Joseph & Shaylee

Infertility and Emotional Stages
Adoption Education Resource Manual, LDS Family Services, Kearns Agency.

Surprise
The most common first feeling of infertility.

Denial
"This can't happen to me!" Denial serves a purpose. It allows the body and mind to adjust at their own pace to events that might otherwise be overwhelming. Denial often comes into play at the time of miscarriage or stillbirth. The loss is too enormous and sudden to endure. It needs to be processed and piecemeal until it can be totally acknowledged.

Isolation
Infertility is a personal and embarrassing subject to discuss. Many infertile couples keep their problem carefully to themselves. This has two very unfortunate consequences: first, the family, friends, and peers of the couple may presume they are using birth control or do not desire children. This leads to needling and pressuring to start a family and fulfill society's dictates that families should be continued. Second, the partners, if they do not confide to others about infertility, must necessarily turn to each other for support, understanding, and sympathy. Often this is an impossible request because both members of an infertile couple are under stress.

Anger
When a couple enter into investigation and attempted treatment of their infertility, they surrender much of their sense of control over their bodies and destinies. The reaction to loss of control and helplessness is often anger. The anger way be very rational, focused at real and correctly perceived insults. Sometimes the anger is more irrational and may be projected onto targets such as the doctor, or an adoption worker. The real target of the anger is both the situation and the self. Anger which isn't acknowledged or released is often repressed and may lead to chronic depression.

Guilt and Unworthiness
People try to make a cause-and-effect relationship between infertility and something they have done (or not done) in life. Infertile people frequently decide that they are not being blessed with a pregnancy because they are in some way unworthy. Pregnancy is being withheld as a punishment.

Depression
Depression is a real legitimate state of sadness, despair, lethargy and vague symptoms of distress. When infertility is marked by an end point, such as final knowledge that pregnancy will never occur, depression gives way to grief.

Grief
"Death. Death of a lot of things. The end of the Jones family and the Jones' family name. It dies with us, because of me. My husband is the last of the male children in his family. Death before life ...before we even knew our child, because he never existed. The hardest part of this kind of death is the fact that it is the death of a dream. There are no solid memories, no pictures, no things to remember. You can't remember your child's blond hair or brown eyes, or his favorite toys or the way he laughed. Or the way it felt to be pregnant with him. He never existed."

There is no funeral, no burial, no grave to lay flowers on. The couple often grieves alone. The infertile person may entertain fears or fantasies that the fertile partner will leave--or worse, will stay and be secretly hostile and condemning. The feelings may lead to a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy.

The Course of Normal Grief
The first state of normal grief is usually shock and disbelief. To absorb the loss so that they will not feel overwhelmed. The second state of grief is actual suffering. Experiencing the painful feelings of sadness and emptiness. Weeping and sobbing, loss of appetite, exhaustion, choking or tightness in the throat. This "grief work" progresses, and the acute state of suffering will usually pass within several weeks to several months. Finally after the third state of grief, recovery begins. They will establish relationships and new interests as well as show renewed ability to experience pleasure, diversion, and satisfaction. Grief, of course may be reactivated, but the suffering is never as acute again.