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You Are Not Alone, A Different View: Altering the Biochemistry of Stress
A Different View of “You Are Not Alone”: Altering the Biochemistry of Stress “Out of control” and “alone” are universal states that are provoked by the challenge to conceive and carry a baby to term....
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Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Helluv A Day: Yet Another Infertility Stressor
The range of feelings that get evoked on the Parenting Holidays is wide and deep, indeed. Whether you’re a woman or a man, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or both can be fraught with emotion. Aside from...
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Mind/Body Stress Reduction Classes for Infertility: More than Meets the Senses
While I teach as many coping mechanisms known to Man as I can cram into four mind/body stress reduction sessions, I’m jazzed by what participants bring that can be incredibly valuable to the other...
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Brainwashed?
The word brainwashed has a negative connotation, conjuring up images of involuntary indoctrination into a mind-set that is robotic and serves a purpose not of our choosing and malignant in some way. I...
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Will the Real Contra-Ceptive Please Stand Up!
Opinions vary as to whether stress causes infertility. Certainly, dealing with infertility causes stress. But can it be implicated as an ongoing “cause” of infertility? This leaves room for feeling...
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Working with a Surrogate to Achieve PregnancyGuest Blog from Mindy Berkson
When you’re trying to get pregnant, it can affect all aspects of your life. Infertility often brings financial, emotional, and relationship struggles that can be exhausting and quite difficult to...
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SYMPTOMS ARE THE BODY’S WISDOM
The days of denying that the mind and body are a unit has been replaced with scientific evidence to the contrary. Some still either deny this phenomenon or have trouble wrapping their brain around it....
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Taming Negative Thinking
Because caveman was vigilant and presumed that the twig that snapped was a saber tooth tiger even if it was a raccoon, we are here. Negative thinking is encoded in our DNA and is normal. But negative...
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A Baker’s Dozen Questions for Infertility
Infertility is an all-consuming bio-psycho-socio-spiritual crisis. But unlike an acute crisis, which resolves in a few weeks, the quest for a family can go on for years. It is hard to concentrate in a...
View ArticleNature Loves the Truth
Would an orchid keep its bloom in a closet without water, fertilizer, or exposure to the light of day? Would a palm tree last very long in Siberia? Could a herd of elephants sustain itself in a...
View ArticleInfertility and Fear
If you are struggling with infertility you are well aware that anxiety goes with the territory. On Sunday, March 4, 2012, The New York Times, Sunday Review section, featured an editorial piece on...
View ArticleSuffering and Infertility
According to Buddhist philosophy, the cause of all suffering is craving. They say if you desire things that you do not have, suffering will follow. If you realize this, peace will be yours....
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The Power of Reframing
Reframing is about deciding to look at our thoughts from a different perspective. When it comes to infertility, the act of reframing is a skill worth cultivating. Keep reading to find out why. As a...
View ArticleNews Men Can Use
Making your way through an infertility struggle is an ordeal. The emotional component of the infertility journey can be even more of an ordeal. Women are generally freer to feel and express their...
View ArticleSelf-Advocacy: Claiming What You Need From Your Doctor
Let’s get one thing straight right away: It is normal to feel intimidated in any doctor’s office and it is normal for your IQ to drop to zero when creating the next generation becomes an ordeal. That...
View ArticleLife is Full of Curve Balls
Infertility involuntarily changes your life. You’re not in the driver’s seat and the roller coaster climbs slowly and plummets quickly. With all this mental and physical motion and commotion, every day...
View ArticleEmphasizing the Body in Mind/Body
Mind/body techniques take into consideration that the body is the historian. The body holds information that perhaps the mind wants to forget. In its determination to keep us honest, the body nags at...
View ArticleWhen Jingle Bells Don’t Rock
I’m known professionally as someone who specializes in the emotional component of infertility. At this holiday season, I’d like to suggest that the need to have access to spiffy coping mechanisms...
View ArticleTurn a Red Light to Green: Art as the Way to “Go”
On December 18, 2012 the NY Times reported a story plugging the value of art. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/arts/design/arts-as-antidote-for-academic-ills.html?_r=0) It told of the artist,...
View ArticleHypnosis with IVF Revisited
In October of 2006, the esteemed journal for reproductive endocrinologists, Fertility & Sterility, published the results of a study in which a group of women going through IVF were hypnotized at...
View ArticleResilience: The “Seed” of Possibility for the Infertile Patient
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from trauma and is integral to mental health. Some would call it the definition of mental health. But resilience is not a fixed commodity. It can be lost as...
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Silence as an Antidote to the “Noise” of Infertility
At the time of this writing, The Museum of Modern Art in NYC is running an exhibition called Soundings: A Contemporary Score. Artists deconstructed sound and made it visable in a variety of ways. What...
View ArticleResponse to: “Selling the Fantasy of Fertility?”
Did anyone see the Op Ed piece in the NY Times, Selling the Fantasy of Fertility? While infertility is making its way into public consciousness, this article represented a skewed opinion of the good...
View ArticleThe New Face of Family by Janet Jaffe, Ph.D
Remember when we defined a family as having a mom, a dad, and 2.5 children? Back in the day of “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” our idea of family was simple and somewhat provincial....
View ArticleFrom Silver Bullets to Silver Linings: Celebrating Women and Community by...
I never thought that I would be grateful for being an infertile woman. For the ten years it took for me to finally have resolution, more than struggling with conception, I struggled to survive with my...
View ArticleEmbracing Change
To be born is to enter an evolutionary process of growth and change. We all grow in physical size and emotional capacity. We are all called upon to navigate the stages of life. Change is inevitable and...
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PCOS: the Need for Resiliency, the Route to Resiliency
PCOS does not preclude pregnancy. It does demands more patience for the extra time it may take to conceive. Therein resides a great deal of the problem, and at the same time, hints at the solution. How...
View ArticleWill This Story Tip the Scales in Favor of Ovum Donation for You?
Any decision to use a third party to create your family demands serious soul-searching. Not only have I been supporting couples in this quest for 35 years, but ironically, my own daughter was faced...
View ArticleLet it Out
In the decades that I’ve been supporting infertility patients, the phrase “I can’t stop crying” has been uttered much more often than not. Many times it comes with apologies, as if tears are wrong....
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WHEN ONE PLUS ONE DOES NOT EQUAL THREE
Couples Under Duress when Under the Stress of Infertility So there you are, a couple in love with being in love. Unicorns and rainbows abound as you plan on making love and making a baby. Bang … the...
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Infertility Mental Health Training
What Do Infertility Patients Want Psychotherapists to Know? Developing the Expertise that Infertility Patients Deserve “The therapist that I fired claimed to be an expert but she was not. I could tell...
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How To Locate Your Resilience When The Stress Of Infertility Feels Traumatic
Anyone who has ever frolicked in the ocean is wise to learn how to avoid getting knocked over by the waves. When a breaker threatens to inundate you with its powerful churning energy, diving under it...
View ArticleHypnosis for Infertility: 12 Facts You Need to Know
Medical treatment for infertility has created many miracles. Physicians are trained to manipulate hormones and join and implant patients’ seeds. Less understood is the power the patient has to...
View ArticleWhat Does if Feel Like to Have a Child via Surrogacy
Bringing Music Back into our Lives By Jennifer Frazier My husband and I were in the car together the day we found out we were pregnant. It was 8:16am on a beautiful Fall day nearly three years ago,...
View ArticleNew York Times – The Fountain of Youth
The New York Times Magazine carried a cover story on October 26th that was fantastic entitled The Fountain of Youth. The research has vast implications, including for those in the fertility challenge,...
View ArticleThe “Big D” and the “Big A”Maintaining Mental Health During the Holidays
If Depression and Anxiety are normal, though unwanted companions on the journey to parenthood for eleven months of the year, as they are for most in the fertility quest, the likelihood of the “Big D”...
View ArticleMisinformation & Missing Information: Couples’ Counseling for Infertility
One of the horrors of the fertility challenge is the build-up of tension in the very place where serenity is palliative, namely between the couple. Most couples pull together really well and in the end...
View ArticleInfertility and Change: New Year’s Resolution Revisited
Are you recognizing the need to make some changes in the process of adapting to the unwanted reality of the fertility challenge? And are you sick of all of the articles which predict failure to...
View ArticleA Valentine Opportunity During Infertility: Getting To The Heart Of The Matter
Here’s an idea for having a truly rewarding experience as a gift to each other on Valentine’s Day. Forget all the trappings: wine (which may be off limits now anyway), reservations at the hottest...
View ArticleThree Mind Body Techniques for Minimizing the Emotional Pain of Infertility
Without question, the number one strategy for dealing with the emotional pain of infertility has a statistically significant correlation with rates of pregnancy!* Do I have your attention? It is the...
View Article7 Ways to Weave Creativity into the Fertility Quest
I looked up the word fertile in the thesaurus. Synonyms such as lush, bountiful or copious have to do with productivity or multiplication. The verb form of fertile suggests causation as in conceive,...
View ArticleBye, Bye Privacy
(Excerpt from On Fertile Ground: Healing Infertility best-selling book by Helen Adrienne) If you want to get pregnant, you can’t stay in the comfort of your bedroom. Your sex life and your menstrual...
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The Pain of Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day for the Pre-Parent
When I was a little girl, I remember putting rolled up socks in my undershirt to create the “breasts” that a mommy has. This made playing house that much more authentic. Although it was hard to recruit...
View ArticleWays to Think About Seeking Solutions
Life on Planet Earth is not easy. Throughout history, there have been seers and soothsayers, clerics and philosophers who have guided their flock. I am trained in one of the 21st century’s versions of...
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“Lemon Aide” for The Wisdom of Soma and Soul
by Bette J. Freedson, LICSW, LCSW, CGP When a client comes in declaring, “I’m stuck!” what comes to your mind as you begin a diagnostic formulation? Which methodology do you choose to address the...
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The Best Decision We Ever Made
By Maya Grobel Moskin Not everyone has to make decisions about how they are going to make a baby. But a lot of people do. At least 7.3 million Americans who struggle to conceive have to make some kind...
View ArticleRelieving Nightmares with Daydreams: Coping with Infertility
.fusion-fullwidth-1 { padding-left: px !important; padding-right: px !important; }By Helen Adrienne, LCSW, BCD Infertility. The experience is a bad dream that couples may not wake up from for many...
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How Does Egg Freezing Work?
By Noreen Butler, the Founder of Carpool Fitness and Director of Business Development for Frozen Egg Bank Network Many women would like to wait to have a family until they are older and more...
View ArticleCreating Meaning From Madness
It seems timely, somehow, that I update and reprint an article that I wrote in the aftermath of 9/11, not so much because it was recently the 15th anniversary of the tragedy, but because this kind of...
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DAMN THOSE STATISTICS !#@*%!: Getting Infertility to Add Up
In common parlance, most folks these days know what is meant by left brain logical and right brain creative/intuitive thinking. You probably know what your stronger suit is. Maybe you feel a satisfying...
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