Hello, hello, hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome back to the IVF This podcast.

Before I get into today’s topic, I just want to take a second and say— I am so glad you’re here. Whether you’ve been listening since episode eight or you stumbled across this today, welcome. This community, you guys, you are what keeps this going.

Okay. Today we are going to talk about something that doesn’t get named very often in the infertility space, but I promise you, if you’ve been on this journey for any length of time, you have felt it. Maybe you just didn’t have a word for it.

We’re talking about survivor’s guilt. And I know that phrase probably conjures something specific for most people—someone died, and you’re the one still here, and somehow that feels like your fault. That’s the version most of us know. But today I want to take that concept and bring it somewhere a little closer to home for us, because I think it is happening in the IVF community all the time—we just haven’t been calling it that.

And I know when I say “survivor’s guilt,” some of you are immediately thinking, “oh, that’s not me” or “that sounds dramatic.” So let me tell you what I mean, and then you tell me if it doesn’t sound familiar.

You get the positive pregnancy test. And instead of feeling purely, unambiguously happy—you feel this weight. Because your best friend is still cycling. Or your group chat is still full of people waiting on results. And the joy feels… complicated.

Or flip it. Your friend gets her positive and you are genuinely happy for her. And also you are devastated for yourself. And then you feel guilty for the devastation. Because what kind of person feels bad when their friend gets good news?

That is how survivor’s guilt can look in IVF. And it shows up more than I think we recognize or acknowledge.

So today I’m going to break this down for you. Where it comes from—including what’s actually happening in your brain. How it shows up in the IVF community specifically. What it is NOT. And how to hold it in a way that doesn’t either eat you alive or keep you from feeling anything at all.

Let’s get into it.

Survivor’s guilt originally comes from trauma research. It was first documented in war veterans and disaster survivors—people who lived through events where others didn’t. And the core experience is this:

“Why did I get to survive when someone else didn’t?”

Now, here’s the thing I want you to hold on to: it is not logical. It was never supposed to be logical. Survivor’s guilt isn’t about math or fairness—even though it feels very much like it’s about fairness. It’s relational. It’s about belonging.

Humans are deeply, deeply wired to organize themselves in groups. We track where we stand in relation to the people around us. So when outcomes within a group diverge—when some people get the thing, and others don’t—the brain doesn’t just notice. It tries to resolve it. It looks for an explanation. And in the absence of one that makes sense, it turns the discomfort inward.

That’s the seed of survivor’s guilt.

Okay, now, I love a science layer, so let’s talk about what’s actually happening in your brain when this comes up.

Your social comparison network is always running.

There are areas of your brain specifically devoted to tracking fairness, belonging, and where you stand relative to the people around you. They are constantly taking in information about how your experience compares to someone else’s. And when there’s moral incongruence—when someone is suffering while you’re doing well—those areas fire. That uncomfortable feeling? That’s not a character flaw. That’s your brain doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Your empathy circuitry is working overtime.

Your brain has empathy circuitry that literally allows you to feel other people’s pain—not as a concept, but as a physical experience. So when you have a close friend who is still struggling with infertility while you’re pregnant, your nervous system is registering her pain. Not metaphorically. Actually. Which is part of why celebrating can feel physically unsafe. Your body is holding two things at once and doesn’t quite know what to do with that.

Your fairness instinct is being triggered.

Humans have a deeply hardwired sense of fairness. And here’s the wild thing: that instinct fires even when the outcome is good for us. When something feels unfair—even in our favor—the brain flags it. Which is where thoughts like “I don’t deserve this” or “it should have been her” come from.

So if you’ve ever wondered why you can’t just be happy—this is why. You’re not broken. You’re wired.

I want to break this down into a few different versions of how this can look, because it doesn’t look the same for everyone.

Version one: You’re the one who got pregnant.

You get the positive test. And instead of just feeling happy, you start managing everyone else’s feelings before you even allow yourself to feel your own. You think twice before posting. You soften your language. You check in with your friends who are still in it before you share anything. You minimize your excitement, almost like if you feel it too big, it’ll be an act of cruelty toward the people still waiting.

You are shrinking your joy to stay emotionally aligned with your community.

And I want to say something very direct here: that impulse—the wanting to protect people, the empathy that makes you even think about this—that is beautiful. AND it can become a trap. Because you cannot sustain your relationship with your own experience by permanently editing it around everyone else’s.

Version two: You’re the one still struggling.

And here is where it gets interesting—because survivor’s guilt has a flip side that not enough people talk about.

Sometimes the person still in IVF feels guilty toward the person who succeeded.

You feel jealous—which you are allowed to feel—and then immediately you feel guilty about the jealousy. “I should be happier for her.” “What kind of friend am I?” “She worked so hard for this, and here I am making it about me.”

So now both people feel guilty. The pregnant one feels guilty for being pregnant. The one still cycling feels guilty for not being able to fully celebrate. And nobody is actually talking to each other about any of it.

No one wins. And the relationship—the very thing that could hold both people—starts to strain under the weight of what no one is saying.

Version three: The community container.

This is something I see a lot in group chats, support groups, and online communities. One person gets pregnant. Another has a failed transfer. Another is waiting on results. And the emotional landscape becomes incredibly complicated to navigate.

The person with good news doesn’t know whether to share. The person with bad news doesn’t want to take away from someone else’s joy. Everyone is managing everyone else’s experience, and in the middle of all that management, nobody is actually getting supported.

Okay, I need to say this clearly.

Survivor’s guilt does not mean you are ungrateful.

It does not mean you are selfish.

It does not mean you are a bad friend.

It does not mean you lack empathy.

In fact—and I really want you to hear this—it means the opposite.

It means your empathy system is highly active. It means your brain is working hard to stay connected to the people who are still suffering. It means you care deeply about fairness and about the people walking this road with you.

The presence of survivor’s guilt is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It is evidence that you are a person who gives a damn.

Here’s where I want to get real with you for a second.

Survivor’s guilt, left unchecked, leads to emotional self-punishment. And it happens in very specific, very sneaky ways.

People start trying to “even the scales.” They minimize their joy. They hide good news. They emotionally shrink themselves. They refuse to celebrate milestones because celebrating feels like a betrayal of someone else’s pain.

But here is what I need you to understand: that doesn’t actually help anyone.

Your suffering does not reduce their suffering. You holding yourself back from joy does not make their journey easier. It just adds more pain to the system. And at some point it starts to look less like empathy and more like a punishment you’re assigning yourself for something you didn’t do.

Think about it like this. If your friend got pregnant and you were still cycling—would you want her to hide it? Would you want her to feel guilty? Would you want her to shrink her joy so that you could feel less alone in yours?

Most people, when they really sit with that question, say no. Because we don’t want that for people we love.

Which means we also probably need to stop doing it to ourselves.

Okay. So what do we actually do with this?

The goal is not to eliminate survivor’s guilt. I don’t think that’s realistic, and honestly I’m not sure it’s even the right goal. The goal is to expand your emotional capacity so that you can hold more than one thing at a time.

Grief for someone else’s pain. And gratitude for your own outcome.

Joy at your positive result. And sadness that your friend is still waiting.

These are not opposites. They are not in conflict. They can exist in the same body, in the same moment. That is not emotional contradiction. That is emotional maturity.

It’s not betrayal. It’s complexity.

And I also want to offer you this reframe: your joy does not steal from someone else’s chances.

IVF is not a finite pie. Someone else getting pregnant doesn’t reduce your probability. Your pregnancy doesn’t reduce theirs. This isn’t a competition, even though it can feel like one when you are all in the same waiting room emotionally.

I’ll offer a few things that can actually help here.

First: Name it.

Just saying to yourself, “I think I’m feeling survivor’s guilt” can do something really significant for your nervous system. Naming reduces the shame spiral. It interrupts the loop. You go from “I’m a terrible person” to “this is a thing that happens, and it’s happening to me right now.” That shift matters.

Second: Allow for emotional complexity.

Instead of trying to force yourself into one clean feeling, try giving yourself permission to say both. “I feel happy and I feel sad.” “I feel excited and I feel scared.” Your nervous system can hold both. It might be uncomfortable, but discomfort is not the same as danger.

Third: Stay connected instead of disappearing.

A lot of people, after success, pull away from their infertility community. Not because they want to—but because they feel guilty being there. And what ends up happening is both people lose the relationship. If it feels safe—for both of you—staying present is often the more healing choice. You don’t have to have all the words. You just have to show up.

Survivor’s guilt is what happens when empathy and unfairness collide.

It’s not a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a sign that you care deeply about the people who walked this road with you. And that you are still holding them, even when your outcomes are different.

If you are in the middle of this right now—on either side of it—I hope this episode helped you feel a little less alone in it. A little less like you should be doing it better or feeling it differently.

You’re not. You’re doing it exactly the way a human who has been through something really hard does it.

I love you, my beautiful friends. Thank you for being here. I’ll talk to you next week.