How Feeling Our Feelings Can Uplevel Our Fertility Journey and Our Lives

Today we explore how feeling our feelings can help us understand important data about our experiences, expand our resilience zone, and improve  communication with our loved ones as we are faced with all sorts of new information and decisions to make along the fertility journey.

At Love and Science, we empower, we educate through evidence, and we use mindful self compassion to start to heal from the inside out. Our goal is to help you achieve your goal of building your family while thriving, not merely surviving. 

As always, please keep in mind that this is my perspective and nothing in this podcast is medical advice.

If you found this conversation valuable, book a consult call with me:

https://calendly.com/loveandsciencefertility/discovery-call

Follow me on social media:

IG: www.instagram.com/loveandsciencefertility

FB: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553692167183

Please don’t let infertility have the final word. We are here to take the burden from you so that you can achieve your goal of building your family with confidence and compassion. I’m rooting for you always.

Transcript:

I'm Dr.

Erica Bove and welcome to the Love and Science podcast.

You're listening to episode 2.

I'm your host and also the founder of Love and Science, thriving through infertility.

I'm so excited you're here today.

With over a decade of experience helping thousands of women just like you, I empower professional women to build their families.

Let's dive in.

So why is it so hard to feel our feelings?

If you're like me, you'd rather do a zillion other things than sit down and feel your feelings.

But sometimes we're not necessarily in control when big feelings come to us.

So the question is, what are our feelings?

Why do they exist?

And how can learning how to process them, even complex feelings, help us to be able to navigate the world in a more steady way, to understand ourselves with a better vocabulary, and also ultimately to have better communication with our loved ones so that we can tolerate feelings in the context of a conversation and move on forward and stop getting stuck in old patterns?

So if you're a good friend of mine, you've heard me say before that I'd rather clean a toilet than feel my feelings.

And this is still true for me most days.

I think that I tend to like the comfort of the predictable and I tend not to like to feel feelings.

I think that sometimes I busy myself and very often I busy myself so that I will not have to feel my feelings because part of me is afraid what might actually come up if I sit in silence.

And at some level it's much more comfortable to be living in the superficial and checking things off my list than to sit down and uncover underneath what is actually going on under the surface.

I have learned a lot about feeling my feelings over the last few years and what I will tell you is that when I actually am able to sit and feel my feelings, it doesn't take as long as I think it will.

And in some magical way, that feeling that I was so afraid to feel loses its power over me.

We all know that the fertility journey can bring up so many complicated emotions, overwhelm frustration, anger, rage, grief, sadness.

There are so many emotions that can come when we say get bad news or when the fertility journey is a lot longer than we thought it was going to be.

Or maybe we get news that our journey is going to be longer and more complicated.

There are so many points along the fertility journey when we are faced with our feelings.

Sometimes it's in the initial diagnostic phase when we realize that something is terribly wrong and we might need to go to significant measures to conceive a child.

Other times we think things are going to be more straightforward and when we actually get results of what we thought was going to be good news, we find out that the thing we thought we fixed maybe wasn't the only problem.

And so it can really be hard, this hurry up and wait can be really, really hard in terms of just feeling like we're being jerked around in circumstances that are out of our control.

I think that when we can learn how to feel our feelings, if we are resisting them, they are persisting.

There's that age-old adage that says that which we resist persists.

I think this is so true in the feeling world, especially related to feelings in the fertility world.

And so if you think about it, if we are actively resisting and putting force against a feeling, that's only going to grow and get stronger until it's like the battle of the wills, until something gives.

But I want to teach you a different way.

I want to teach you how to get quiet, how to welcome a feeling, how to feel it in your body and then let it go.

Feelings are nothing more than the weather.

They are data that tells us that something is important to us.

So say we all of a sudden cry unexpectedly.

What I say to my clients and my patients is the tears tell us that what's going on is important.

Let's explore that a little bit more.

And so I think what gets us into trouble, at least I'll speak for myself, is when we feel something and then judge ourselves for feeling that way.

One example is where, you know, say I get bad news and I say to myself, it should be easier than this or I shouldn't be feeling such sadness.

I should just be able to move on.

And so not only am I taking the pain of the bad news or the pain that the journey's gotten a little bit longer and I'm imposing self-judgment on that to tell myself that I actually shouldn't be feeling this way.

And so it's in that way that we increase our suffering and most of us just do this automatically.

So part of my role as a coach is to look at these situations that are creating your day-to-day reality and to shine a light on them to look at the thoughts, to look at the feelings and really asking that question, what is the pain and what is the suffering?

And that is one of my zones of genius is being able to separate the two and say, okay, well there are certain things we can't change and maybe that's the insult that created the pain.

But we can most certainly adjust how we look at that situation and how we think about that situation and maybe even how we feel about that situation.

And if there's any shred of self-judgment there, let's turn that around because so often we think we shouldn't feel a certain way and sometimes it's completely justified.

Usually it's completely justified.

I think what adds to our suffering is when we judge ourselves for that and maybe sometimes we hang on to that feeling a little bit longer just because we don't know how to deal with it.

We don't know how to process it.

So that's what I love to help people do is to get into their bodies, to feel their feelings, to breathe into those feelings and then to let them go.

So when we realize that a feeling cannot kill us, we realize that we actually don't need to fear our feelings.

We can look at them with curiosity and we can look at them as we would reading a research paper full of data because the feelings are just data about our body and when we can understand what thoughts are creating our feelings, we can gently challenge those thoughts and we can ask ourselves how we want to feel and even a 1% shift in our approach can dramatically affect our experience of the process and oftentimes even the result.

So that's really the first point is how can feeling our feelings decrease our fear related to those feelings, decrease the unnecessary suffering and then also help us to move on from those feelings and stay more in the present, living the life that is in front of us in that moment.

The second way that feeling our feelings can help us is that it can expand what's called our resilience zone and I really hesitate to use the word resilience because I think especially in health care and clinician well-being it's used as a euphemism.

So I want to be very clear that when I say resilience zone I truly mean the range of feelings that we're able to feel on any given day in any given situation.

When our resilience zone gets very narrow we might feel a feeling and we might get triggered even and some of us might fight or flight in that situation.

We either get angry and fight or if you're like me you might shut down and run away and hide and neither is good because it's just a very reactionary approach to the situation.

But when we can slow down the process and when we can truly understand that no feeling is gonna kill us we can tolerate a lot more in our experience.

So say something happens and perhaps I feel shame.

I talk about shame a lot.

If I allow myself to just notice that maybe name the feeling first get a little separation from that feeling and just say huh isn't that interesting I think I'm feeling some shame about this in my body.

That already gives me space and separation to allow it to be there but also to make sure that I'm not overpowered by it.

So this is a very interesting tool this can even happen with anger.

We might start to feel the symptoms of anger in our body our heart starts to race.

My face I'll speak to him about myself my face starts to get really hot.

My jaw starts to clench and I feel kind of like like almost like a volcano like I'm gonna explode.

If I can just notice isn't that interesting I think I'm starting to really feel warm and really intense.

I think I'm having an angry reaction here.

Just even noticing that slows the process down I can start breathing into my feeling and ask myself huh I wonder what's making me so angry and what core wound is this poking at right now?

Is it an abandonment wound?

Is it a inadequacy wound?

Like what's going on?

Because I know that when I'm the most upset by something that's usually when something is poking at a core wound of mine.

And by the way one of the things we work at in Love and Science is we really look at figuring out what those wounds are and healing them from the inside out so that even the same insult the same trigger might not have such a dramatic effect.

So if I can stay in the moment and just notice huh I just learned this information about my cycle this is how I'm feeling isn't it interesting that I'm feeling this way.

Then we then get to decide what to do about that and what I call that is responding instead of reacting.

We're not just having some knee-jerk reflex reaction but we're actually able to pause and in that pause is our power and then we think to ourselves how do I really want to handle this situation and maybe it's even I'm starting to feel activated and triggered I really need to take a moment outside because I'm worried I'm gonna explode.

Even that awareness is enough to slow things down so that we don't fall into the same patterns that we have in the past.

So a lot of this feeling our feelings is really about getting back our own power so our feelings are not running the show so that we are and even if we start to feel significantly altered by our feelings we are still on the dryer seat we can slow the process down so then we get to choose what to do in that moment and about that situation in general.

In addition even if we find that in that moment we don't quite have the grace and the poise that we would like to have we can actually learn the skills to go back and to repair in that moment.

Now repairing is not comfortable you know if you're like me you just want to sweep things under the rug and move on forward into the future but one thing I've learned is that if I've created harm in my ecosystem in my universe and it's still creating harm in the present right that rift is still very palpable I need to do something about that and to do something about that is to be able to sit with that discomfort enough to be able to heal in that moment.

So that is also in just a little we talk about love and science a lot of the self-harm we actually do is to ourselves and the way that we talk to ourselves and about ourselves and beat ourselves up for many things which are not even in our control but I think that when we think about having healthy relationships and having the ability to feel and repair we have to start with ourselves otherwise we're not going to be able to express this outwardly.

Now as an aside there are various words we can use to describe our emotions.

Many of us have a very limited vocabulary I sort of pride myself on having expanded that vocabulary over time maybe maybe the feeling words are as simple as mad, sad, glad.

I know that sounds very basic I'm happy I'm sad I'm frustrated you know maybe we have a very kind of limited vocabulary because we don't maybe think about our feelings that much and so it hasn't even made sense for us to figure out the tools we need to express ourselves in this way.

One resource I found extremely valuable to me in my journey of learning how to express myself better is Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart.

The way that she organizes her book which she gives credit to the Millennials for this I just wanted to point that out the way that the Millennials helped her to organize her brain is that she categorizes feelings into different groups of feelings.

So for instance the first chapter is related to the places we go when things are uncertain or too much.

Now if we think about the fertility journey that is a journey that is a place where things are very often uncertain or too much right so she talks about stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, excitement, distraction, excuse me dread, fear or vulnerability.

Her next chapter is places we go when we compare and I always say that I think the 11th commandment should be thou shall not compare and I think a lot of feelings come up when we compare ourselves to others.

Maybe it's a family member who is not having fertility issues right now.

Maybe it's a friend who from our perspective is just being very insensitive in terms of how they're describing their own fertility journey to us.

Maybe it's another friend who actually happens to be on the fertility journey but they're getting good news right now and we're not.

And so I think a lot of the ways we think about feelings and jealousy and resentment and all of those things that I don't like identifying myself with those feelings but if they're existing under the surface and I'm not able to name them and address them then it kind of becomes like that game of whack-a-mole at the fair that those feelings continue to influence my behavior but it's not really in my conscious control.

So I might ask myself why am I acting so strangely?

Why do I just feel this low-level irritation all the time?

I don't want to be this way and if I go three layers deeper perhaps it's because there's a feeling that is there and bothering me.

It's just I don't have the language to express that.

So I think the more nuanced we can get in naming our feelings and expressing our feelings sometimes a feeling that we think is maybe one feeling like mad maybe there's like three other feelings hiding behind that like sad, frustrated, scared.

A lot of feelings hide under anger and anger feels very powerful to us but if we actually look at it under the surface maybe there's some more vulnerable feelings that we've been avoiding because we don't like to feel vulnerable we like to feel in control.

So a lot of this we talk about in Love and Science when we start to really understand what's going on under the surface.

In summary the second way that learning how to feel our feelings can help us is it can really expand our resilient zone.

It can help us stay in the moment longer especially as it pertains to being with ourselves and also being with our loved ones and we truly understand that no feeling is gonna kill us and so it just allows us to be with ourselves, be with our feelings and work through them and then move on with a lot more grace and a lot more tools in our toolkit and one of those like I mentioned is really learning the vocabulary and the nuance of getting more clear so we can be clear with ourselves what we're actually feeling and then be clear with our loved ones as well.

The third way that feeling our feelings can really be helpful for us in our lives is that it can help us communicate better and what I say that a communication between two people I think sometimes we put communication on a pedestal like if I can just learn how to communicate with my partner and if he can just learn how to communicate with me or she can learn how to communicate with me then we're gonna be set.

I think of you know good communication is necessary but not sufficient.

We need a whole lot more than good communication if we're gonna have satisfying relationships but if we can't use our words and communicate with another effectively we actually can't authentically express ourselves and we also can't authentically receive the experience of another person because our perspective stays so small and our understanding stays so limited.

So if we can as I use the yoga analogy stay on the mat in a conversation long enough to listen to maybe it's a partner maybe it's our mother maybe it's our best friend but somebody who has a different perspective than we do I think at some level all of us want to be seen and heard and loved and in order to do that we have to be able to tolerate differences between us and realize that it is okay that we might disagree.

The important thing is that we see and acknowledge the other person's perspective and then figure out how we can move forward.

So if I'm in a conversation say with my sister and things start to get heated and all of a sudden my fight-or-flight reflex kicks on and I'm just like okay this is too much for me I'm going I'll talk to you later.

That may get me out of the conversation in that moment however it doesn't heal that wound and it doesn't give me any tools to move forward in the relationship with the issue at stake.

If I can even pause and say you know what I think I'm starting to feel overwhelmed right now I think I need just a five-minute break maybe get some water.

I really am invested in figuring this out for you.

I just think in this moment I'm starting to get overwhelmed how about we take a break and we come back.

I think that can be very powerful because even to be able to acknowledge I'm feeling overwhelmed right now and I still value that your relationship I still value this topic I think that enables us to hold the complexity of those moments and give us a chance to move forward in those moments when maybe that wasn't even possible before with our previous skill set.

So that is part of my goal is to help each of you be with yourselves long enough understand that you can tolerate temporary moments of disconnection in the spirit of growth and that you truly can stay on the mat with loving healthy boundaries so that you can have the best relationships possible.

Growing, evolving, becoming closer, becoming vulnerable, all those things take a lot of practice and a lot of skills and I am a hundred percent here for it to help you with that.

So in summary our feelings are not going to kill us even if it seems that way.

By learning how to feel our feelings we expand our resilience zone both with being able to understand ourselves and other people and also being able to have meaningful relationships with each other and this is incredibly important on the fertility journey as we are feeling strong emotions trying not to get flooded trying to assimilate an awful lot of information about ourselves and our bodies and navigate a very complicated process which is the fertility journey.

There are so many different ways to proceed. There are so many different decision points. There are so many times when we receive bad news. There are sometimes even when we receive good news and it's absolutely terrifying. What if we finally learn that we are pregnant after a long, long struggle to get there? That might even induce a whole new set of fears and worries that we didn't even expect to, and you know, we didn't even anticipate that we might experience.

So, a lot of this is how to human, as Glennon Doyle says. Feelings are data. Feelings are part of our human experience. The more that we can befriend and even embrace our feelings, even the tougher ones, the more of an integrated experience we will have. The more we will be able to clear through the crap of our mental chatter, and the more we will be able to connect authentically with our bodies, with our values, with our people. Whether that's our friends, our partners, our parents, whoever it is who is walking this journey with us, our doctors, maybe a coach, if you have a coach, if you have me as your coach.

And that's how we make the best decisions possible. And that's how we can feel confident that we're moving in the right direction for us. So, with that, I'm going to end it. It is my true humble honor to serve you in this way. I would absolutely love to have more conversations about feelings, to sit with you as I feel my feelings, to welcome your feelings. And we are not alone here. We walk this journey together. Thank you.

Until the next time, bye. Thank you for listening to the Love and Science Podcast. I'm so glad you joined us today. If you found this conversation valuable, if you could please rate, review, and share this podcast with your trusted people, it would mean so much to me. If you would like more tools to help you navigate the fertility journey, book a free discovery call with me today. The link is in the show notes. Please do not let infertility have the final word. I am here to take the burden from you so that you can achieve your goal of building your family. In gratitude, this is Dr. Erica Both. I'm rooting for you always. You, you, you.