5 Benefits of Fertility Counseling

asian couple seeing fertility counseling

5 Benefits of Fertility Counseling

Life gets pretty intense in the wake of an infertility diagnosis. In addition to fielding the reality that your worst fears were confirmed, you’re thrust into a clinical regime of stats, figures, data, testing, results, and a calendar full of appointments – which doesn’t always honor the needs of your emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

To help you navigate all of the above and honor your heart and soul, we recommend fertility counseling to any patient pursuing fertility treatments. There are multiple reasons for this.

5 Things You’ll Gain from Fertility Counseling Support

First and foremost, while our physicians, nurses, and staff want to honor your heart, our primary mission is to help you conceive and give birth to a healthy, full-term baby. To do that, we do our work in “the clinical realm,” but there is much to be said about receiving support and good counsel from someone whose expertise is in the therapeutic realm.

In our practice’s nearly 50 combined years of experience, we’ve seen firsthand how fertility counseling provides the following benefits to our patients.

1. A space to process your feelings

We’re used to supporting patients through tough times. However, as we mentioned above, our job is primarily that of using the most up-to-date and innovative research findings and technological advancements to help our patients start their own families. This can result in years of testing and treatments, including failed treatments, and that inevitable sadness, frustration, and loss take its toll.

Above all else, your fertility counselor provides the space to hold and process all of your feelings and to give you the tools you need to make the best decisions for yourself and your partner.

2. Keep your romance alive

Unless you already knew conception would be a struggle, most couples enter the fertility testing world after a year or more of failed attempts to get pregnant at home. It’s not uncommon for couples to feel sex is more of a chore than an intimate, passionate, and fun way to connect and enjoy one another.

The combination of grief, sadness, anger, frustration, etc., also takes its toll on a couples’ connection. We often serve disconnected couples who have lost their romance along the way. Your future child(ren) deserves to have happy, healthy, and connected parents, so take advantage of fertility counseling to protect the sanctity of your relationship.

3. Manage stress, feelings of being overwhelmed, and grief

We consider a fertility counselor to be the first line of fertility support. Your conversations with family and friends are undoubtedly helpful, as are online and in-person support groups. However, fertility counselors are experts in the emotional and psychological realms.

Your fertility counselor is there to help you:

  • Manage stress
  • Vent and express emotions that are hard for others to hear or bear. A fertility counseling office is the space to express all of the feelings that feel “bad” to share or emote elsewhere.
  • Process and learn how to move forward with the seemingly unbearable grief that exists as the result of infertility factors, miscarriages, and failed treatment attempts

Therapists specializing in fertility counseling have all kinds of resources at their disposal to create personalized support tools and exercises to buoy you more smoothly along the bumpy fertility treatment path.

4. Make better decisions for yourself

Sometimes, individuals or couples become so blinded in their path to get pregnant at all costs they shut out all of the other potential ways to become parents. Your fertility counseling sessions offer a place to process the emotions that may have hijacked you into an unreasonable treatment path. You may find that working through all of your options – and the feelings they bring up for you – help to envision a clearer path forward. This may mean taking a break from treatments for a while or making the decision to use donor eggs or sperm to increase your fertility chances.

5. Looking ahead to the future

Your fertility journey doesn’t stop when your baby is born. Children are hungry for their birth story, and depending on the route you had to take, this may bring up complicated emotions you didn’t see coming. Your fertility counselor can prepare you ahead of time for the types of conversations that may come up and how to best honor your child’s feelings – especially if your treatment plan involves the use of donor sperm, eggs, or donated embryos.

Virginia Fertility & IVF believes it takes a village of healthcare providers to raise a family. We’re happy to provide referrals to some of the area’s most reputable fertility counseling professionals.

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