Not pregnant yet? You bet!

Step three: one has to wait and hope the embryos survive. The more embryos there are, the higher the chances for conception are. Then several of them are put into the uterus, the rest are frozen for the next time, and some of those that are already in the uterus, will be terminated to prevent multiple pregnancy. Church people think it’s murder, but there is no other way – no one will pay hundreds of thousands for lowering the chance of successful pregnancy, because of some moral requirements. There is a bank analogy again: when you pay off a loan, you’ll have to give up all the other projects in case you are not able to pay the interest – then what?

Step four: bear the baby. Not all people bear the child until the end of the term, as well as not all people pay the credit. 20% of the cases – that is how often the pregnancy happens after introducing “un-frozen” embryos (it’s mean number in Europe27). I don’t know the number of successful pregnancies, as well as the paid credits.

Step five: giving birth. The Head of pediatrics in our country states, that 75% of IVF babies are disabled and calls to the government to stop supporting this dead-end project28. It is worth saying about the women as well. They shall require medical help to cure the consequences of artificial insemination for a long time afterwards. The same thing happens with credits: those who stumbled up to the finish line have changed, their needs have changed. The apartment they needed 15—20 years ago and bought for the mortgage does not make them happy anymore. Or there was a financial crisis, so the huge investment in real estate that plummeted in value since then has lost all meaning. Now you have an apartment that doesn’t cost this kind of money – it’s no party. The bank customers realize that they have paid triple price.

Where am I going with this? Am I saying that those who take credits are immature dependable people? No, of course not. Taking a credit is a rather healthy solution and it disciplines, if a person reckoned his/her abilities, saw all the consequences of the choice and agreed to it. And he won’t blame the bank for not giving all the information on how he would feel paying back the debt for a long period of time. If someone is able to pay the credit with no fines and no harm to the other aspects of his/her life, it means it’s healthy behavior. However, there always were and always will be those who cannot live in balance.

For example, a person who can soberly consider his/her financial abilities won’t even touch credit cards that are send to mail boxes, that are designed to immature consumers forcing them to exceed their means and spend the money they don’t have. It’s absurd: we borrow the money to buy the things we don’t need to impress the people we don’t know.

How do we learn to live in balance financial-wise? The recipe is the same: to give a rod, not a fish. To help a person once, you need to give them money. To help them forever, you need to rebuild the way they think to restore the balance between “give” and “take”. The law of balance is simple: to decrease the spending and increase the income. Read books on financial literacy, attend workshops, find ways to earn more, invest in your personal growth. Reaching financial success is not an issue, it’s a task. And it’s an interesting and achievable task, too.

And now on the subject of women and IVF: is it the only way to become a mother? You are the only person who knows the answer. Read books on psychology, go to workshops, find alternative ways of healing, not only in the field of medicine, invest the energy of your psyche in yourself, your growth, become an expert on infertility, learn this problem inside out. Try all the options of solving the issue: what happens if you never become a mother? What are the alternatives? It is also life, fulfilled and worth living. It’s not an issue, but a task to realize your creative potential. And it’s an interesting and achievable task, too.

My book is an attempt to make women hear me: infertility is not the problem of your body, it’s a problem of undeveloped, immature personality, and it can be solved with the help of non-medical psychotherapy. It’s a way to save so much money, health, time, energy! It will not be easy, it’s hard work, although it looks innocent: just a conversation with a specialist for one hour a week. But not only will you keep your health, but you will also take care of it, take the power over your life in your hands, fill it with meaning and joy.

Just know that there is such an opportunity, but if you know this, don’t tell that you have tried EVERYTHING!

“Jumble”

Drugs and surgery are the major methods applied. One of the main problems to use drugs and surgery in healing is their numerous side-effects. It is only the influence on physical body that is taken into account when prescribing the drugs.

Barbara Ann Brennan

The story of Lida is a story of a woman who literary tried EVERYTHING. Now she is thirty-seven, she is joyful, vivacious woman who reminds of a sun not only by her spirit, but also by her brown eyes and bright-red hair. She came to a women’s psychotherapy group when she was thirty, by that time she had been trying to get pregnant for ten years. We used psychodrama method in our work with her, which is the way for the clients to play their situation, choosing the group members and staging the scenes from their own life.

So, Lida told she wanted to become a mother, but didn’t know what else to do, as she had tried everything for ten years.

– What else does it want? – she exclaimed desperately in tears. I tried to build on that phrase and told her:

– Ask it.

Lida chose two women for the role of herself and the baby and talked to the baby:

– What else do you want? Why don’t you come to me? What haven’t I done? I know everything about it. My poor entrails are cut and wounded, there is not a thing doctors didn’t do with them? I’m so tired!

– Then you don’t need to talk to the baby.

– To my entrails then?

– I think so. Who could play them?

– I need many people: uterus, tubes, ovaries.

– Choose as many as you need.

Looking attentively into the faces of the group members, Lida chose them for a new scene. The four women chosen for the roles of wounded entrails came to the group because they had miscarriages, lost pregnancies, abortions and infertility.

– Do you know how it all looks like?

– I’ve learned the anatomy over these years so well that I will make female organs with my eyes closed. But mine are all kinds of different, everything is wrung in and out.

I automatically make a mental note about the use of the verb “make”, which also has a figurative meaning: “make someone do something”. I just note it to check out my hypothesis: what if Lida’s infertility is a result of her strategy to make people do something? People are free and they don’t like to be made do anything. As well as entrails.

– Make the sculpture of your female organs of these people.

Lida puts the “uterus” in the middle, “tubes” and “ovaries” by the sides. The five women who play the roles of reproductive organs join their hands.

– Now wring like in a child’s game “Jumble”.

The women make the symmetrical orderly sculpture into a chaos of people while still holding each other’s hands. When Lida sees what happened she wipes her tears:

– These are my female organs…

– What is going on with you?

– I’m sad and I feel pity for myself.

– Tell me, when you look at this sculpture, does it remind you of something?

– Yes, it looks like our family: this is how I drag on my mother, my brother, two relatives who are like children to me, although they have their own parents…

– Now there are two ways: either get your organs or your family members in order.

– I will straighten it with the family soon just as well; my husband and I are moving to another city. I’d rather talk to my organs.

– So try to be a baby and get into the uterus.

Lida takes on a role of her baby and walks around the wrung sculpture:

– How can I get in… No, it’s not what it takes. I need to talk to my uterus and ask her to let it in.

– Do it.

Lida stops talking, it is obvious, something is going on in her mind. Then she stands on her knees and tells to her “uterus” crying”:

– I’m sorry I did this to you… I thought if I go to doctors and they do some procedures, this would mean I was doing the right thing, nothing else was required. I didn’t take a moment to think what it was what you needed…

– You can ask it what it needs.

– It doesn’t need anything at this point, she is used to the pain, so it doesn’t feel anything.

– That is what you decided for it. Exchange roles with it.

Lida exchanges places with the uterus and stands in the wrung sculpture, yikes and laughs:

– Yeah, now I get it!

Other parts of the sculpture who have been standing in uncomfortable poses for several minutes now are tired of waiting for Lida to understand that she needs to untie the knot.

– Tell us, what is it that you get?

– I need to un-wring.

– Let your stand-in who plays you ask for forgiveness and you listen to it in the role of the uterus.

The member of the group who plays Lida addresses the uterus and repeats Lida’s words about being guilty and asks to forgive her. Lida listens to these words in the role of her uterus and says:

– I’m so tired, it’s OK, it’s water under the bridge, I’m glad you understand me now.

– Now, go out and untie.

Lida unties the “jumble” and puts the participants in an orderly structure like five Olympic rings: ovaries and uterus are in the front and tubes on the back, all of them are still holding hands.

– This is how it goes.

– Now be the baby and try to get into the uterus.

Lida in the role of the baby crawls as an egg: going between the legs of the women who comprise the sculpture and finds herself in the uterus.

– Here I am, all attached.

– Now exchange roles and be yourself again.

Lida becomes herself, now she walks to the sculpture to metaphorically place the organs and the baby within herself, everybody sits down.

– What do you feel?

– I feel good… my back hurts, I need someone to stand behind me… My husband!

– Choose your husband, let him stand behind you.

– I need him to hug me. Now it’s warm.

– How does your baby feel?

The woman who plays the baby:

– I feel so good here!

– Shall we finish? Take the roles off.

“Jumble”: commentary

We are invited to take a different view of our symptoms. Our first, natural desire is to suppress them, but we must learn to read them as cues to the wounded wishes of our soul, or as the autonomous protest of our soul over our mismanagement.

James Hollis

This session with Lida happened seven years ago. Now I would have done it differently, I would have put more emphasis on the feelings of the client. However, what was done was enough to see the psychological reasons for her infertility. The climax of the session happened when Lida realized what she did to her reproductive system and expressed it as: “I thought if I go to doctors and they do some procedures, this would mean I was doing the right thing, nothing else was required. I didn’t take a moment to think what it was what you needed…”

Now Lida understood for the first time in her life, that, firstly, her health was her responsibility, not the doctors’; secondly, that it was necessary to know the needs of one’s body and to listen to oneself and to one’s body, and not to undergo standard recommendations and supposedly necessary and useful procedures. To do so, it is necessary to redirect one’s energy from the outside to the inside, develop one’s intuition, learn how to read the language of one’s body, get to know one’s own feelings. This is not something our culture offers to us, and living this way is unusual for many people.

What is it that our bodies want? It’s been comparatively a short time since Bert Hellinger’s Love’s Hidden Symmetry29 was published. Its main idea is that every person within the family system has a place he has an inherent right for. If he is deprived of that place for some reason, it ends badly for the whole system. The same works for entrails. Each one of them has a place, a territory, boundaries that are as sacred as the borders of a country. Any intervention is possible only upon obtaining the “permission” of the organ; just as well as when going to another country one should obtain a visa.

Violating boundaries

Say, what good two kidneys are?

Better a kidney and a car.

Internet meme

Unfortunately, medical interventions are violation of the boundaries without the “permission” from the body. I know this both from my experience of psychotherapy sessions and my own. For example, there was a time when I had a blood sample taken to check out my hormones and prescribe the treatment. When a nurse took out the needle from my vein, she accidentally dropped some blood on my arm. She took a wet piece of cloth from the sink (usually they clean the sink with such cloths) and wiped the blood from my skin. I was told return to have my blood sample taken one more time in a week. For this whole week I could not shake the disgusted memory of the wet cloth. Besides, I couldn’t forgive myself for being so tactful as to keep silent, instead of telling about my resentment. The day before the blood test the skin on the inside of my elbow was covered in red itching spots. When I understood that this was the way my body reacted to the procedure and to upcoming hormonal treatment, I didn’t go to the hospital any more, a started looking for other ways of treatment and I did find them.

Personally, I’m not lucky with medical procedures, lots of bad things happen to me. When I had my eczema treated with quartz lamp, I made it worse by getting my leg burnt. The thing was that the lamp was loose on its pole and was coming down bit by bit, but I didn’t notice as I was wearing safety goggles. After curing the burn I’ve got another prescription for injections that should have been done according to a special pattern: the dose of the drug should have been increased from one to ten units. The nurse who supposedly was very familiar with this drug didn’t read the prescription and started with the maximum dosage of the drug. As a result, my whole body was covered in eczema…

If I studied psychology when I was young, maybe it would have been different. However, I doubt it. It is due to the negative experience that I was able to hear my body and had some insights as a result of difficult and hard inner work.

“Jumble”: post scriptum

But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.

Leo Tolstoy

I guess, Lida also needed to get there. I didn’t hear from her for a long time, and then I got an email from her:

“It’s been three years since I moved. Several days ago I heard that you were planning on visiting our city. I was reviewing the program for the conference and found your theme. I would be glad to see you if you have time”.

I used this opportunity to ask about the children. Lida said that her husband and she got divorced as he left her “for a twenty-four year old”; that she does not have children, she was “married to her work”. Sometimes she was perfectly happy, sometimes she missed Siberia, her friends. She bought an apartment, she took a mortgage. She joked about this: “In Russia we exchanged death penalty for mortgage”.

In a couple of years I received one more message from Lida:

“You may congratulate me on a new husband!”

“Yes, I got that already, congratulations! And on the new second name as well!”

And finally, the long expected message:

“Hello, Rimma. I wanted to boast to you that I gave birth to a boy. I know you will be glad for me. Now I cannot imagine how I lived without him all these years”.

“Lida, all these years I was afraid to ask you if you had children? I remember you session on this subject. Was it IVF or you made it on your own? I’m not just glad, I’m happy!!! I have a grandson, he is six months, it’s a bliss!”

“Yes, I saw the photos of your grandson, he is great! I had IVF done in Moscow, my second husband literary forced me to go through with it. I didn’t even dream of it, I just lived enjoying my life. I gave birth on my own, I tried so hard and listened to what doctors told me to do. When I was pregnant, I read my notes of your lectures on developmental psychology, I try not to become a “crazy mommy”.

Now I think I didn’t just have to go through it all, but I have also truly accept this, so that the pain stopped being so painful, pity dissolved in love and all of this became my valuable experience. I am very grateful to God and to doctors”.

Skeptics might say that this is the case when no psychotherapy worked. What did work was the infamous IVF and there were no negative consequences! It is both so and not so. Yes, IVF did work, I’m very happy for Lida. However, now it is not the same Lida who once addressed the doctors for the first time about her regular sex life with one partner for two years not resulting in pregnancy. The girl was healthy at that point, at least physically. Usually, sterility in such cases is a result of subconscious wish not to have a baby for some reason. In Lida’s case I suppose it was due to her unconscious wish to push aside the problems of her five relatives who behaved like babies and take care of her own baby in her own family. This desire conflicted with the mistrust to her partner on whom, as Lida had guessed, she could not rely on. Later this lack of trust was confirmed when her husband left her for another woman.

If we turn back to the moment when Lida went to doctors, one can only regret that she had a wrong address: as we all remember, medical procedures did not bring the desired results. What she did need at that point was to see her controversial situation. However, medical system gives a chance to every customer who is healthy enough (I remind you that it “helps” not ill women, but healthy women who made it through numerous difficult tests!) to undergo standard methods that are useless in the best case scenario, and it the worst case scenario they damaging to women’s health.

Robert Mendelsohn is sure that treating patients with today’s standard medical methods can seldom be effective, it is often more dangerous than the disease it is supposed to treat. It happens because modern medicine went too far using the methods designed for extreme situations on daily basis. Should we be surprised that when we come to a doctor we are treated not like a person who needs help, but rather like a potential consumer of miracle factory products?30 There is some bitter irony in the fact that the doctor is perfectly aware of the cost of these modern and useless procedures!

Why did IVF worked when Lida’s body was deprived of the ability to function naturally because of all the interventions? Why hadn’t it worked before? Unlike women who spend their lives in a race for conception, Lida accepted her life and everything in it. She didn’t bet on becoming a mother in her second marriage, her life was filled with her art. If that try wasn’t a success it wouldn’t have broken her heart and wouldn’t have bankrupted her emotionally. The thing is that the procedure is useless, if a woman is not ready to open herself to new experience. It’s not the procedure that causes the problems, but the state on one’s mind. Conscious choice does not equal the choice made out of fear and desperation. It is totally different.

How about a kiss?

Artificial insemination specialist leaves the farm after having his job done. A cow puts its head in the window of his car and says: “How about a kiss?”

A joke

Angela, a thirty year old woman, has endometriosis, she has IVF done for free due to the federal program. She has already had two unsuccessful tries, although the third one was made just two days ago she knows in advance that the embryo won’t survive. Of all the eggs they had only one was fertilized and it was underdeveloped: instead of dividing eight times by a certain moment, it divided only three times. Embryo specialist said not to give it much hope.

But Angela came with a different problem. She was highly impressed by a handsome doctor who performed the IVF. When he had his job done, he said: “You’ll spend this night with me”. The ambiguity of his words and his tone caused confusion in her mind.

– Can you imagine? He didn’t say “You will stay in the hospital till tomorrow”, he said “You’ll spend this night with me”! – told Angela excitedly. – If he only asked me, if he only gave me a hint, I would have given it to him without giving it much thought!

Angela looks in front of her as if not seeing anything, rubs her temples and says frustrated:

– But I’m happily married, my husband is such a nice guy, we are so close! Can you explain what is the deal with this obsession?

I have thought about this frequently, as a matter of fact. I mean, about in vitro fertilization. The process that is deeply personal, spiritual and sexual that joins two people as one and makes them parents, becomes distant and impersonal inside a hospital. There is no passion-charged field necessary to conceive new life in the mechanical procedure.

Is it possible that the feelings Angela told me about are normal in an un-normal situation? And she tries to compensate it with her behavior? I don’t know the answer, but nothing prevents me from assuming it. The man who fertilized the egg and put the embryo in is a part of the sacrament now. He becomes very close, but he is still a stranger. How a woman is supposed to overcome this estrangement and resolve the conflict between the two roles he performs: a doctor and a participant of bringing new life into this world? Unconsciously Angela found a way: to fall in love with him to humanize the process of in vitro fertilization.

I totally agree with Jeremy Taylor when he says that each of us is born as a result of a sexual contact, so in this sense sexuality deeply resonates with religious and philosophical problems. So, modern procedures, such as artificial insemination, amniocentesis31, ability to determine the sex of a baby and possible abnormalities, in vitro fertilization, complicated devices for maintaining life that allow to “give birth to an embryo” without growing it in mother’s uterus, have created moral dilemmas that can’t be solved, unless the un-measurable elements of human life are considered as real and important as the devices that make these procedures possible32.

If two people are bound by love and respect for each other, this does good to the future baby, so nothing is impossible.

Chapter 4

Saving oneself is one’s own business

Responsibility and conception

I won’t play coy and say I’m clever.

I haven’t created anything ever.

My inventions haven’t won any gold,

But just “cause I was busy and had a cold.

Internet meme by Better-days

I want to scream out loud: always take responsibility when you have an opportunity to do so! I would put it even more strictly: always take responsibility, create this opportunity for yourself. Responsibility is your power to rule over your life. Sometimes people think that responsibility is a heavy unbearable load that is better to be passed on to somebody else. But when we give up the responsibility, we give up the power.

I pretty much copied the paragraph above from my other book on financial success. If you want to have a lot of money, take the responsibility. This principal might be even more important in case of medical interventions, because it’s about your health and your life. Robert Menleshon states that doctors’ strategy is to “blame it on the victim”, to disguise most of their sins, including forcing on the medication, hysterectomy and cesarean that their patients didn’t need and that were not necessary. He thinks that a woman who wishes to be healthy should learn how to shield herself against dangerous and unnecessary medicines. Don’t wait that a doctor does it for you. Ask to give instruction to each medicine. Pay special attention to warnings and side effects. If you don’t like want you see, make your doctor prove his point of view. If he is unable or unwilling to do so, maybe it’s time to discuss it with somebody else33