somebody talks about how their daughter or their granddaughter got pregnant so easily, or the first try or things like that. It would trigger things that you might never think it would come up.
Erin: Yeah. Yeah, it’s so true. And even like back to the baby showers, like I’m four years postpartum, five years since my last fertility treatment, and I had a baby shower last week, and it was like leading up to it, and I was feeling like my behavior was off.
Erin: I was like, why am I acting like this or feeling like this? And it hit me like a ton of bricks. Like this baby shower, I’m triggered by this and it’s like making me, it’s making me a certain way because it’s just still there. It’s still there. Yeah. And I was, it just took me a minute to realize, I was like, oh yeah.
Erin: It’s a thing we shower. Totally makes sense. Yeah, for sure. Crazy. This
Delia: This is something that we call in therapy, emotional flashback. It’s almost like you’re getting the flashback of that, how it felt for you physically. Yeah. And then also the memory of the feelings that you’re getting.
Erin: Yeah. Totally. Oh, that’s so good. Do you wanna talk more about the emotional flashback? because I feel like you have something good there.
Delia: Yeah, sure. S o when it comes to the infertility, a lot of the times we don’t refer to it as trauma, but when we think about it, like how trauma affects us from like a body perspective, our bodies remember, right? So all that, you had all of those, heartbreaks, all of those, like negative cycles or like unsuccessful embryo transfer, all of these things, they get stored in our body, right? And a lot of the times we push it down, but then it still comes back when we have that emotional flashback.
Delia: When something kind of remembers, then it triggers you. And sometimes you might feel familiar, like, why am I feeling this way? And other times we might think this is so random.
Erin: Yeah, totally. And it I think sometimes I probably have these emotional flashbacks and I don’t even realize it.
Erin: Like this one with the baby shower, it was like, oh I acknowledged and recognized and was able to like, oh, pinpoint it and then deal with it and then enjoy the shower. Probably, so many times we have these triggers or these things and then don’t even realize like what’s triggering us or why we’re like just acting off or being angry or having Yeah, like big feelings or, yeah.
Erin: So how can, I’m going off script here, but how can we recognize and look for those things? Do you have any good tips to, like, how do we like come back to our body? Actually, this is the next question. Like, how does it show up in our body and mind or day to day and how can we deal with ourselves?
Erin: How can we watch for those things or be more aware of like, when we’re triggered or, and we’re talking about folks still on a journey. The start of a journey after a loss, five, 10 years postpartum. You’re still triggered by things like, what’s something that we can watch for? And maybe just speak to that.
Delia: For sure. And so usually this is something that I think it became one of my motto. I usually try to get my clients and, like myself from a personal perspective, it’s all about becoming curious about yourself. So becoming curious about what happens to you?
Delia: What are your patterns, what are your behaviors? What kind of thoughts you’re having, because a lot of the times, thoughts and feelings and behaviors that kind of be interrelated. So perhaps sometimes you might feel it in your body, you might feel the anxiety and it might be just something that kind of reminds you of it.
Delia: And you might have just, an automatic thought that comes on and without even realizing for it. Yeah. And as you were asking me about, like the day-to-day living experience and how it comes up like physiologically mostly. So I I’m gonna go back to what I said earlier about the trauma.
Delia: So usually we don’t. Use the word trauma for infertility, because people usually imagine trauma as wars, car accidents or natural disasters, right? Yes. So something like very significant.
Delia: But the truth is when we’re thinking about what trauma is not defined by the event, but it’s defined by the way our body responds to what feels threatening.
Delia: Or what feels unsafe. And
Erin: Wait, I want you to say it again. Yeah. Say it again for the people in the back. Like what? So give us the definition of trauma because this is so important. For the folks who are experiencing infertility to get this it’s, so say it again because that’s really important.
Delia: Yeah. So it’s basically, trauma is not defined by what happened by the event itself, but it’s basically the way our body responds to that event or how, what it feels unsafe or what feels threatening.
Erin: Yes. Okay. So what feels safe and threatening? How we respond. So good.
Erin: I think, yeah. There, there’s, it’s so true. When you think about the fertility journey and is it safe to say, like you spoke about like a car accident being a, and people think of that oh, I’m, this trauma from a frightening event or our body goes into this fight or flight in those stress responses in those big moments, but infertility is like a long trauma.
Erin: It’s like it happens over a long period of time. So it’s almost like that analogy when you put a frog in like water and then turn on the heat. Yes. And like he won’t get out, he’ll just die in there because you turn it up so slowly that eventually you just cook the frog. Whereas if you put him into the hot water, he jumps out.
Erin: Yeah. This is like the infertility trauma, it’s almost like you don’t experience it happening to you. It’s an after you realize it after – that traumatized me.
Erin: Because you it happens over such a slow long process where a lot of people, unless there’s an, a big event where there’s like a loss of a baby or, in, in those like really bigger instances, for me, I can pinpoint the most traumatizing part of my journey was when we found out, like the diagnosis, like the moment that we’ve, we knew like we’ll never have a biological child, we’ll never have we will need IVF to have a family. That was like, for me, the defining moment of okay, now I’m like feeling, feeling the things. Anyways I digress, but so speak to that long trauma and then for those who have experienced like an a, a large event, like how does it feel different?
Delia: And I’m glad that you mentioned that and I, first of all, I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry for what you’ve been through.
Delia: This is never easy for anybody. And the way you were explained that, it’s almost like somebody like just keep going through the trauma, and through the infertility. And that’s basically what happens. It’s almost like we have we find that relentless energy that it’s almost like it, it affects us.
Delia: We’re going through the heartbreak with, we are feeling the trauma of it all, but we’re still pushing through we’re still like going through. So it’s almost like that that thing. I wanna differentiate between a little bit of the trauma because the car accidents and the natural disaster, this is what we usually refer to as like big T trauma.
Delia: That is something that is like automatically traumatic. Yeah. Big T like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay. And
Delia: then we also refer to something small t traumas. Like for like with a little t trauma, right? Little trauma. And this is what, where infertility actually fits in, right? It’s because it’s something that happens that it’s not just one big traumatic event, but it’s small, it’s like the drip by drip, it’s finding out that, like you have to do another cycle or finding out, yeah, you’re transferred, then implant or all of these things.
Erin: Yes. Would it go into would that fall into the same bucket as like somebody who’s experienced like emotional abuse from a partner or a parent or somebody who’s or physical, like over a long period of time and felt like in a similar way, like stuck or like they couldn’t get out or whatever.
Erin: Is it safe to compare like the, we don’t compare the different, there’s no levels of grief. All grief is grief and we all deal with it and all loss is loss. But is it, is that, would that be a similar like if experience, I’m just thinking of like folks who might be listening to this, who have gone through something that’s not infertility, like to relate to what an infertility patient is going through.
Delia: Yeah, for sure. And the thing is we don’t, we don’t really compare the traumatic experiences. Yeah. Because everybody like deals with it. So it’s all about how the nervous system reacts to that threat. But I’m gonna go back to, because you said, either abuse, emotional abuse or, like childhood developmental trauma.
Delia: Like it happens in instances. But going back to that, how it relates to infertility trauma is that, remember the definition that I said? That is not the event itself, but it’s the way our body responds to what it is. So when we’re thinking about it that’s right what threatening about infertility.
Delia: So infertility, most of the time it threatens our own identity, right? We have that confusion. Who am I if I can’t have biological children or who am I after? So many losses, right? And then it threatens our relationships, or for a lot of people, they tend to distance themselves from other friends that I have children or it feels that they’re not feeling validated or they’re not feeling understood. And then it also threatens the imagined future, right? Because going back to that we cannot control this. This is something that it’s so uncertain and it’s unknown, right?
Delia: In a nutshell, it threatens something that should have been a given, for a lot of people, like we take this, that it’s a given that, like whenever you’re ready to try to get pregnant, hey, it’s gonna happen, right?
Erin: Yeah. You think this is my like God given right? To have a baby. Natural. Naturally, we hate that term in our. Community, but it makes sense in the space of conceiving in the, behind the door of the bedroom compared to in the fertility clinic. But yeah. That’s really good. That’s really good.
Delia: And if I may add something else when we’re thinking about, just because I’ve studied trauma for so long, yeah, it’s good. A psychotherapist, I was a psychometric and I was doing psychological assessments for traumatic brain injuries. So I have, this passion about what happens to the brain trauma. But I wanted to like share, like the word trauma itself comes from the Greek word for wound.
Delia: And I find that like when I realized like where it comes from I find that it’s it fits like a glove with an infertility community. Yeah. Because that’s what it does, right? It leaves a wound. It does. For a lot of people it’s very invisible from the outside.
Delia: Like they don’t know what’s going on, but it’s, it can cut very deep on the inside for someone that is actually going through that.
Erin: Absolutely. It does leave a wound. There’s no doubt about that. I think anybody who’s gone through it, like even just for TTC for a year and then doing IUI and not being successful, like still a wound, there’s everybody who’s gone on this journey that’s had any sort of, change to the direction you thought your life was gonna go. It’s so difficult. It’s so difficult.
Erin: Let’s pivot a little bit and talk about I wanna touch on. How partners, grieve differently. So what are some, can you give us some tips on how couples can support one another through loss? And then we’re gonna talk a little bit more about stillbirth and pregnancy loss.
Delia: Yeah. Okay. So I find that this is such an important question because I also do therapy for both individuals and couples.
Erin: Oh. I tell everybody where to find you after as well, because this is really important. Yeah.
Delia: I find that this is important because. Different grieving styles, it’s pretty much one of the biggest sources of conflict that I’ve seen couples, dealing with infertility or even after loss. And I think we’ll probably do more than one hour just for this question on its own. Yeah. So partners, are already devastated by the loss. And suddenly they can feel disconnected from the one person who should understand them.
Delia: Or who should feel the same way as they feel. Yeah. So I wanna emphasize something: that it’s completely normal for partners to grieve differently. And I’m not only talking about just a little bit differently, but radically different, right? So we see that one, one partner might actually need to talk more about it while the other doesn’t want to talk about it at all.
Delia: So it’s almost like I, I can’t deal with this. It’s very triggering. Yeah. One partner might cry openly while the other distracts themselves with work and the thing is, none of these approaches are wrong, right? So they’re just different. Pretty much nervous system responses to that overwhelming pain.
Delia: And some people process grief externally by talking and crying and others they internalize that by needing space or time alone.
Delia: But the issue comes, the problem is when we interpret the partner different grief as not caring or being emotionally unavailable to us. So that’s where the conflict comes.
Delia: Yeah. What I usually do with club couples work is instead of, having that perception first try to name it. So have that upward conversation with your partner. Like you can just say, this is what my grief looks like, this is what I need right now, I need to talk about it, or I need to not talk about it.
Delia: So whatever it comes with. One thing that I like to say is that different doesn’t mean less. Yeah. So just because your partner deals with it different doesn’t mean that it’s any less meaningful for them, or that is that any less meaningful in the relationship.
Delia: Another thing that I try to do with couples is to try to create like small micro moments of connection that doesn’t require the same grief.
Delia: So that could be, have a 10 minute check-in either at nighttime or midday or in the morning or whatever feels right. And the most important is to just… what I said earlier that, I like to be curious about, like patterns and things like that. Try to get curious instead of becoming defensive about the partner.
Delia: Yeah. So what I mean by that is try to assume a positive intent, right? So assume that, just because your partner’s grieving differently, that it’s not necessarily that they’re minimizing the loss or they’re not caring about you, or they’re just trying to forget about it. It’s pretty much they’re surviving the only way they know how in the moment.
Delia: And yeah, and that can be powerful, right? Like for couples to see it from a different perspective.
Erin: Yeah. Oh, it’s such a good perspective. And even I think just people hearing that tonight and listening later to hear that, that I’ve been on my own grief journey the last like year or so, but I feel like there’s, yes, naming it and recognizing it is so powerful. And you get this wave of empathy for your partner when you realize oh, that’s grief, actually. Yeah. And I just feel like when you can name it and call it that, what it is, it’s so much easier to be like, oh, it’s, you can act like a jerk because you’re just grieving or whatever, like when, and it’s just, it’s never okay to act like a jerk, but do you know what I mean? Like it’s, there’s a lot more support for your partner when you realize how they’re grieving is not number one, like you said, different to you. But also number two, just that’s their way, so That’s so good. I think that’s really powerful and for people to hear that. So how, let’s go through some of the emotions or challenges parent, like people face when they’ve had especially, a loss, like a stillbirth or a pregnancy loss. So like you, you touched on a couple so for folks who are listening to this one give me tell me what I’m looking for in my partner, like maybe we, so we can call this grief. What are people looking for? What are some of the big emotions and challenges that couples face? That aren’t necessarily talked about openly or, can you give us some example, more examples?
Delia: So one thing that I can tell you, like straight from the top of my head is the resentment, right? Oh yeah. When it comes to, like in couples, right? We have that resentment that either like I said, that the partner doesn’t grieve in the same way that, oh, how come they’re they’re dealing much better with it right now and they can put it behind them, right?
Delia: So it’s like that resentment that can build in the couple, it could also be anger. So a lot of the times we see the, what we call courtesy stigma. So if it’s a male factor in fertility or a female factor, infertility, like when it comes to that loss and that grief, emotions can be so raw and heavy that, like that envy and the resentment can come up from that.
Erin: Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think, it’s like beyond resentment, I think just there’s, I feel like sometimes there’s this constant competition going on where you’re like, trying to not, you’re not like competing with your, with each other, but it’s coming across that way because there’s this I don’t know, I just remember back to my journey and the number of times we looked at each other and we’re like, we’re on the same team. This is us against infertility. I like that. Yep. It’s us against infertility. It’s not like me and you and Howard, it’s no, we’re we chose us first. And infertility unfortunately is getting in the way, but like it’s us against infertility.
Erin: We’re on the same team, but how are we gonna tackle this together?
Delia: No, you have a common enemy, right? The infertility struggle. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what, it’s it, I’m glad that you brought that up, right? Because when we’re thinking about the, how couples and infertility or struggling to conceive, or any losses, it can really put a strain on even like the strongest of relationships.
Delia: But a lot of the times, this can actually create a stronger bond and connection between the partners. Because for a lot of people, this is basically the first most intense life crisis that they had to deal with. Yeah. And that’s what infertility is that life crisis that you just kinda learn.
Delia: How do you cope with it on an individual basis, but then also as a couple.
Erin: That’s what it was for us. And we were like 10 years married almost when we hit infertility. And so it was like, oh my goodness. Like it rocked us. It did. And I think a lot of couples, we hear this on our podcast all the time, like when we get people to tell their stories your relationship might take a hit.
Erin: This is going to be hard. So it’s good for people to, I wish they knew that going into the journey, that this is this is gonna be difficult. So buckle up for sure. Get learn, get your foundation strong. Yeah. Yeah.
Delia: But then you get to learn more about your partner, like and about yourself, like how do you deal with certain stuff, like you, you get to learn about boundaries, you get to learn about so much stuff when it comes to this. Yeah. So there are some silver linings when it comes to this.
Erin: Totally. It doesn’t. It’s true. And if you can see it that way, that’s so key.
Erin: It’s so important. So can you walk us through some of the therapeutic approaches you use when working with clients who are processing infertility, trauma, and loss?
Delia: So basically I use an eclectic and integrative approach because I believe, like meeting clients where they are in the moment. So for someone who has just experienced, for example, an unsuccessful embryo transfer or a negative pregnancy test or a miscarriage, my initial focus would be to go to the somatic and working with the body through the grief because when we’re grieving, our natural impulse is to run away from the pain, right? Because we cannot sit with the heavy, raw emotions. So we try to push it down to suppress what we’re feeling. But the thing is, grief is not just emotional. It lives in our body. So yeah, you might notice that tightness in the chest, that heaviness in the stomach, like that heightened anxiety or kind of an overwhelming sense of unease.
Delia: So I start by creating kind of safety in the body and learning how to stay present with those sensations instead of either running away from them, suppressing them, or avoiding them. And then when clients are ready to process the actual traumatic memories, my go-to modality is Accelerated Resolution Therapy.
Delia: Or A R T. So many of you may have heard of EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement and Desensitization and Reprocessing is such a mouthful every time it’s, I try to say it. And ART works very similarly, so they both use bilateral stimulation and guided eye movements to help the brain reprocess the traumatic memories.
Delia: What I love a lot about ART is that it allows clients to keep the facts of what happened, but the memory’s no longer hijacking their nervous system. So they’re able to remember, like they remember the miscarriage, they remember the, like the moment when they got the phone call or the moment when they went for the ultrasound, they feel the pain, but it doesn’t hijack the nervous system.
Delia: They don’t go into that full panic mode. Therapy is very effective for that kind of like repetitive trauma, the one that we talked about a little bit earlier, right? Yeah. That it’s coming and coming.
Erin: I didn’t even know that was possible, that you could do that to your brain. That’s so amazing.
Erin: Yeah. Cool. Very cool. Especially if there’s something that feels like it is impacting still the day to day ongoing yeah. That’s awesome. So for somebody who’s feeling stuck in their grief and isn’t sure how to move forward what would you recommend for them?
Delia: That’s, wow, what a really good question, right? because we get that feeling of being stuck in this journey a lot. So it’s almost like at every single turn we feel stuck. But when somebody feels stuck in their grief, in this journey, the first thing that I want to do is validate. So feeling stuck isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with them or that something is broken.
Delia: But it’s often, just your nervous system telling you that this loss might require more time and processing than you could have anticipated. And that’s completely normal.
Delia: So that would validate, like normalize the feelings. And then like my first step that I would try to, offer to the clients is to always give yourself permission to just simply be where you are without having any judgment, right?
Delia: Because in this journey, a lot of us we know that we have that self-induced shame or that self-induced anger that I shouldn’t feel this way, I should be stronger. I should be like all the should. Yeah. So a lot of the times it’s just being where you are without judging that, and you don’t need to have all the answers right now.
Delia: And what do we know from trauma research is that our bodies and minds need, actually need time to integrate the loss.
Delia: Yeah. So that’s an important piece of it, right? To give yourself permission to just be where you are.
Erin: Yeah. It’s so hard. It’s like easy to say it’s hard, but it’s so hard to do it actually.
Erin: Especially a lot of type A women out there with infertility, just like trying to control every single step of the way. And it’s so difficult because that you cannot control this. There’s just I don’t know, we talk a lot about like controlling what you can control.
Erin: I sometimes use that as a way to get unstuck. Actually for me, I’ve found like ongoing, the stuck is actually my trigger to like, in everything in my life, if I’m like, I am stuck in this situation or in this moment, in this whatever the case may be. I’m like, this is my trigger. And it puts me back into my, like infertility brain.
Erin: And if I get, if I’m like, if I can’t move forward, it’s the weirdest thing. So I feel like I learned how to unstick myself. Yeah. Controlling the, so I go back to this like coping with infertility, like control what I can control in this moment to get through being stuck.
Delia: So what do you just explain is exactly the hijack that happens.
Erin: Yeah.
Erin: And for me, it’s being stuck. So it’s like in any situation with work or if it’s with a family oh, let’s say I like really wanna plan a vacation, but I’m like I can’t because I have a work project. I don’t know what’s going to be due or whatever. It’s okay, that. That whole not being able to move forward.
Erin: Like I, it makes me feel stuck and then I like have to go, okay, yeah I can plan it, I can know where I wanna go. I can know what I wanna do. And then once I get like past that thing that’s making me stuck, I can then book the trip or whatever. That’s just a silly example. No, but it’s the the being stuck is the trigger.
Erin: So I don’t know if anybody else out there can relate to that.
Delia: Yeah. And you know what you’re describing is some something totally normal. And when, if we’re thinking about, like us as humans, we don’t like uncertainty. We don’t like the unknown. We wanna have the familiar, we wanna be in control of that.
Delia: Because otherwise it just feels scary, right? So it’s almost like how our brain was built, like from an evolutionary perspective, to keep us safe.
Erin: Yeah. It’s so true though that it was built to keep us safe. That’s absolutely.
Delia: I wanted to also mention, so I know I said that give yourself permission to like, to be where you are.
Delia: And I know that feel a little bit, like hard, but it’s like going back to that, validating yourself and naming it for what it feels. But another hardest part of this is, how do you cultivate and how do you practice that self-compassion, which that can feel even more impossible, especially when we’re grieving that.
Delia: But that’s exactly what we need in the moment, right? So I usually encourage clients to write down evidence for their resilience, especially when they feel stuck. So maybe it’s something as simple as, like you really advocated for yourself when a doctor or a nurse minimized your concerns when it’s don’t worry about it.
Delia: It has nothing to worry about. But then meanwhile you just feel it in your body that, hey, this doesn’t feel right. And we know ourselves the most. And or it could also be, like you kept showing up when it felt unbearable, like you wanted to give up, but then you kept on going, right?
Delia: Yeah. Yeah. And and then have them keep that list very obsess with them because that’s really good. We do get those intrusive thoughts, like those negative automatic thoughts. The darkness that comes up and the self blame. So when we have something concrete to like rebattle with those thoughts it can really make a difference.
Erin: Yeah. Oh, that’s so good. And I love that you bring up intrusive thoughts because I feel like if this is going off script again, this is what I do. I’m sorry. I’m a terrible host. I love it. I’m a terrible host. Intrusive thoughts is something that I’ve like really delved into in the last couple years because I never knew how to name them before.
Erin: And then I all of a sudden was like, oh, that’s what that is and this is how I can I can speak to it, I can just let it leave and it doesn’t impact me anymore, but, can you speak about intrusive thoughts, what they are and how they could be relevant to infertility or where they might come in, what some of them examples could be for people so that they can identify and know how to deal with those things.
Erin: Because I feel like learning how to like work with intrusive thoughts, I was, it was, it made my life so much easier. I’m like, oh, that’s just an intrusive thought. You can just right off.
Delia: The thing is, when it comes to intrusive thought, just to put it in, like in easy terms.
Delia: It’s basically, your brain is always gonna focus on something that, like you either keep thinking about, you are worried about, you’re scared about. And it’s gonna keep on repeating that because it thinks Hey, you know what you thought about that. Like what if this or what if that?
Delia: And it thinks that it’s important. So yeah. We’ll bring up and then you go down this crazy wormhole.
Delia: You go down that rabbit hole. Hole, the spiral. Yeah. So it’s pretty much, paying attention because a lot of the times when we keep on having the same thought repetitively, it just becomes so automatic we don’t even realize it.
Delia: So you might have a thought that comes on and all of a sudden you’re like, why am I in a bad mood all of a sudden? And it could be, the thought that you were having, maybe you’re thinking like, maybe I should have tried harder, or maybe, there’s something wrong with me.
Delia: All of those things. There’s just to go a little bit, like deeper into this, do it, we have this area in our brain that is called the default mode network. So it’s our default is whenever you’re not focusing or concentrating on something, your mind starts to focus on yourself. Like it goes internal.
Delia: And for most of us, we have that negativity bias when we’re thinking about ourselves. We’re thinking about what we did in the past that we regret, or that we should have thought, or we’re thinking about the future. What are we scared about? Yeah. So it, it goes hand in hand with that. And most of the time this, the intrusive thoughts are not gonna be about something positive.
Erin: Yeah, no they’re like almost always negative or extreme, I’m never gonna be a mom or I, things like, maybe I’d be a terrible mom, that’s why this isn’t working. Or what did I do in another life to deserve that?
Erin: There’s just so many things that can pop in that, that just, yeah, it’s our body’s way of protecting ourself where we’re like, our brain’s trying to stop us. From feeling and hurting and like working through the emotions.
Delia: It’s trying to make meaning of something that is happening, because we’re always, our brain is always gonna try to make meaning out of it. So if you had a loss or like you’re struggling to conceive or maybe, I, I’m not deserving to be a mom, or maybe I wasn’t gonna be a good mom, or all of these things.
Delia: Protect you from, like future disappointments, if I could say that. Yes. Yeah.
Erin: Yes, a hundred percent. Yeah, I’m just gonna interject here with my snoring bulldog down beside me, my cohost. She’s making an appearance. If anybody hears that, I apologize. She’s doing a good job down there, just sleeping away.
Erin: Okay. That was so good. I love that. I wanna talk a little bit about, how infertility, we talked a bit before about the rollercoaster and how it’s so hard to you go up and down and up and down. It’s this compounding ongoing grief. So can you speak to, because grief with infertility often comes with the cycle: hope, disappointment, hope, disappointment, hope, disappointment. It never finalizes. You never actually get to resolve. And so like you, some people do, especially like if you do have success in the form of a baby, or even if you walk away from fertility journey and decide to be childless not by choice.
Erin: Sometimes that is it. You’re just like, oh the weights lifted off even though you didn’t get to the point that you thought you would with a child. So can you just talk about how can people cope with the ongoing, or we call it rolling grief, so that up and down and up and down and up and down. It’s just so exhausting.
Delia: Yeah. And you know what, this is one of the most emotionally exhausting parts of infertility. Or when we’re conceived, it’s that kind of, that relentless cycle of, hope and devastation, disappointment over and over again. So it’s not a single grief that you’re processing and moving through, but it’s, like something that we often call ambiguous loss or, chronic sorrow.
Delia: Grief doesn’t necessarily have a clear endpoint when it comes to fertility, but comes up again with every negative test, any negative cycle or not an implantation, and this can be so exhausting for someone that like it’s relentlessly trying to control what is happening and like their future. I wanted to say a little bit of what’s happening psychologically when it comes to this role in grief. So yeah. I often refer to Brene Brown’s work on emotions. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her book on, so she does a lot of research on emotions.
Delia: And in her last I don’t know, it might not be the last book, but in one of her latest books Atlas of the Heart, she has a lot of definitions about emotions. So the way she defines disappointment is essentially unmet expectations. And that’s what happens, like with grief and we’re, we’re going through like cycles and it’s not exactly what we’re, what, where we wanna be.
Delia: And what makes infertility so brutal is that the expectations feel both urgent and vague at the same time. Especially for women, like we can have the biological clock ticking. So it’s, it feels so urgent that, oh, I’m 38, I’m 39. I have to like, really push through this without having to think about it.
Delia: So usually when we first. Start to try to get pregnant. Like the expectation is very clear. Like when we don’t know how long it’s gonna take we often think that, oh, if it doesn’t happen in the first month, it’s gonna happen the second month or within a few months.
Delia: But then after we have a negative pregnancy test, after another, after loss, those expectations become so unclear. So you’re basically not even sure what to hope for anymore. So to like counteract this, like disappointment without make expectations, Brene calls this having realistic expectations.
Delia: I like to refer to it as grounded hope, because grounded hope isn’t about lowering your expectations or protecting yourself by expecting the worst happening, like the worst or catastrophizing, but it’s about anchoring your hope in reality. So it’s like kind of her, like her realistic expectation.
Delia: It’s the middle ground between being optimistic and then having complete pessimism, right? Like that complete resignation. And what does that look like, having that grounded hope? It’s pretty much being honest with yourself about the numbers, about the statistics, about your specific diagnosis, right?
Delia: So if you have a diagnosis of diminished ovarian reserve, for example your first IVF cycle might not have as many eggs, egg follicles, right? So it’s almost like being honest about what you’re expecting or about what your body has been through, right? Like maybe you need a break and things like that.
Erin: Yeah.
Erin: Yeah. That’s so good. So even naming or expectations before going into a retrieval before going into, might help alleviate some disappointment. Is that a would that be an appropriate way to navigate and wanted to give tangible tools people can do to help maybe eliminate some of the lost hope cycle rollercoaster.
Delia: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So it’s pretty much saying, okay, I know this embryo transfer has a 40% success rate. I’m going to hope it works. Obviously we always hope that it’s gonna work. But I’m also going to have a plan for it if it doesn’t.
Delia: So it’s almost don’t we don’t go in and we’re like trying to like hope for that desperation that we have. To have to keep it in balance. So it’s good to ask yourself, what am I expecting here? When it comes to that, is my expectation based on reality?
Delia: Or is based on what I desperately want to be true. Because a lot of the times that’s what we focus on the most.
Erin: Yes. And I always found like going into a, like a test, like the beta test or going into a retrieval or I would always have a plan. What I was gonna do like that night if it was positive or it was a negative, or if it was this or that, so that I could get excited about either plan.
Erin: Okay. If this is positive, we’re gonna do this and celebrate, but if it’s negative, I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna be okay. You’re like, like having some plans in advance so that I knew it wasn’t gonna just, hit me. Also take some space for grief when you need to, but I found that helped me.
Delia: For sure. That you bring a really good point with that. Yeah. And I would also wanna add that it’s also important to find ways to to experience hope and joy outside of the fertility journey, even if that sounds impossible, because we tend to have our whole identity surrounded about this. Yes.
Delia: Everything is about this, like every if we’re thinking about taking a vacation and we’re thinking like, hold on a second, am I gonna have to go do a, an egg retrieval at that time? Or do I have to do an embryo transfer?
Delia: So we plan everything around that.
Erin: Yeah, it’s so true.
Erin: It’s so true. We do, and it’s like all consuming, it’s taking over our whole life because of that. You can’t like plan ahead because of what if, yeah.
Delia: Wanted to say that a lot of my clients, they every time I bring this up they they usually think that it’s a distraction from, from what I’m going to, but I usually try to reframe it that, this is, you’re surviving the in-between, right?
Delia: Yeah. because to be able to have that, that resilience. . Get knocked down and you get back in by by whatever way necessary.
Erin: Yeah. And you mentioned a good point, and I think we can speak this what’s wrong with the distraction?
Erin: Distract yourself. Like we, I tell people that all the time in their two week wait. You’ve got all this time to you’re just worrying. Distract yourself. Go do something fun, plan something, do a puzzle, do a whatever, distract yourself so that you’re not just living in the worry and the pain and the unknown, like distract. There’s nothing wrong with doing that.
Delia: But it’s hard to distract yourself. because going back to that, like that default mode, like the moment you’re not doing anything and like it keeps coming back.
Erin: I used to say when I would get a transfer or do an IUI just, I’m going to sleep, wake me up in 15 days when we know, or we don’t know.
Erin: I just, I don’t wanna, I just wanna sleep for the next couple weeks. I never obviously could or whatever, but it’s just that feeling. I just need to get to the end. So whatever we need to do. We just find the coping strategy. Don’t sleep through the two weeks, but just find the coping strategies.
Delia: And you’re right. because if we don’t have that distraction, if you’re doing nothing, that’s all you’re gonna be thinking about is oh wait, is that twinge? Oh, does that mean it’s implantation? That is that? Yes. Oh my gosh.
Erin: We drive ourselves crazy with the signs and with, oh, last time it was this and it’s using Dr. Google. Oh yeah. Now Chat GPT right now we’re into all the ai it’s beyond Dr. Google. It’s read my test results.
Delia: I know for Chat GPT it can really offer that reassurance sometimes for clients. It’s true. True. Yeah. When it’s almost instead of calling your doctor or, like going on Google it, you get instant, reassurance and validation from for Chat GPT.
Erin: It’s a wild tool. I’m not gonna lie. I love it.
Delia: I have a love hate relationship with it.
Erin: I get it. Yeah. That’s so funny. You did touch on ambiguous loss before, so I’d love to hear more thoughts on that. And how does that concept apply to infertility and reproductive challenges?
Delia: Yeah, so basically when it comes to I’m gonna talk about who developed the ambiguous loss, like who, who came up with this term, like Dr. Boss, like Dr. Pauline Boss. So basically she describes a type of grief like that is ambiguous, that lacks clarity, that lacks closure, or that it lacks that social recognition.
Delia: But she was talking about two different types. So it’s the loss without debt, or the loss without leaving. But I find that infertility has its own category of ambiguous loss. Yeah. Because when you’re experiencing infertility, you’re grieving someone that never existed in a tangible way, but who absolutely existed to you, right?
Delia: Yeah. Like in your imagination or like your dreams, right? So you’re grieving the baby. Imagine the family that you planned, you’re grieving the version of yourself that you thought you’d become. Is real loss. But because there’s no body, there’s no funeral, no socially recognized ritual, the world doesn’t know how to hold space for it.
Delia: Yeah. So people don’t bring meals, they don’t send flowers, they don’t ask how you’re doing a few months later. So there’s this kind of ambiguity of not knowing if this is permanent.
Erin: Yeah. Oh my gosh, that’s so powerful. Because it’s so true. It’s so true. They don’t, people don’t know, they, the world does not know our families don’t know what to do.
Erin: I know even in our infertility community, we show up for each other when we know someone’s going through loss. But it’s because we can directly connect to the pain, directly connect to the heart.
Delia: Because we’ve been through it, like we know exactly first how it happens. But a lot of people, like they don’t know how to react to this.
Delia: So it’s not that they have a bad intention or ill intent for that, but it’s that, in general, people don’t know how to sit with, hard emotions. I know. But when it comes to, like typical grief, there’s that finality aspect of it and people know exactly what to do. They have the steps, but not with this.
Erin: Yeah, and there’s so much toxic positivity with this because it’s oh, at least you got pregnant.
Erin: Oh, at least if a sentence starts with at least you should just stop talking. Yeah. There’s so many things people try and they try, but I’ve said to the women in my group before, nobody would ever say, if your husband died, nobody would ever be like, at least there’s another man out there for you somewhere.
Erin: Yeah. At least you can, you know you can find a man. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just bananas that like people think it’s okay to speak about infertility in this way. For sure. Yeah. And with these specific statements. But every time I hear another shocking thing that somebody says, I try and frame it in the way of if that was your partner that died or something.
Erin: Serious. Like that you would never say that to a person. So don’t say it to somebody who’s experiencing infertility or has experienced a loss of life or loss. Sure, yeah. Anything like that, it’s all like grief.
Delia: That can be very painful. But the way I like to look at this is that I.
Delia: Tend to think that people have good intentions, right? When it comes to any control. But when it comes to this, a lot of the time, it’s almost like when you see someone that you care about that they’re suffering or that they’re struggling, it’s almost like our brain switches into that problem solving mode, and it’s almost, you are trying to cheer them up somehow, like you’re trying to solve the problem.
Delia: Oh, hey, at least good news, like you can get pregnant again. Yeah. But they don’t realize like how, because what it what they’re trying to say might mean something different, but what it means to the person hearing it is you know what? Your feelings are not valid.
Delia: You should move faster through this. You shouldn’t care about this. You’re exaggerating it, right? Yeah, it can feel very invalidating, can be painful.
Erin: That’s such a good perspective and you’re so positive. And I think you’re absolutely right. There’s, I don’t think Ill intention when our family members or our best friends are saying those things, but it would be good if we could help to train the world on this ambiguous loss, it’s issue, so we’ll try, we’ll do it in a really nice way. Not that you’re in way.
Delia: I usually say that for people that don’t know how to react, just, just say that, if you dunno what to say, just say that, Hey, I don’t know what you are going through; it must be really hard.
Delia: I just dunno what to do. What do you need from me? So you don’t have to go into that problem solving mode. You can just ask for the person needs.
Erin: I’ve been in experiences in my own life where I don’t, somebody’s going through something I’ve never been through. And I don’t know what to say or what to do, and it’s all I can offer is, I’m so sorry.
Erin: I am so sorry you’re going through that. Can I sit with you in the dark? Can I sit with you? Can we just, can I come alongside you? What, what do you need? You don’t know. Okay. I don’t know either. So let’s just be in that space together. Or something because it’s so hard to know.
Erin: Oh my gosh. We’re getting close to the end of this episode. It’s gone so fast. I was telling you, I think we can have at least two hours just talking over and over. Oh, i’m gonna have to ask you one last question and then we’re going to, I want people to know where they can find you. But finally, what would, what message would you wanna leave with someone who’s grieving after loss, or struggling with infertility right now?
Delia: I’m gonna leave you with a question instead of like an advice. So if you’re finding yourself in the thick of this right now you’re right on the maze of infertility. And I’m gonna leave you with a question that might not be necessarily for right now, maybe not for months or years, or it could even be for right now, but eventually I want you to ask yourself, what am I learning about myself through this, right?
Delia: And through this, I don’t mean it in any, when, find your silver lining kind of way, but generally ask yourself, what are you discovering about yourself? Going back to, like being curious about yourself, about your patterns. But maybe you can ask what have you noticed about how you can handle when you thought you can’t handle anymore?
Delia: What do you need from people around you when you’re going through a hard time? Or what did you learn about how you grieve, how you cope, and how you keep going, right? Yeah. Because whether you wanted this or not, this is actually teaching you things.
Erin: Yeah, honestly, like self-awareness, it can be a really hard journey because it’s very confronting to learn about yourself and know who you are, like in the depths of your core of who you are.
Erin: But it’s actually, in my experience, the most freeing thing you can actually experience because you learn to value who you are. You learn to love who you are. You learn to be confident in who you are, the more you learn about yourself and become self-aware. So this is such good advice because I think if, especially on this journey, if you can learn about how you’re coping and how you’re dealing, you’ll have so much more grace for yourself.
Erin: You’ll have so much more empathy for yourself. Just like you would for your best friend. Just like you would for your mother if she was going through this or your, anybody in your life that you love. That’s great advice. Thank you. Yeah, for sure.
Delia: Because otherwise you just go on automatic pilot, right?
Delia: If you don’t become aware, if you don’t, if you’re not aware of that,
Erin: Yeah, totally.
Erin: So good. Thank you so much. You’ve given us so much wisdom and compassion tonight. And thank you for the incredible work that you do supporting families in all of these vulnerable times of moment.
Erin: I wanna get you to tell you, tell us all about where people can find you, but before I do that, the first place they’re gonna find you and we did this episode tonight for a reason because next weekend is the Canadian Fertility Show. So if you don’t have tickets yet, you need to get there.
Erin: Delia is gonna be there on the stage talking about this. Why don’t you tell people a little bit about your talk. You wanna go to Canadian Fertility Show.ca you can get tickets, and we actually have an Oasis code, which I’m gonna put on the screen while you tell us a little bit about the talk that you’re gonna do at the show next week.
Delia: Yeah. Thank you. And first of all, I wanted to say thank you for having me tonight. This was a pleasure. Like I love talking about this. So I will be at the Canadian Fertility Show. I will have a booth there. You can find me at booth number one. You can come by, grab one of our swag bags and some resources and I will also have a speech where I’m talking about the infertility maze and the trauma behind it.
Delia: So I think there’s gonna be a lot of more information there that I can give compared to tonight. Oh, that’s gonna be so good. Yeah. Yeah. And people can find me, so I do have a group practice called Get Reconnected Psychotherapy Services. So you can find me @ getreconnected.ca. I’m on all platforms, Instagram, Facebook, and you can also find me on Instagram as Fertility with Delia.
Delia: Okay. So I have that as a little bit of a separate for just fertility stuff.
Erin: Yes. Amazing. So Get Reconnected. That’s where you can find Delia. You do couples, you do individual. This is very exciting for our community. Cannot wait to see you next weekend and give you a hug in person to say Thank you for coming on the live tonight.
Erin: Looking forward to that, and then everybody. Yes, that’s October 18th. We’re in 2025. If you’re listening to this in like 2028, please ignore this part of the episode. But October 18th, if you are listening to it in 2028, there’s probably another fertility show coming up. We’re probably all gonna be there, so get your butts there.
Erin: It’s at the Western Harbor Castle in Toronto. It’s gonna be an amazing day. You do not wanna miss this. So thank you so much. We will be back next week. Marissa will be back next week hosting our episode of Fertility Village Live. I think we’re gonna be showing some fertility books and featuring some authors who’ve written, actually no I apologize.
Erin: That’s in two weeks. Next week we’ve got Kaylee and Sarah and they’re going to be talking about resources for pregnancy and infant loss. So definitely show up. You’re gonna wanna hear from them. Okay, thanks everybody. We’re two minutes over time. Thanks everybody for tuning in tonight. If you’re here and if you’re listening later, wherever you are in your journey today, you’re not alone and you don’t have to walk this path alone, Oasis, FSN if you wanna join a support group and then we’ll see you back another time for an awesome conversation.
Erin: Goodnight. Thanks again, Delia. Nice. Great to see you.
