As a marriage and couples counselor, I have extensive experience helping individuals and couples with distress and anxiety caused by fertility, pregnancy and postpartum issues. Prolonged infertility is like dealing with cancer, chronic pain and HIV. When infertility takes over your life, it’s time to consider seeking an experienced counseling professional.Do you?
- struggle to cover up issues
- avoid socializing with friends, associates and family who have infants or children
- worry and feel despondent at the end of every menstrual cycle
- feel victimized by infertility
- feel inadequate
- argue more
- avoid making love as opposed to having sex
I work with the infertility physician as a team. The process not only goes more smoothly, but your relationship can be strengthened by increased empathy and improved intimacy and communication skills.
I’m a psychoanalytically oriented couple’s therapist and can simultaneously develop individual growth and facilitate the evolution of your bonding and parenting process. I help contain and normalize difficult feelings and teach coping skills.
The infertility ordeal can be transformed to shared experience that helps you grow individually and together.
You can acquire intimate understanding of each other and learn empathy and relationship skills that you will utilize in parenting.
Prolonged infertility can cause unbearable stress on your relationship. Family pressures to start a family can add to the stress in family systems seem to demand grandchildren. The stress of infertility can also affect the your sex life: Depression and anxiety about conceiving can destroy the pleasure and intimacy of love making. Sometimes the couple are conflict avoidant and unable to soothe each other in their pain.
Couples who opt for fertility treatment also experience fear and anxiety, especially when repeated procedures extend over long periods of time. Some couples feel self-conscious and ashamed about needing medical help to conceive. I can facilitate communication and help you manage misconceptions and fears about infertility treatment.
Infertility causes regression in the individual and the couple.
Prolonged infertility can cause shame, anxiety, sadness and envy.
Infertility treatment can stimulate chaotic primitive states related to the quality of attunement with the couple’s individual family system.
Feelings of inadequacy and resistance to adult responsibilities can polarize couples
Core couple’s issues related to fear of abandonment and fear of engulfment are exacerbated as the birth date advances.
Depending on your unique intimacy style, I can assess and treat sexual and closeness issues that arise during the pregnancy. Fears of abandonment and fears of closeness often become exacerbated as the delivery date approaches, especially for first time parents.
I offer a free 15-min confidential consultation so you can see if I am the right therapist for your fertility, pregnancy and postpartum concerns. I am easy to discuss what brings you to counseling at this time and explore out fit because the relationship with the therapist is the most important treatment factor. Contact me today!