When you want to have a baby but are struggling with fertility challenges, it's normal to experience a range and mixture of ever-changing feelings. These feelings are a natural and necessary form of grief. Whether you continue to hope to give birth or you've stopped pursuing pregnancy, this compassionate guide will help you affirm and express your feelings about infertility. Tips for both women and men are included.
Working with Infertility and Grief: A Practical Guide for Helping Professionals explores issues of grief, including disenfranchised grief and chronic sorrow, related to infertility and reproductive loss. Out of the small handful of books related to this topic, this is the first of its kind geared toward equipping helping professionals who assist those grieving unrecognized losses. Written through the lens of the literary framework of The Hero’s Journey, this comprehensive practitioner guide directly targets mental health professionals working with clients, supervisees, or students who have experienced infertility, miscarriage, or death of an infant. This book is also for those who experienced it themselves. Readers will learn more about the crisis of infertility and reproductive loss, gain insight into the experience of those suffering, and acquire practical tools and strategies for helping and healing. This text is broad enough to be integrated into a course for a graduate program and specific enough to serve as a shelf reference for those in practice.
Infertility Counseling: A Comprehensive Handbook for Clinicians, 2nd edition, is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary textbook for all health professionals providing care for individuals facing reproductive health issues. It is the most thorough and extensive book currently available for clinicians in the field of infertility counseling, providing an exhaustive and comprehensive review of topics. It addresses both the medical and psychological aspects of infertility, reviewing assessment approaches, treatment strategies, counseling for medical conditions impacting fertility, third-party reproduction, alternative family building and post infertility counseling issues. Each chapter follows the same format: introduction, historical overview, literature review, theoretical framework, identification of clinical issues, suggestions for therapeutic interventions, and future implication. This edition also includes extensive appendixes of clinical tools useful to the clinician, including an Internet database of resources and an extensive glossary of terminology.
Infertility ranks among the hardest griefs a couple can face. Yet this painful issue is all too often neglected in both Church and society. Under the Laurel Tree traces one God-fearing couple's journey through the emotional turmoil of childlessness. By following the story of Saints Joachim and Anna, this book helps individuals and couples navigate the loss inherent in infertility amid the pain of shame, separation, anger, bargaining, and blamelessness. In walking alongside Joachim and Anna, we encounter not only a life-giving template for grief, but also the path back to ourselves, our partner, and our God-given vocation of eucharistic thanksgiving.
A spiritual companion for those grieving infertility, pregnancy loss, or stillbirth, bringing solace from Jewish tradition.Many people who endure the emotional suffering of infertility, pregnancy loss, or stillbirth bear this sorrow alone. Pregnancies that end too early are hidden; failed attempts at conception are barely mentioned. Many women and men long to find solace in religious ritual and tradition to ease the emptiness felt from a loss that is without a face, a name, or a grave. At last, there is a source that acknowledges and encourages expressions of their grief, and offers comfort in the moments of their pain. Providing companionship and strength for healing from others who also have grieved, Tears of Sorrow, Seeds of Hope is a spiritual companion that enables the reader to mourn within the words and ways of Judaism. Drawing deeply on the wellspring of comfort found in traditional Jewish texts and prayer, it also offers readings and rituals created especially for parents struggling with the uncertainty and sorrow of pregnancy loss and infertility?providing a source of compassion, healing, and hope.
Coping with Infertility is an essential source of emotional support for any couple struggling with involuntary childlessness. The book offers proven techniques and real-life examples from both men and women, in order to outline common emotional reactions and remind couples that they are not alone in their ups and downs. The coping skills discussed in the book have been assembled from years of working with individuals in clinical trials and have undergone rigorous scientific testing. These state-of-the-art techniques have been shown to be effective in helping couples deal with the stress, depression, relationship problems, and grief often associated with infertility. Coping with Infertility is an easily accessible and problem-focused guide for couples to use in overcoming the emotional roadblocks of infertility.
When infertility painfully interrupted Elizabeth Hagan's plan to start a family, the path of grace offered her another way. Instead of giving birth to a child, she birthed herself instead. Along the way, she learned you can't control how fast your dreams come true, if they come true at all, but you can find grace for embracing your life in the present tense, grief and all. Through her new book Birthed, Elizabeth Hagan offers her story as a companion and guide for living through your own pain and loss. For the one in eight couples who face infertility, you will know you are not alone and a long season of grief does not have to destroy your marriage or your friendships with childbearing friends. For those friends and family members of infertile couples, there are no "one size fits all" answers to a fertility journey-medically, emotionally, or spiritually-and the worst thing you can say is nothing at all. Adoption is never the complete solution to infertility, and through it all, pain can never be fixed, only lived through. So allow grace to help you begin to live today in the present moment.
Infertility: Psychological Issues and Counseling Strategies is a valuable reference for mental health professionals who treat individuals and couples grappling with the psychological and emotional strains of infertility and its treatment. Drawing upon their professional experiences as well as the current literature in the field, leading practitioners consider the differences in how women and men react to a diagnosis of infertility and describe strategies for helping individuals deal with the anxieties, feelings of inadequacy, and low self-esteem that can follow such a diagnosis. These experts examine the effects of infertility on love, sex, and other facets of a relationship and detail methods for helping couples resolve conflicts about infertility. They explore the latest findings on pregnancy-related stress and its possible somatic effects, and they describe effective stress management techniques. They offer practical guidelines for helping patients to cope with failed fertility treatments and manage the grief of a miscarriage. And they examine a wide range of clinical issues surrounding alternative routes to parenting, including adoption.
My story is different from yours, but the pages of our lives share a common theme. Silent suffering. The longing for a child. Think of my book as your companion of hope, a ray of sunshine, to shine truth, encouragement, and perspective on your situation. ---Kathe Wunnenberg Infertility is a deeply private pain that is often misunderstood by those who have not experienced its seasons of longing and loss. Whether you recently tried to have a child or have struggled for years to conceive, Longing for a Child is a compassionate companion full of hope, healing, and practical help. Offering biblical perspectives and moving stories of others who have struggled with infertility, sixty heartfelt devotions connect you securely to God during this time of waiting, heartbreak, and questioning. Each devotion contains a Scripture, short thematic story, prayer, reflective questions, and a space for journaling. Meditations for special occasions, such as Mother's Day, are also included. An encouraging devotional companion that can be used by individuals, couples, or groups, Longing for a Child speaks directly to the heart, meeting you wherever you are on your journey through infertility.
A comprehensive guide for the clinical practitioner. The authors draw from a wealth of empirical research as well as numerous case studies to provide a deep understanding of the experience of infertility and how to help guide patients through the process.ùMary P. Riddle, PhD, The Pennsylvania State University, World Campus --
