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When medicine fails to cure infertility, many women turn to psychotherapy for help. To cope with the problem and remove the indoor unit, they have to go through a difficult path.
The causes of infertility can be very different. With some of them, medicine has learned to cope. Thanks to treatment or IVF, many women with such a diagnosis still found the happiness of motherhood. Others have tried a variety of treatments for years, all to no avail. And finally, there is a third group — those who were helped by psychotherapy to become a mother.
Rimma Efimkina, a psychologist and psychotherapist from Novosibirsk, describes about 30 such cases from her own practice in her book “How are you? Has not yet given birth?».
And at first glance, they all look like a real miracle, which is hard to believe.
For example, here is a quote from a letter from one of her clients, written ten years after working with a psychotherapist: “I have two daughters, the girls are mirror images of each other. I was the first to become pregnant completely unexpectedly — in the clinic that pregnancy was called «diamond». According to all indicators, I had to be treated for about three more years in order to start preparing for IVF — the doctors did not give any chance of a natural pregnancy at all.
Most of the heroines in this book came to the therapist when they had almost (or completely) lost hope of being cured. But if the doctors could not achieve anything, how could some “talks” help?
A symptom is a message from our unconscious
With the help of the stories of her clients, Efimkina writes, she wanted to show how the principle of integrity works — the unity of the mental, emotional and bodily spheres in such an area as childbirth, although this is only a particular aspect of psychosomatics. The body changes following the change in consciousness. And why and what exactly in consciousness needs to be changed?
First you need to understand that the symptoms in the body are always a consequence of the state of consciousness.
Infertility doesn’t just happen. “This is a message to a woman that she has gone astray from her own path, lost her destiny, stopped hearing the voice of the soul,” writes Rimma Efimkina.
In the most general sense, this is not a problem of the body, it is a problem of immature consciousness. During the sessions, the psychotherapist’s clients discover how their infertility is connected with dependence on a husband, with the «suffocating hug» of the mother, with the rejecting mother, with the domineering father …
Why doesn’t the medical approach always help?
Efimkina explains this by the difference in a woman’s relationship with a doctor and with a psychotherapist. We come to the doctor as patients, and the patient is a person receiving medical care, undergoing medical supervision and / or treatment. His role is passive, he is the object of treatment. The man is waiting for something to be done to him.
Psychologists prefer to call those they work with clients.
And this is the general name of the entity receiving some services. And the help of a psychologist is not to solve the problem for the client. His task is to give the client not a fish, but a fishing rod.
After all, “man himself unconsciously created his own situation, with the consequences of which it is unpleasant for him to come into contact.” And then help is the activation of a person’s internal resources so that he himself can cope with his problem.
How is the work going?
It can be a one-on-one conversation, but, according to Efimkina, work in a psychodramatic group is more effective. Here the client receives maximum support, because all the topics discussed are of an archetypal nature and somehow resonate in each participant. The main emphasis of the psychologist is on attentive listening to the client’s story.
“I listen to a woman talk about her symptoms, look at her non-verbal expressions, compare her speech and behavior and find incongruencies, inconsistencies, contradictions. They talk about an internal conflict imprinted in the body as a block. When it is possible to identify the blocking installation and find the activator, catharsis occurs, and the grateful body begins to function at the behest of nature.
The metaphors with which the client describes the symptom are very important.
Here Nastya talks about her diagnosis — polycystic ovaries: the eggs do not mature and remain in the ovaries, growing to the walls … «it looks like rice burns to the bottom of the pan.» And it turns out that this metaphor accurately describes Nastya’s difficult, painful relationship with her father: lonely, drinking, unhappy, he endlessly demands her attention, and she pities him and follows his lead.
During therapy, she will have to understand that she has the right to live her own life, and not the life of her father. By the way, it was her letter with a story about two daughters that we quoted at the beginning.
Change is the hard way
The therapist creates conditions for the client to increase awareness, but does not guarantee it. «It’s his job, not ours, his choice, his life.» Moreover, awareness alone is not enough, because after it the most correct and logical thing is to change your life strategy. But sometimes the client does not have enough internal resource for this.
Such is the story of Yana, who realized that she had chosen for herself the model of behavior of a “convenient for everyone” girl. As a child, she tried to earn her mother’s love, now she is just as obedient to her husband in everything. Yana did not dare to make her own choices, her hopes of becoming a mother have not yet come true, which means that this story is not over yet.
However, even in stories with a “magic” ending, everything did not happen by magic.
Some of the heroines managed to get pregnant quickly enough, someone after a few years. It is not easy to change seriously, it is not for nothing that Efimkina calls it “hard labor”.
After all, you need to learn to “redirect efforts not outward, but inward, that is, develop your intuition, learn to read body language, recognize your own feelings.” It takes a lot of effort. But it’s worth it — the letters of women who have refuted their diagnosis of «infertility» convince of this.