Conception Crisis & Intimacy

Trying to conceive, fertility struggles, IVF and fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, miscarriage, termination, pregnancy complications, birth trauma…

Some couples, when they come to me with intimacy struggles know where it started. For some, it’s from moving through the layers of the subconscious, the emotional parts of themselves, that we begin to understand what’s really playing out in the relationship and ultimately the bedroom…

He might have an ‘erection problem’.

She might ‘struggle to orgasm’.

His libido or desire has ‘fallen off a cliff and can’t seem to get it back’.

She ‘wants to be touched but withdraws when he does’.

He works late and has lost interest in home life.

She has become overly critical.

What we often don’t understand is the unfelt and unexpressed emotions of a journey can have a huge impact in our lives and bodies. It can influence how close we feel to someone. It can feed into the unkind stories we have about ourselves. Our bodies hold onto it. Sometimes, we have shoved it so very far down and covered it with a layer of denial that we don’t even recognise that there is an emotion still there. Still requiring attention. Still asking to be acknowledged and accepted.

Maybe we don’t share because we don’t want to be a burden. Maybe we don’t feel we ‘deserve’ to have that emotional experience. Maybe we tell ourselves that we’re OK. Maybe we put another person’s needs before our own. Maybe we think we are protecting someone else. Maybe we have never even learnt to acknowledge our own emotional experience so shutting it down is a habit to protect us.

Until… not sharing actually causes a ‘problem’.

A book I share so often with clients is the book ‘Pathway to Surrender’ by David Hawkins. To summarise in the simplest terms what the book is about, it’s a full permission slip that whatever thought you have, whatever feeling you have is absolutely valid. And, no matter how bitter, angry and resentful, trying to ‘love and light’ your way out of it is bypassing. What happens when we bypass is we are just ignoring it. But it’s still there. And you know what happens to emotions and thoughts that are there still there? We behave from those low vibration thoughts unconsciously. They drive us, there’s that famous quote attributed to Carl Jung:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

It is there, it is moving you forward so the task is to learn to be with it. Having those thoughts and feelings doesn’t make you bad, it makes you human. And, we can experience conflicting thoughts and feelings at the same time - it’s normal and OK. It’s what we do with it all that’s important.

Two things (and more) can be true at the same time. You can absolutely love your partner and how he shows up for you, you want to be with him and love him. And, you can be so angry and resentful of his behaviour during the IVF process that you push him away.

You can absolutely love and adore your wife. And, you can recoil when she touches you because of the fun times which eventually turned into on-demand performance have left you feeling like an object and used.

But what we do is we try to focus on the ‘good’. Because ‘I am a bad person if I think of my partner in this way’. And the thing is, by ignoring those unexpressed emotions and thoughts they don’t disappear - they linger. Every time something is said or doesn’t work out in exactly the way you want it pops up. You react or withdraw from that place of hurt. Because that hurt desires to be witnessed. To be seen.

I am not saying and advocating for sharing everything with your partner, because there are some pains which aren’t for them to hold but for you to process independently - that are your responsibility. And then there are some pains which need to be witnessed - in a held container where you both learn to listen to each other and share your experience from ‘I’ statements instead of from blame.

What I am saying is that sitting with the emotion, welcoming it, giving it space to be, noticing your thoughts and the stories you have created and accepting them as a part of your experience means that they disperse, lessen… they are less of a burden.

And with that you can begin to soften, relax, take a breath and trust - yourself and your partner.

The fertility/infertility journey is a complicated one - so many approach it with enthusiasm. Imagining a future life, watching other people’s lives and putting themselves in their shoes. The disappointment from what doesn’t come to fruition and the deep, deep heart aching grief that holds down the chest and moves into the pit of the stomach.

Then there is the process of conception which is ‘successful’. During the process a disconnection in the relationship as sex turned from intimacy to mechanics. The challenges of parenthood that accompany it which the ‘fortunate ones’ feel they shouldn’t voice because they are ‘lucky’ and should appreciate the gift they have been given of parenthood.

For some it can be the unexpected news. News they didn’t choose. News that shocks or surprises. And it can leave you having to make decisions and choices that you weren’t ready for. Doubting yourself, mind in a spiral.

So if you never get a moment to pause while in the process to, well, process, you hold onto all of that. I share my own personal journey here in this article when I received a call to say my second child had a high chance of having Down’s Syndrome. What holding onto it all and not sharing did for me and my body.

For the men who were witness to and experienced a traumatic birth or they themselves found the birthing process traumatic (even if it was ‘successful’) can read about it here.

But this is the thing - what we ‘think’ we should feel vs what we actually do are different.

The man who feels guilty that he is happy his partner chose termination when he was already feeling pressure to provide for a family that felt already too big.

The mother who didn’t get the birth she wanted because she was rushed into surgery and doesn’t trust her body but feels like she should be grateful for her ‘healthy baby’, is actually feeling deep grief.

The new father whose sperm wasn’t mobile enough to get his partner pregnant and feels he should be happy with the baby he now has but wonders if he will ever feel fully connected to the child or if this is just a phase. He daren’t share that fear with her so is lonely in this thought and questions his ability to be a partner and a father.

The woman who spent too long in a dead-end relationship hoping he would have children when he wouldn’t and when she finally meets the right man, a really great man that adores her - but her fertility is saying that she’s ‘left it too late’… the bittersweet.

The father who’s happy to be a dad but who also misses his partner and doesn’t know how to tell her, because he feels left out and on the outside of the dyad. (I call this experience of men feeling left out in pregnancy and birth The Forgotten Father).

It’s nuanced, it’s complicated and it changes from person to person, couple to couple.

It impacts for one or both:

Self-esteem

Body image

Trust of Self and trusting the body

What intimacy now means

Safety in themselves, each other and the relationship

How able they are to relax - fully relax

Anxiety around sex

Desire

Orgasm

Feeling connected

Overtime wanting different things

Feel like an object than a sexual human

Feel like caregiver rather than lover

Communication and increase conflict

Sex moved away from intimacy and ended up taking the role of performance - achieving, timing, dates, temperature, getting, success, failure. And with those labels the fun is removed. It’s clinical. Logical. Sex stops being about connection - it moves out of the body and into the head. The mind. With thoughts. You may notice those stories and thoughts, or you may not…

Who can I blame?

What could have been done differently?

Why me?

Why them?

Why us?

What should I do?

Will I upset them if I say what I want?

It’s my burden.

I’m broken.

They are suffering too but I don’t have the capacity to support them.

I’m not attractive.

I’m letting them down.

A real man/woman wouldn’t have this problem.

I don’t deserve to enjoy sex.

I feel guilty when I’m happy or turned on.

They don’t understand what I’ve been through.

It’s happened differently for us.

They don’t desire me anymore.

They want me to move on and get over it.

It’s not fair.

I don’t love them anymore.

I can’t relax because there’s too much riding on this.

It’s they’re fault.

I hate them.

They are detached.

I hate myself.

I’m walking on eggshells.

I failed.

They aren’t supporting me.

I’m not enough.

They’ve changed.

I need to protect them, they’re my responsibility.

I can’t make them happy.

I feel obliged to stay when I want to leave.

The head spins. And the nervous system follows with irritability, shut down, reactivity, withdrawal - whatever your coping mechanism and default pattern - your partner feels it and responds with their wired strategy for stress.

It seeps into the bedroom. It impacts when you touch each other. Expectation. Disappointment. Frustration. Distance. Loneliness. Reaching.

What doesn’t break it makes it stronger - with commitment. With promises. With time. With love. With a willingness to hold yourself. To hold the other. To listen. To accept.

And sometimes, in life, things need to be burnt down to the ashes before they are rebuilt. Deep intimacy doesn’t come from an easy ride. It comes from the safety that’s built when you both learn to finally say to each other ‘I’ve got you’. ‘I’m here’. ‘It’s us’.

‘We can do it together’.

It’s a choice - how are you going to move forward?

Do share with anyone who needs to read this - they aren't alone.

Carla Crivaro is a trauma-informed and certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach, she works with men and women internationally to reach their goals in delicious sex, profound love and authentic relationships. Carla helps men and women understand themselves and each other, sexually and relationally, in and out of the bedroom. You can reach her at hello@carlacrivaro.com.