Welcome to IVF This, episode 150 IVF and Time doesn’t heal

I am so humbled that I just said the number 150- that is absolute insanity to me! 

150 podcast episodes. 150 pieces of original content. I just looked at my podcast stats and we are JUST under 150K unique downloads. Absolutely astonishing to me. So thank you! If you’re listening to this episode the day it drops or if you are listening to this in three years, thank you! Thank you for the listening, thank you for sharing, thank you for being here! 

A huge, massive, the biggest of shoutouts to my producer Anthony. Aside from me, this wonderful human is the reason this podcast exists. The first time I spoke to Anthony was in like August’ish of 2020. I had this idea of a podcast and I had reached out to some people that I had been referred to and they weren’t accepting new clients and in a wonderfully serendipitous way, I met Anthony. Now, I want you to stay with me through this timeline bc I think it will give you some idea of how instrumental he has been in the podcast. I met him, well in a COVID time spoke to him, in August and we talked about my vision for the podcast and logistical stuff. And then I pretty much ghosted him for 6’ish weeks. I was absolutely terrified, and so I ran and hid. And then in October, I located my big girl pants and, I talked with him again, bought my equipment, and started recording. The first episode didn’t drop until November. And he has proven time and time again to be as patient with me as that first few months. I couldn’t do this podcast without him and I get so much satisfaction thinking about him having to edit all of this praise and how uncomfortable he likely is and I’m grinning like the Cheshire cat. 

Ok, onwards. So I have usually kept the 50’s episodes to more personal stuff- at 50 I interviewed my best friend Rachel and talked about our friendship and how we navigated our own infertility and IVF journeys. Episode 100 was an interview that I did with my love, my husband and I talking about our journey. And so today will be similar but just with me. 

And what I want to talk about today is how life after infertility and IVF looks. Now, I want ot acknowledge right off the bat that I have had, by all accounts, remarkable IVF success throughout our infertility journey. We got pregnant spontaneously with our oldest, who will be 10 in August, we did two stim cycles and 3 transfers, of which 2 were successful- our 6 and a half year old and our, very nearly two year old. In fact, she’ll be two in a couple of weeks. That does not mean we haven’t struggled- I’m very open about that, but as I talk about a post-IVF, post family planning life, I want to acknowledge that my success is not shared by many of you- even though I wish to God it would be. 

So, to set the stage, around 9 months ago, I had an endometrial ablation.  I had had over a year of weird periods and hormone and I decided to do that- then over the past eh, I’d say like 4-5 months I have really thought I am in Perimenopause- shout out to the single ovary that was already in premature ovarian insufficiency. So there’s not one single test they can run to say, Yup, you’re perimenopausal but I have a lot of the symptoms. And so I was talking to a few friends of mine, we were all kind of sharing what’s been going on and one of them, by everyone’s surprise, including her own, she was pregnant. She’s in her early 40’s and honestly, this family has had some of the roughest 3 years for their family, so it was a surprise but celebrated by all!

But when I came home and I was kind of reflecting back, even with that announcement, after having gone through an ablation and seeing some glaring symptoms of perimenopause, even when neither my husband nor I want anymore children, and knowing the horror this family has faced in the past 3 years, I still felt that twinge of pain. That old familiar twinge that happened when I would see a pregnancy or a birth announcement or something like that. Like it wasn’t AS painful, it didn’t evoke anywhere near the emotion that it had previously, but it wasn’t nothing. And just like I tell all of you, regularly, two things can be true at once, I can feel tremendous joy for them and tremendous sadness for me. And this wasn’t sadness, per se, I think it was more like emotional muscle memory. Ya know? And I remember Rachel, my best friend, and I talking about the same thing- so I know it’s not just me! Like I am nearly two years removed from it, three years from my last IVF cycle and those feelings, those pangs or twinges, that heartache still hits me. I remember it all so vividly- it feels like it was both yesterday and decades ago. 

And so I was thinking about this a lot and then, scrolling social media, as one does, I came across an infertility/motherhood “influencer” that talked about something similar and that “time heals all wounds” and it just made my skin crawl. 

And so when I was thinking about this episode, another 50 in the can, I wanted to talk a little bit about why you might experience that similar pang, even when you have everything you always wanted in front of you, and that that’s not a bad thing. 

So you know I love some myth-busting so I am going to talk about why “Time Heals All Wounds” can actually be very detrimental to someone going through trauma or pain, and what time’s actual role is in healing. 

So let’s start with why “time heals all wounds” is a relatively common phrase that is often attributed to Greek poet Menander that lived in 300 bc, who wrote, “Time is the healer of all necessary evils.” And it has been used throughout literature since then. And like a lot of things said to people experiencing any type of grief (breakups, death, infertility, illness- no one is immune to this) we can understand why it seems like a great phrase, or that it holds some universal truth. Like about the phrase that is rage-inducing, “Stay positive.” Like you understand why it’s a commonly used phrase in the infertility/ IVF world, but it doesn’t mean it cannot be harmful.

It's so convenient to just say time heals. It feels so comforting to just imagine that all we have to do is wait for time to pass, and we will feel better. And I get why we say it. I get that we don't want to feel bad and we're looking for ways to feel better. And so it feels good to think that all we have to do is just wait for time to pass. We have confidence that time will pass. If all that needs to happen is that time needs to pass and then we're going to feel better, don't we want to get behind that? 

I get why we get behind that, I'm all for that. I understand it. And it's been used in self-help for decades. And yet we know that if all that needed to happen was for time to pass then we would all make the exact amount of ‘progress’. We'd all be in the same place simply because time had passed and that is not the case. We can look around and see different people in different amounts of time since their loss, or whatever their situation, and they are in different places. So it can't be as simple as we just need time to heal. It's just not that simple, but we understand, it feels good to say it. It's got a nice long history. There's some quotes about it if you go to the interwebs but it's just not that accurate. And I would propose that it can honestly do a little bit of damage. Now, not always, again, it's nuanced, it's complicated. 

But when we believe time heals, what we end up doing in grief often is white knuckling the whole experience, it's just resisting it. We try to get away from all of the feelings because we're just trying to bide time. We end up using coping mechanisms that maybe help us in the short term but create something we don't necessarily want in the long term. So maybe we just keep ourselves super busy so that we are distracted, because we think time will just pass and that's all we have to do is stay busy. I heard that so many times. 

My husband lost both of his parents by the time he was 41, his father we lost very suddenly and very unexpectedly and I remember so clearly at the viewing, people would tell us, “Just stay busy, distract yourself” etc based on that idea of time healing.

After out transfer that failed, in summer 2020, I had so many people reaching out with messages of support and love and several of them had some variation of the whole, “Give yourself time, time will heal, throw yourself into your work, etc.” As if you distract yourself enough that would somehow solve for the grief I was experiencing. And this isn’t putting anyone on blast or anything, but if that is the general or cultural belief around managing grief or loss is to distract yourself- IDK about you but some of us eat to distract ourselves, some of us shop to distract ourselves from our feelings. We have a lot of ways we can distract ourselves from our feelings- so it’s not that distracting ourselves is wrong or bad, it’s just that sometimes those distraction techniques can create consequences that we don’t want. 

This actually happens a lot, or at least this is my hypothesis, when we go back-to-back-to-back cycles, stim or transfer, to avoid the hurt. Like that’s not the ONLY reason that we do that, but it’s a very physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially taxing experience and one of the consequences is that we don’t give ourselves time to process what we have gone through and continue to go through. Thinking if we can just get to the next thing, we will get to feel better. 

Again, it's not wrong, it just can create consequences that maybe we don't want. I like to think about it like a beach ball, too, my teacher, Brooke Castillo teaches it this way, which is when we're trying to avoid emotion it's like shoving a beach ball under the water. You can do it temporarily. It takes a lot of energy and effort. You can do it, but also eventually you get tired. And when you finally get tired and let go, the beach ball will come up with great force and perhaps smack into you. And a lot of us are doing that unnecessarily because we're believing time will heal. 

And so, when we believe that time heals, it can make us a little lmore passive than we might want to be. It can make us advocate less for the kind of support that we want, than we might otherwise be if we didn't believe time healed. 

If we fully just believed, I'm responsible for getting myself where I want to be now that this loss has happened and time is not going to do that for me. We might be a little more assertive in how we advocate for ourselves in whatever that means for us, different resources for different people. But if all we think is just, I’ve just got to lay low until time passes, it makes us a little more passive. It makes us a bystander in our own healing. Like if time is the main thing working, then we’re not owning our part in our healing. 

You've heard me probably talk about the dual process model of grief, distraction, immersion. But it's worth bringing up again here because if we understand it, we can use it to our advantage. If we don't and we're buying into the myth that time heals, then we can lean a little bit too much into distraction. So dual process theory of grief teaches that there's essentially two buckets of activity. So there's grief related activity and there's non-grief related activity. So the ‘work of grief’ and respite, things unrelated to grief. And so oftentimes we think well, I've got to do all the work of grief. 

Or we fall into the other binary of, I just need to let time heal and just distract myself as time does something magical. And really, neither one is all that useful. Forcing ourselves to only do the work of grief and then also going into the binary where we're just avoiding and waiting for time to pass isn't what the dual process model teaches, helps us. What the dual process model of grief teaches is that it's the back and forth that helps us. It's the doing the work of our grief, thinking about our loss, coming to terms with it, doing the stuff related to the loss. 

And then also distracting ourselves, so it's immersing and distracting, and immersing and distracting. Netflix binges are distracting. Getting outside, gardening, doing things unrelated to your loss, hobbies, anything unrelated, living life, back and forth, back and forth. If we're believing time heals then we tend to drift too far into distraction, too far into the respite bucket. When what we really want to do is go back and forth, back and forth. 

So that's why I think we say this time heals thing, makes us feel better. We've been saying it that way for eons, since Greek philosophers. And why I think it's not helpful for us to say, it actually makes us white knuckle. It makes us less likely to learn how to feel our feelings. It makes us more passive than we might want to be, less able to advocate for ourselves. It might have us drifting too far into distraction when we really want to be going back and forth, dealing with the grief, avoiding it, back and forth, back and forth. 

What I really want to question though, is a word we don't often question, which is healing. What does that even mean? Have you ever thought about that? Sometimes I like to question words that we just throw around commonly because we don't all have the same definition of what that means, healing. So I wonder what your definition of healing is. Have you ever considered it? You can stop, if you want to stop and consider it before I tell you mine, you can but I'm about to tell you mine. 

I think typically what people think of when they think of healing is they relate to healing as though it means something happens like you get a cut. And then you get stitches on that cut and then that part of your body is no longer wounded. It's like it didn't happen. Something broke, we fixed it and now it's like it was before. But I don't think that's a useful definition of healing. I don't think healing is really equivalent to the same as it was before, especially when it comes to grief and loss. We for sure are not ever going to be the same as we were before infertility and IVF. 

That doesn't mean we aren't going to be happy. That doesn't mean we can't love life again. That just means we're always changing and we're always different after things happen in our lives. It's just the way it is to be a human. And really honestly would we want to not be changed by this experience? No, probably not. So the way that I want to encourage us to think about healing is I want us to use the word integration. 

Let's use healing and integration as equivalent words, which means we're not going to be the same as we were before but we are going to decide on purpose what we want to think of what happened, what we want to think about our future, who we want to be given what happened, how we want to live, considering what happened. We do get to take what happened and like a new color of thread in a tapestry, weave it into the fabric of our lives. 

We decide what we want to take that information and make it mean in our lives. We decide how to integrate this life experience into the broader life that we are cultivating and creating for ourselves. Are we going to live more aligned with certain values? Are we going to make changes? What do we want for ourselves? What's our new way of being in the world? That’s what we do, that's integration. 

Now I want to talk about very quickly, the real role of time in grief. Mary-Frances O'Connor, wrote The Grieving Brain. It’s a fantastic book, if you’re interested in the topic.  And to put a long story short, essentially what's happening as time passes is that our brain is learning and updating. Our brain has encoded the we-ness of our situation, the we-ness of our identity. So if we think about this in terms of infertility, our brain spent a lot of time imagining what our lives would look like and how our family would look. Now, this happens on a very subconscious level but what began as imagining morphed into expectations. And our brains code that expectation as certainty- like it’s kind of a pseudo certainty bc we intellectually know there is no certainty, but it still feels certain. 

So, as we go through this journey and we have losses, disappointments, heartbreak and the family in our minds feels further and further away, our brain has to try to integrate and recode our experiences. But we still have those expectations back there in the back of our mind, and there is still that yearning that we have for our family. But what time does, is that even though we are yearning and heartbroken, even while we’re still on that particular journey or path- our brain is continually learning and integrating and re-coding. And THAT’S the role of time. 

But DURING all of this, we can learn how to support ourselves. New skills and supports to help us throughout our time on this Gawd forsaken ride, that extend even after. And that’s the point. Most of us, I know I did this, I languished for YEARS, especially those first few years, of our journey. I felt that longing so strongly. It wasn’t until I took a really close look at my life that I saw I could be doing something during this time. OFC what I wanted to be doing was making, growing, and raising babies. But, it didn’t mean my time was wasted if that’s NOT what I was doing. I could still care for myself and be loving and present to my husband and the children I came to have. 

So to say it succinctly, it's nuanced, it's complicated. To say that time heals is to oversimplify grief in a way that doesn't help. It is inaccurate. Grief isn't simple, it's actually quite messy and more than time passing needs to happen for us to decide what we want to do and who we want to be. So let's stop saying time heals, please, let's stop saying that. 

Because it makes it seem like you’re not doing work to better yourself, and you ARE. Give yourself the credit for what you do and what you are learning and what you are applying. Give yourself all the credit because you’re doing an amazing job navigating a really hard situation. 

Ok, that is what I have for you this week. Have a great one and I’ll talk to you soon.