Not pregnant yet? You bet!

Not pregnant yet? You bet!

Rimma Efimkina

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.

Gospel of Thomas

Translator Irina Gift

Illustrator Igor Zakharov

© Rimma Efimkina, 2020

© Irina Gift, translation, 2020

© Igor Zakharov, illustrations, 2020

ISBN 978-5-0051-7791-9

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Table on contents

Foreword

There are many reasons why people can’t have children. According to the dominant in our society materialistic point of view on childbirth the issue is of purely technical nature and can be fixed like fixing a car. However, cases described in this book show that these issues have psychological reasons. And they can be fixed if we see the meaning of what is going on and understand it. Usually, if we do, any medical interventions become unnecessary.

I own a whole collection of babies’ photos born by “infertile” women as a result of our both individual and group psychotherapy meetings. I’m really proud of my collection. Besides, it is a piece of “evidence” proving that psychotherapy works. “Impartial” doctors diagnosed these women with fertility issues. The diagnosis included infertility, missed miscarriage, repeated miscarriage. These were numerous sad stories from very different women of childbearing age. And all of them had a happy ending.

It’s not such a wonder after all, when you know how to work with psychosomatic health issues. The main thing here is to listen attentively to their stories. I listen to a woman telling me about her symptoms, I watch for non-verbal cues, I observe if what she says matches what she does, and look for mismatches, inconsistency, incongruence. These are signs of internal conflict that is represented on the physical level in the form of blockage in the body. Catharsis is what happens when we find blocking mindset and replace it with activating mindset. Grateful for this, the body starts working as Nature and God intended it to. When I say God here, I don’t imply religious, but metaphorical meaning of this word – the Creator. If God made humans in his image and likeness, in this case everyone can be a creator. Any woman is a creator, because she can create people in the image and likeness of herself.

In this book I tell more than thirty stories of my clients. At times I quote my colleagues’ cases and observations, works of fiction, as well as women’s discussions of these issues on the Internet to illustrate my interpretation of a particular case. What I would like to show with the help of these stories is how holistic approach – which says we are whole mentally, emotionally and physically – works in childbirth.

I did not mean to dedicate this book to childbirth alone, because it is just one aspect of psychosomatic health issues. However, subconsciously I knew it was going to be a book, otherwise why would I write down by memory all these psychotherapy sessions each time I came back from my workshops? And now I opened my folder titled “Infertility” and read through the stories I had collected over 15 years of psychotherapy practice. Most of the woman became mothers and gave birth. It’s time my child – this very book – saw the light.

As I was writing this book there were numerous synchronous events that helped me ponder over the subject I was writing about. For example, the beginning and the end of the first draft coincided with the beginning of pregnancy and the due date of out five-year-old Siamese cat Kate. Very much to everyone surprise it gave birth to three black kittens. Although their father was a white blue-eyed cat named Deposit. I guess this can be interpreted as “man plans, God laughs” and regardless of what my initial plan for the book had been it turned out to be not quite as “white” as I thought it would.

Another synchronicity blast came from the women whose stories comprise this book: they reappeared in my life after being absent for several years, so I could discuss their stories and ask for permission to publish their cases with their names changed. Most of them were very enthusiastic about my idea of the book, and I’m very grateful for that. My sincere gratitude goes to all of you – for your courage to share your story with me and the readers of my book. This book would not exist if it wasn’t for you, you are its part and parcel!”

I couldn’t help but try to have fun and include humorous Internet memes as epigraphs, because they convey the meaning in a creative humorous way. Besides, I singled out blocking and activating mindsets and put it at the end of each story, as they sum up the essence of each session. They are easy to understand even if you have no special training in psychology and they are useful just as they are.

Chapter 1

Becoming a mother: psychological initiation experience

“It’s hard to get through”

Give a hungry man a rod – not a fish!

Proverb

I received an email from Marina who was my client for three years:

– Rimma, I’m pregnant! I’m so grateful to you every day of my life!

I rejoiced when I read this: yay-yay-yay! At last! I knew it would happen! But then I remembered that Marina left her husband two weeks ago. I tapped on the keyboard excitedly:

– Marina, but who is the father? – and then I remembered I had forgotten to congratulate her, I wrote hurriedly: – I’m so happy for you anyway, congratulations!

– Thanks. It’s my husband. I try to keep it a secret. I had stopped myself from writing to you three times, but then I did it anyway.

Of course one wants to share their joy. I also feel tempted to boast that I was part of this miracle. My bad, I know this is not the right thing to do. We, psychotherapists, create conditions so that the client could increase the level of their consciousness, but nothing is guaranteed. It’s their work, their choice, their life, not ours. However, when my clients have breakthroughs like this – this is my reward for the contribution I made. I rejoice together with Marina and I recall what happened three years ago.

It was the first day of personal-growth workshop. Participants introduce themselves and told whatever they thought fit about themselves to the group. Marina was thirty-four, styled, red-headed, she told about her achievements and then she stopped abruptly when she came to the issue of being a mom, her face turned red. Her husband and her had been married for more than ten years, but couldn’t have a baby. To my question: “What stands in the way?” Marina snaped at me with her brown eyes wide open:

– Why? Should I go into medical stuff?!

I’m not surprised by this kind of reaction, it’s rather typical. Our people go in therapy when all traditional ways of solving the problem didn’t work. They wasted a lot of their time, felt a lot of pain and suffered a lot, spent a lot of money. My question takes them back to square one where they started, so it is viewed as being arrogant and they feel irritated and even angry.

Difference between patient and client

People are so dependent on doctors, medical research, vaccines, and their faith in pharmaceuticals; and so afraid to take responsibility for their own lives.

Tatyana Demidova

Why do I think the medical approach doesn’t always work? For starters, when dealing with doctors, a woman is called a patient. The word patient comes from Latin (patiens – one who has to be patient, to suffer) meaning a person undergoing medical observation or some kind of treatment because of some disease. Apart from the emotional component (suffering) the word patient has another one, and this is a person being passive, treated like an object. This way a person is supposed to wait while someone does something to change the situation.

Psychologists prefer calling the people they work with clients, not patients. In Ancient Rome a client (comes from Latin cliens, pl. clients) was a free citizen protected by their patron. Client is a general word for a person using some kind of service.

People have been taught by our mass-culture that someone will do something for their wellbeing. They expect that someone will solve their problems, give advice, sympathize with them, write a prescription or judge their offenders. However, if we agree that a person subconsciously created the situation they are in, there should be other ways to help them deal with the consequences of this situation. What would be helpful is activating their internal resources, so that they could deal with the situation all by themselves. This means giving them a rod, not a fish – that’s the way they can become mature, independent and self-sufficient.

When I ask my client a question on what the doctors said, I would like to hear her version of the story, so that I understand how she interacts with people. There is one and the same strategy underlying her interactions with people and interactions with her own body. If this strategy is not efficient, she could change it, and then – and only then – do both her interactions with people and her symptoms change.

“Don’t see any obstacles”

Take responsibility for the things that are coming to you from fate. You can find the principle and learn something, and you can do this in every aspect of your life.

Ruediger Dahlke

I explained this to Marina and the rest of the group as well as I could, and she agreed to investigate her symptom. I asked her to tell about it in her own words, not medical terms, or – still better – show. Marina told that an egg won’t come out of the ovary, that is why it cannot be fertilized and go down to the uterus. Marina asked all members of the group to stand in a circle representing an ovary, and she was an egg inside this circle. She easily broke through latched hands of the group members and came out. Then I asked her to show the rest. She just “jumped” to the uterus. I was surprised at how that was even possible. Then she remembered that she had to go through the tube first, so she arranged the people and went through. She took some group members to make a uterus, chose a midwife and “was born”. Nothing about that was difficult. I was surprised and told her:

– I don’t see any reasons why you cannot get pregnant. Look for yourself: the egg came out of the ovary, no problem after this either…

– Well, yes…

– Let’s play this again, what if we missed something?

We played the scene again – no problems this time either. Then I asked her to choose a stand-in for herself and watch the scene from outside. Marina, one hand on her hip and the other touching her chin, frowned at the scene as her stand-in broke through the vicious circle.

– Marina, what part of your life does this scene remind you of?

She pondered a while and then answered:

– This reminds me of my relationships with my mom. She overprotects me. It is difficult for me to get through my mother’s restrictions.

– Chose someone to play the role of your mother and tell her this.

We played a scene where Marina talks to her mother that she feels fear and anger, when she controls her grownup daughter, but her feelings weren’t expressed as eagerly as one might have expected. Obviously, this wasn’t anger. To intensify her feelings I offered to play a fantasy scene and chose someone to play the role of her own child. This was just it: her eyes watered immediately. Marina felt overwhelming bitterness when she projected her relationships with her mother to her future relationships with her unborn child. Marina said that the baby was a girl, so both scenes – her dialogue with her mother and with her daughter were the same.

Without even realizing it, the first thing Marina told her daughter that she would take care and protect her, so that she wouldn’t get hurt. The group laughed at this – it was amazing how the mother’s pattern of behavior that made Marina suffer was precisely mirrored in her relationships with her daughter, I suggested exchanging roles. When Marina felt like a little girl overprotected by her mother, she felt like protesting and rebelling: “I don’t want this!” – “And what do you want?” – “I just want to be loved!”

Marina barely moved when she was watching stands-in playing this same scene from outside. I asked her if she wanted to change something in the scene. She answered that she wanted mother and daughter to give each other a hug. Stands-in were relieved to do so, later they said that this was exactly what they wanted to do themselves.

– And now try on the roles of the mother and of the baby and experience how close they are.

At the end of the session Marina took all the roles off the group members. When she came back the next day, she shared a story. She was staying at some friends of hers who had a two-year-old daughter. Once, when the girl fell down, Marias startled so abruptly that she actually scared the girl whose parents were more relaxed about her falling down. So the girl avoided Marina. However, when Marina stayed at her friends after our psychodrama session, the girl suddenly changed her attitude towards her: she sat in her lap for the whole evening playing with her. I joked about it:

– See, if you can tempt other people’s children into coming to you now, one day you will “tempt” your own baby into coming to you!

“It’s hard to get through”: commentary

– Hi, mom, I’m coming home. Should I buy anything?

– Yes, buy your own apartment and move the hell away from my house!

Internet meme

So, what happened during marina’s session? I believe that subconsciously a person interacts both with people and inanimate things according to a pattern. This means that if Marina’s mother controlled her daughter, Marina learned that this was the way to interact with people, this is why she controls her close ones. And she does the same to her own body. If we take her phrase “An egg won’t come out of the ovary”, and replace the word egg with Marina’s name, we’ll get that Marina herself won’t come out of the boundaries once set by her mother.

Now, when the reason the interaction fails is clear, it’s time to do the hard thing – to change one’s behavior. In Marina’s case it is necessary for her to grow up, and cross the boundaries, cross the metaphorical threshold, and let her future children cross the threshold as well. There are several such “thresholds” in our lives: egg comes out of the ovary, embryo comes out of the uterus, child comes out of their parents’ care and out of their home, soul comes out of the body… These are the great transitions, and it is really difficult and scary to go beyond into the unknown. We will get back to that.

“It is hard to get through”: post scriptum

The disease represents your unfulfilled longing. So, above all else, use your illness to set yourself free to do what you have always wanted to do.

Barbara Ann Brennan

We had this session when Marina was thirty four. Now she is thirty-seven, and many things changed over the years. When I wrote this down it’s was just as if I knew that I would need these notes for this book. Now it’s funny to read the words about crossing the threshold. Step by step Marina came to be independent. A year ago she made her own workshop for participants of a psychotherapy retreat and when she came back she started her own business – her beloved brainchild.

Finally, her third bold step was to question her own marriage that lasted more than ten years, but still had not resulted in having children. Marina decided to leave – she rented an apartment and moved away from her husband – literary crossed the threshold! She said she wanted to live alone for a while and try to understand who she was, what it was that she wanted, what she could do. She found the apartment for just a penny after one phone call – some friends of hers were going away for a long period of time and asked her to watch over their two-bedroom fully furnished place. All of it was very easy to do. It is in the quiet emptiness of her friends’ apartment that she understood that she wanted to live with her husband and with her husband only. She chose him unconsciously back then, but now she knew: he was the one she chose all by herself.

One week after she came back to her husband, she found out she was six weeks pregnant. It seems like the decision to be independent was already there, so, when it happened, the woman was able to be fully creative.

When the first emotions went away, I asked her a question:

– So, now what?

– What do you mean “what” – I came back. I understood that people do to me exactly what I was doing to people. I did not value my husband, the efforts he made trying to keep our relationships together. When I moved, we talked for two hours on the phone per day. When I realized I did not value him, I cried all day, and then all this happened… It’s amazing how things turned out, I’m shocked both with what happened and with myself.

– Does your husband know?

– Of course! He COULDN’T be happier, he asks what he should do to take care of me and to support me.

– Marina, I think it’s great!

– Rimma, it’s a MIRACLE, I cry when I think about it. I tried like 154 times and nothing. And now it happened just like this, it’s wonderful! My business, my pregnancy! I wanted to share this news with you. I thought you will be happy too.

– I am! But I don’t agree that it all happened just like that. You made it happened, you pushed your limits – you changed the way you think!!!

– I believe I should change it more in the future, but this is the whole other story. Thank you for helping me.

By the way, try and guess the sex of the baby Marina is expecting. Of course it’s a girl!

Infertility reasons: psychological and medical points of view

The obstetricians say that menstruation is the weeping of a disappointed uterus.

Eric Bern

As mentioned above, psychologists and health professionals view the reasons for infertility differently. Health professionals imply a more materialistic approach approaching conception as a result of biochemical factors and seeing uterus as a lab with good conditions for the fetus to live in. They take childbearing under control (and preferably, the conception as well) as soon as possible to prevent any malfunctions in baby-making process.

Those malfunctions are accounted and pigeonholed just as well. Medically speaking, there are seven physiological reasons why women could be infertile: blockage in or lack of both fallopian tubes, adhesion process in the pelvis, endocrine disorders, pathology or lack of uterus, endometriosis, antibodies to sperm, chromosomal abnormality. This is the text I took from Wikipedia shortened by the factor of one hundred.

However, I copied the eighth reason carefully: “Psychological reasons for infertility could include both conscious and subconscious wish not to have a baby. Sometimes it’s fear of pregnancy and giving birth, sometimes it’s the man the woman does not want to see as the father of her children, sometimes it’s resistance to bodily changes pregnancy could lead to, etc.” I’m glad that they do not discount the eighth – psychological – reason, although they make it sound overly simplistic and thus nonessential. However, if there was no this psychological component in creating new live, women could long be relieved of pregnancy and its side-effects and replaced by mechanical uteruses.

I had a lot of thoughts in this regard that strived to be written down for a long time. I noticed that even though health professionals are aware of psychological reasons for infertility, generally they do not account for them, still treating it in medical and not psychological ways. For instance, even if a woman is healthy, but does not get pregnant within a year or two, health professionals prescribe pharmacological treatment or a surgery. It is not entirely fair, because they take the bread out of our mouths. I’m not offended, however, because women who have some of the seven reasons mentioned above do get pregnant and do give birth after psychological sessions. And sometimes even after huge medical interventions, which I would personally put as a whole separate reason for infertility: medical control on its own might make conception and childbearing problematic.

This same Marina I mentioned above is a great example. When she came to one of the groups twenty weeks pregnant, the members of the group were excited to hear her story, Marina told her “medical history” in her own words:

– I always had troubles with my periods. Ever since I was nineteen I took hormones to keep them going. However, as soon as I started my own business it magically came about all on its own!

I smiled as I was listening to Marina. This is so obvious that now Marina is the mistress of her own business and her own life. She does not work for an employee as she used to, she creates according to her life task.

Speaking about the hormones, to be honest I’m really concerned about hormonal therapy. The word “hormone” itself kind of sounds like the word “harmony”. I know that etymologically they are different, however, the right hemisphere of our brain does not think logically, it uses images and associations: so, hormones regulate certain processes in different organs of our body to sustain the homeostasis, i.e. harmony. When a woman stops counting on her own system in sustaining homeostasis and turns to external ways to sustain the homeostasis, she gives up her responsibility for her own harmony and becomes dependable. I believe that the healing process should be about taking back the responsibility for one’s own body and environment. Organizing her own business was for Marina her way of sustaining homeostasis – it was her brainchild causing her a number of feelings, both negative (anxiety, fear, anger, sadness) and positive (joy, pride, believing in herself).

When Marina came to my psychological retreat this summer, her periods stopped again. She was shocked, but it did not occur to her that this could be pregnancy. The group was amazed at this:

– But why? This is so natural: no periods, you go buy a pregnancy test!

– Well, yeah… It is natural for you. When I don’t get my period for me this means my hormones are failing me yet again, and this means hospitals, doctors, yet again. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was. I tried everything for the 14 years! I even had laparoscopic ovarian surgery1, but it didn’t do me much good.

– Having perfectly healthy ovaries cut?

– They say, it helps some women to get pregnant.

I have to say I am suspicious about messing with nature’s way with the help of surgery as well as about hormonal therapy. Today’s medicine enabled people to live dozens of years longer and surgeries saved many, let’s be thankful for that. However, in Marina’s case it was not live-or-die situation. How strongly a woman must want to have a baby to go into surgery with anesthesia which, if successful, will give a chance to have a baby, if unsuccessful, however, will severely damage her health!

Here is the list of side effects for laparoscopic ovarian wedge resection (and any other surgery for that matter): anesthesia side effects; internal injuries due to trocars being inserted; blood vessel injuries; influence of gas; complications due to infections; hematoma and seroma; transitory fever; pelvic adhesions; incisional hernia2.

Still, women just go for it. On the one hand, their belief in traditional methods is so strong they refuse acknowledging the damaging consequences and ineffectiveness, and do not look for other ways to overcome the issue. On the other hand, women do not believe in themselves, do not believe that getting their mind in order is a reliable and effective way to do this! Sometimes women spend years trying this and that until they finally find what works.

Marina wrote to me, among other things: “I remembered your word during the session ‘I don’t see why you cannot get pregnant’. That’s because the problem was in my head. I clung for those words when trying to get through!”