This week, we’re going to talk about another one of the most common emotions we experience during infertility and IVF- shame. 

Shame is almost universal for so, so many of us. It has even been called the most human emotion because of its prevalence. But I find the most interesting part about shame is that it is one of the most experienced emotions but understood the least. 

Shame shapes and drives so much of our behavior both when we experience the emotion and when we are resisting the feeling. Many times, the resistance to shame looks like anger. Red-hot anger that lashes and rages and often will look for blame. I am guilty of this! I can drop into shame in an instant. Shame is such an uncomfortable emotion that we try to get rid of it quickly by turning it on someone else in the form of anger. 

When I cover a topic like shame, I love to turn to the googles for a definition. Shame is a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior. I love that it says “consciousness.” Another definition is an unpleasant self-conscious emotion typically associated with a negative evaluation of the self. 

Shame has a few different roots. One root is from an old Norse word -I’m not going to even pretend to know how to pronounce the word- meaning “cheek redness.” Another possible root is from the old English word “Scamu” -I probably butchered that, but here we go- and it is related to disgrace, dishonor, and loss of esteem. So, you can see that this root is very closely associated with our modern experience of shame. But I love that the Norse word translates to the physiological response that many of us experience during shame. Another possible root for the word shame that means “to cover.” This, along with the other two examples, is so freaking perfect for shame because shame lives and thrives in darkness and secrecy. When we feel shame, we don’t want to be seen. We isolate, we hide, we blame ourselves, and, thus, shame continues to thrive. 

Think about it; it’s almost impossible to feel shame about something that everyone knows about and doesn’t care about, right? Because shame is caused by our beliefs about other people’s judgments. Our judgments about their judgments. Of course, what it really is, is our judgments about ourselves that we are projecting on to other people. 

 That’s why so many of us don’t talk about our infertility journey. We feel deep, bone-crushing shame around it. See, our shame isn’t caused by a particular action that we’ve taken or an experience we’ve had; it’s caused by our thoughts about ourselves. And generally, those thoughts are about our own worthiness, weakness, or inadequacy. 

Infertility shame goes back centuries. In primitive tribes, procreation was essential for the survival of that tribe. There were no two-ways about it. Culturally a woman’s worth has been and, in many ways, is still measured by her fertility. Modern challenges to this social belief have somewhat diminished this, but it remains to this day. A woman’s role has been to produce and raise children. Those who failed to do so were ostracized. Many believed their infertility a form of divine punishment. 

In Genesis Chapter 30, verse 1 states, “When Rachel saw that she was not bearing Jacob any children, she became jealous of her sister. So, she said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I’ll die.” This was her cry out of anguish and shame. In an article published by Harvard Medical School some 3,000 years later, the researchers found that over half of the women, the study sampled identified that infertility is the most upsetting experience of their lives. Now, Harvard researchers didn’t call on me in 2009, but if they HAD, I would have totally been in that half of the group. So, not THAT much has changed for women. MANY of us believe or have believed that we are being punished. 

One of the most toxic legacies of infertility is that it is binary- you are eighter fertile or infertile. I will either be a mother, or I will not. It is within the context of those roles that shame creeps in. 

If we have been socialized, over centuries, to believe that THIS is our role. This is the thing we’re “supposed” to do, and we can’t do that thing, well, then there’s almost no choice BUT to believe that there is something wrong with us. That’s shame. The belief, not that we DID something wrong, which is guilt, but that there is something wrong WITH us. 

Now, in modern times we don’t have the same expectations around procreation; it is not essential for every woman to have children for the survival of our species. Yet, the shame around what was once only meant for daily survival has continued to metastasize around infertility. What remains is the continuation of our thoughts around not adhering to the social norm of being a mother. 

As women, we are almost inherently shameful. We have been socialized that our emotions are shameful, our bodies are shameful, and by extension, our infertility is shameful. But again, shame is not that we have DONE wrong. It is that we ARE wrong. 

Shame is deeply rooted in our beliefs about ourselves. Fundamentally, shame is a problem of self-worth and self-acceptance. Shame comes from some version of a story that we believe that there is something wrong with us.

Shame comes up around infertility because the plan we had is not going how we, well, planned. It’s going differently than how we wanted it to. None of us want the compounded frustration, anger, and shame we experience with every failed cycle. None of us want to talk to 5 different doctors, 15 different medical students and feel like everyone in the world has seen your vagina. Amirite? 5 doctors, 15 medical students, and a speculum walk into my vagina is the WORST joke set up in history, and yet, this is the world that some of us live in. Never by choice. 

I want to clarify that shame is not an objective indication that you have done something wrong or that there is something wrong with you. Shame doesn’t confirm some universal truth, EVER! 

Shame is entirely based on your thoughts about yourself, just for being who you are. You, in a sense, believe you are unworthy and unaccepted just for existing. 

To add an extra layer of suffering, some of us feel shame about a specific thing we did or didn’t do. This is especially true if we have a failed IVF cycle, transfer, or miscarriage. 

I should have done this

I shouldn’t have done that

I had a client who genuinely believed that she caused her miscarriage because she took “hot” showers. 

No, love, you didn’t.

To be clear, shame is not caused by believing something was wrong or a problem. It’s the belief that you are unworthy or unacceptable FOR that action or mistake. 

I know this because we can make mistakes like EPIC effing fails, and we don’t make it mean anything about us. There’s no shame attached to it at all. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. Shame comes from our thoughts about ourselves. It comes from the belief we are unworthy. It comes from the judgments we have about ourselves. It doesn’t have anything to do with eating a cold-cut sandwich or sushi, it doesn’t come from taking a home pregnancy test on Day five after a transfer, and it comes up negative. It doesn’t come from turning down the invite to yet another person’s baby shower. There is no “shameful” act- as much as we want to believe there are. There are only thoughts that create shame. 

So, I bet you’re wondering what to do with all this information. You’re like, “Yea, Emily, we got it shame is a thing, and it’s created in our minds, but what do we DO with that information?” 

I’m going to give you three ways to combat your shame.

1. Name it! Since shame hides in the dark and grows in silence, bringing it to the light kills it. Shame cannot exist where we shine the light. Dr. Brené Brown writes extensively on this topic, and she is one of my all-time favorite authors and speakers. She writes, “when we bury the story, we stay the subject of the story, but when we own the story, we get to narrate the ending.” SOOO Good, right?!?! Getting beyond shame means that we acknowledge it. We own what we are feeling. We share our stories, despite the thoughts you have about being judged. Another of Dr. Brown’s incredible quotes from her book Daring Greatly, “The less we talk about shame, the more power it has over our lives. If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we’ve basically cut it off at the knees.” Now, I’m not saying that you should share your story regardless. But know that it’s your story to tell. If you feel called to share your journey, do it! If you do not feel called to share it, that’s perfect too! Most of us don’t share our stories because of our shame. Because we fear the judgment that might come from people, that fear, that shame keeps us quiet and alone. THAT’S the thing we want to get away from. WE can openly discuss our struggles if that’s what we choose. 

1. Disconnect what your diagnosis from who you are. You are not the decisions you make or the things that happen to you. We are not our actions nor our thoughts. One of the first things I talk about with my new clients is that we are not our thoughts. Before most of my clients begin working with me, they believe that there is no difference between them or their thoughts. But it’s not true. I like to give the example of a glass of water. You have a glass of water on your desk. Everyone can see it’s a glass of water- there is no debating that. Then we have our THOUGHTS about the glass of water. And THAT is subjective. One person might think, “oh, thank goodness there’s water, I’m so thirsty,” and another person might think, “Ugh, I don’t really want any water right now, I want some coffee” or something like that. Our thoughts are subjective, therefore, not facts. This I why, for us, the most important thing is to separate yourself from your infertility. It is very easy for us to say, “I am infertile” or something in that vein during this journey. However, when someone has cancer, they don’t say, “I am cancer,” do they? No! Because their identity is not cancer. Cancer is a disease process that they are experiencing. It’s the same with infertility. The world health organization defines infertility as “a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after twelve months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse.” It’s a disease. Full stop.

For some reason, people like to put qualifiers on infertility, something like “it’s just infertility; it’s not like I have cancer or am going to die.” We try to minimize our journey, our struggle. Yet, when we say things like that, we still feel like shit. We feel that way because we are trying to undermine how we feel. Almost like we’re lying to ourselves about how hard this journey is and trying to put a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. We don’t have to qualify what we feel. We don’t have to minimize how we feel; we don’t have to soften how we feel for the comfort of those around us. That’s just one of the many lies of shame.

1. Compassion- I cannot overstate this- compassion is the KEY! If you think of shame as a toxin in your body. A poison that courses through your veins and reaches every part of you - compassion is the antidote. Compassion neutralizes the toxin of shame and doesn’t allow it to spread. Compassion towards myself or someone else is one of my favorite emotions. I think of shame as an unproductive emotion. Most of the time, it drives us to inaction. To stay in isolation. To freeze. That’s it’s job. It wants you to stay in the dark so that it can keep growing. It’s literally doing its job. We talked earlier about how shame was important in our early evolution because it, in many ways, kept us in line. It helped enforce social contracts because NO one enjoys the feeling of shame. Remember, this was centuries-long socialization. In modern times, we do not have those same societal needs that we did even 100 years ago, but no one told our primitive brain. So, our primitive brain continues to offer thoughts that create shame. The trouble starts when we BELIEVE the thoughts. Another one of my favorite authors is Byron Katie, who is amazing, and one of my favorite quotes from her is “a thought isn’t a problem until you believe it.” 

Our brain will always offer up crap thoughts. That’s what it’s programmed to do. It’s a machine that pumps out words/ sentences- it isn’t personal; it’s working the exact way it should. Our pain comes from us believing and reacting to every thought we have. This is where compassion comes in. It’s as if we can say to ourselves, “It’s ok to think that, but I don’t have to believe it.” I will talk about this in more detail in episodes to come to help build out that concept. 

One of the activities that I emphasize in my coaching program is journaling. I think journaling is very therapeutic, and we can get so much more mileage out of the coaching process when clients regularly journal. One of my clients talked about how she looked back at some of the things that she had written about herself and said, “yea, it’s as if I was writing about the most repulsive, worst person that’s ever lived- about myself. I was writing about me.” That’s was a big revelation for her to acknowledge how she viewed herself. If this is you, I want you to picture someone you love sitting across from you- it can be your partner, parents, sibling, or best friend, it doesn’t matter. But I want you to picture them saying all the things that you say about yourself, about themselves. 

“I’m such a failure.”

“I don’t deserve anything.”

“I’m disgusting.” 

All of the shitty that we say to ourselves. How would you treat that person that you love? What would you tell them? Would you agree with them? Would you pile on and tell them more ways that they suck? Probably not. 

You would probably tell them that it isn’t true. 

You would tell them that you loved them.

You would tell them the many ways they are amazing, gifted, and loved. 

You would have compassion for them.

Compassion for ourselves is like a muscle that you have to build. As easy as it seems to come for us to feel compassion for others, it does not seem to come that easy for us to have compassion for ourselves. We have to work at it. We have to build that muscle. But I promise you, doing that work is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your future. 

Until next time, I love you all!