Transcription of Anne Belden for the show Fertility, #85
Dr. Lisa Today’s conversation is going to be about actually being a hearty girl and a healthy woman but in a very different way. I’m happy to have with me in the studio today, Anne Belden who is a fertility and adoption coach and is also organizing an important event coming up at the end of April. Thanks for joining us today.
Anne: Thank, Lisa. It’s so nice to be here with you.
Dr. Lisa: This is a free fertility seminar. Fertility is something that as you and I were talking, it’s something that a lot of people deal with and yet not a lot of people discuss. The fact that you’re putting the seminar out there and for the first time, it says a lot.
Anne: Right, it does affect a lot of couples. One in eight couples experience infertility which is defined as trying to conceive for a year, deliberately trying to get pregnant without success. One in eight couples is a lot of people.
You’re also right that it’s really not talked about very much. I’d like to say that it’s really one of the last social issues to come out of the closet.
Dr. Lisa: Why do you think that’s true?
Anne: Fertility and infertility tap into such a personal part of ourselves. It says so much about who we are as women in the society, the expectations that our culture puts on us as women. It helps us to think about who we want to become. It taps into our sexuality. Very, very personal issues, our intimate relationship is involved. I just think it carries with it a lot of privacy and sensitivity.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that women have self-pressure to be all things to all people, go out and work? Also simultaneously get pregnant and be fertile and give birth and parent? Do you think that this contributes to a level of stress that perhaps makes it difficult to get pregnant in the first place?
Anne: It’s an interesting question. The whole question as if does stress create fertility problems or do fertility problems create stress? It’s like a chicken and an egg. It’s probably a little bit of both. It’s hard for everyone today in our society to do so many things that we’re wanting to do.
For women in particular, building their families, having careers that are fulfilling and meaningful. Many of us want to do both of those things. Where’s the balance? How do you do that? The question of stress is a really good one though because what happens is the longer women try to conceive and are not able to, it does definitely build stress.
We do know that chronic and ongoing stress can at the same time impact on our state of health over an extended period of time.
Dr. Lisa: Did the stress become an issue in your own journey? I know that you have two children now. They didn’t come easily.
Anne: I can certainly relate to this stress as it relates to fertility. My husband and I spent 10 years trying to build our family. Although that was quite a long time ago, my kids are now 18 and 23. I can completely understand what women are going through because the emotional aspect of infertility are the same as they were 25 years ago.
One of the things that contribute to that is there are so many people who are trying to be helpful by telling you or inviting what to do, how to get pregnant, how to feel better, how to just relax, how to do these things as well as the medical community which are wonderful in trying to direct you down the right path.
It can be really confusing. You can feel like you’re pushed and pulled in so many directions that you lose touch with what is really best for you which might not be best for the next patient or for your friend who’s having trouble conceiving.
That does create some stress. It’s important to be able to begin to untangle that. It’s like those mangles roots that get all gnarled up. What feeling is really coming from what?
Dr. Lisa: One of the things that you do as part of your work with women and families with fertility and adoption issues is that you offer them mind-body methods of dealing with their own stress. I have it in front of me this Breathe pamphlet that you’ve given me. Talk to me about why breathing is so important for your patients or your clients, I should say?
Anne: It’s important because whenever we begin to feel stressed, our bodies have a physiological response no matter what it’s in response to. We start breathing more shallowly. Our heart starts to beat more rapidly. We start to get sweaty. The easiest, most fundamental technique is to try and breathe more diaphragmatically; breathe really deeply.
I talk to my kids about this. I talk with my clients as they’re maybe going into a difficult medical procedure that they’re stressed about. Maybe they’ve just had their embryo transfer for IVF. If they can really begin to just start breathing much more deeply and really thinking about it, mindfully breathing, it can help them to calm down.
There are a lot of other simple things that I have here on this card. Emotional expression which sounds so simple but it’s actually a lot harder to do. That can come in the way of certainly talking with friends in an honest, authentic way. Also writing can really help to move emotions out of us.
Another thing that I talk with people about is what I call, Thought Massaging; just looking at also called Cognitive Restructuring, a more clinical term. Really looking at those negative thought that start to play over and over again in our heads such as, “I’m never going to be a mom. I’m not getting pregnant because I won’t be any good at it.”
Helping them to really get up on a stool and look at those thoughts and begin to take them apart and think about, “Is this really true? How is this helping me? What can I do to intersect those thoughts when I start to realize they’re playing over and over again?
Dr. Lisa: In a newsletter that you sent me recently, talking about the physiologic impact of smiling.
Anne: That was a great study that I put in there. We don’t think about it. The more you smile, people smile back at you. When people are smiling at you, you feel better. If you feel better, it’s going to change the whole way that you move through that day. The more you do those things; it lifts us up in terms of our spirits.
It can really change how we enter into any kind of situation if we do that. Those are the little things that I talk with clients about.
Dr. Lisa: You also offer what you call Back Pocket Comebacks.
Anne: I came up with those because the things that people say to you when you’re trying to get pregnant, not in a way that’s intended to be hurtful or harmful. They do come across like that. One of the things I have on here, one of the most common things that people get are, “Are you ever going to have kids? You’re 30 now. It’s about time you’re getting ready to have children.”
What I’ve got on here is I’ve got two different responses. One I called snarky response, which is a thing that you’re probably not going to say but what you’d really like to say. What I have on here is, “Well, hold on. Let me grab my Ouija board.” Of course, like if we only knew, if we had that Ouija board, that crystal ball wouldn’t that be nice.
The more thoughtful grace just kind of response that is actually helpful to have in your back pocket. It might be something like, “We’d really love to have kids but it’s a lot harder than we expected.”
People are bombarded all the time with really hurtful things again not intentionally. We lose our focus when we’re in a place of struggle or even emotional pain. We can’t come up with something to say. This is intended to help people come up with that.
Another one, if I could just go through another one that people get all the time is, “Why don’t you just adopt? There are so many kids out there that need good homes.” That initial snarky response, what sometimes you think about saying is, “If there are so many kids out there, why didn’t you just adopt? You could have adopted.”
Of course, the more gracious thing to say might be something like, “You know, we may consider adopting but right now, we’re trying to have a biological child like most people want to have.”
Dr. Lisa: This is something that you have to deal with in your own life. You had questions probably just like this because you ended up having one biological child and one adopted child.
Anne: I did. It took us 10 years to have those kids. Our son was conceived through ART, Artificial Reproductive Technology. That was about a three and a half year process to conceive him. We considered ourselves really lucky. We didn’t have major medical issues. It was mostly unexplained infertility.
Then as soon as he was born about a year afterwards, we started trying pretty much right again to try and conceive. We tried for about five years. First, I had surgeries in there. I had a 12-week miscarriage. I did it all that was available at that time. I did more pergonal cycles than they whatever consider allowing. I think I did around 17.
I did several IVF cycles. That took about 10 years. At the end of that, one of the hardest things is deciding when to stop? How much farther do you go? There’s always that next carrot dangling in front of me, that next medical, new medical drug or procedure.
I finally decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore. We then opened ourselves up to adoption. It was a really, really tough time. One of the things that got me through of course was that my husband and I we’re on the same page about what we wanted.
I’m a real extrovert. I enlisted the support of my friends to help me get through it. I also connected with the Resolve, which is a great national organization that’s been around for about 40 years supporting this issue through advocacy and education. That’s really what this event is tied into is the National Resolve.
Dr. Lisa: Why is it that even pregnancy, something that is deeply personal becomes a topic of conversation that everybody feels that they have a part of? Whether it’s pregnancy, whether it’s fertility, why is it that women’s reproductive cycles? Why are they something that we all seem to have a stake in unlike any other topic?
Anne: It’s so fundamental to who we are as women and as human beings. It’s also such a cultural expectation. I’m not sure people even think about it that much in terms of they just have the expectation that it’s part of the life cycle to go on and you move into adulthood. You start to build your family.
It’s a very integral part of how we see ourselves as women is that when we get our periods when we’re teenagers, that is something that everybody starts talking about; it grows from there.
Dr. Lisa: I see that. I still also see that you wouldn’t necessarily openly have a discussion about somebody’s alcoholism per se. You wouldn’t always talk about somebody’s cancer. I don’t know. It’s interesting for me that fertility and infertility and pregnancy and all the things around reproduction just seem like such a public access thing.
Anne: What’s interesting about is that fertility may be and pregnancy; you see book and all this are everywhere. People and public, strangers might touch a pregnant woman’s belly, they don’t even know them. Yet at the same time, what’s interesting is that infertility is not.
You have this huge public access as you said to pregnancy and fertility and child-bearing. Pretty in videos of giving birth online, that kind of stuff. Yet when it comes to infertility, all of a sudden the doors slam shut. There’s a real element of shame around that, not being able to conceive. If it’s such a given, it’s such an expectation, it’s such a part of our womanhood and now we’re not able to meet that expectation and produce that. What does it say about me as a women?
It goes with and part in parcel with people feels that that is in the realm of the public. They don’t think about the fact that someone may not be able to achieve that. They’re just not tuned in to that because it’s such a cultural expectation.
Dr. Lisa: I wonder if we will see the same thing happen to infertility that we actually saw happen with pregnancy and birth. It wasn’t that long ago those women were sent in to the twilight sleep and then they magically reappeared with the baby. It wasn’t that long ago those men weren’t really involved. I’m thinking the ‘60s.
Maybe Resolve has been around 40 years. Maybe we are finally heading into a time where this doesn’t have to be quite so shameful or quite so hidden.
Anne: Organizations like Resolve mainly Resolve are really working at that. If you look at just the language around it, infertility versus fertility, people have a hard time talking about that. I do think that people are speaking out a little bit more about their experiences of not being able to get pregnant.
IVF is in the news all the time now. It really hasn’t been all that long that we’ve had IVF. The first IVF baby, Louise Brown was in ’78. Since then, there’ve been over five million babies born through IVF. We see it in the papers. It’s being talked about. It’s becoming much more acceptable.
I think that that will begin to happen. It will begin to move into that more public realm. It’s a much slower grow.
Dr. Lisa: One of the ways that you’re helping this to move into the public realm is to offer a free fertility seminar coming up in honor of National Infertility Awareness Week. I know you have thoughts on the term infertility awareness week. This seminar is coming up on April 30th from 5:30 to 8:00 at the Maine Medical Center.
It’s featuring some pre-high level guests, Dr. Lannon from Boston IVF who is also on the show. Dr. Michael Drouin, Dr. Caroline Hodsdon, who has been a guest of ours before. Dr. Anne Rainville and Dr. Dan Spratt. These are some heavy hitters.
Anne: It’s really fabulous that all of these people are willing and able to come out on this evening to speak on this panel. What people want to see is a range of approaches and a range of practices. It gives people an opportunity to meet these different physicians, get a sense for what they might be like.
It’s a wonderful contribution that they’re making. It’s the first time we’ve ever had an event in honor of what Resolve calls National Infertility Awareness Week. As you pointed out, I’m calling this a free fertility seminar because I think coming at it from a positive approach fertility, it just plain feels better to people than coming in there saying it’s infertility.
Along with those five physicians who are going to be speaking, there are eight alternative practitioners who would then be not speaking on the panel but will be in available to speak with. Some of them will be doing demonstrations, giving little many talks, some meeting with people afterwards.
It’s an opportunity to meet a wide range of practitioners who really focus on and specialize in fertility issues in Portland.
Dr. Lisa: I like the fact that you’re calling a day fertility seminar. I’m sure that you’re going to have a fertile or at least large group. Eventually, hopefully fertile group of people coming to the seminar.
Anne: We hope that they don’t … I planned on the lessons where you want them to come but then I don’t want them to have to come back next year. It’s like the support group that I do. I do a monthly support group through Resolve. I do that. I’m here in Portland. I donate that. We have no around 10 or 12 people who come every month to this, both men and women. It’s held the last Tuesday of each month at Maine Med.
It is my hope that people don’t come back to it because we all want them of course to get pregnant in between meetings.
Dr. Lisa: How can people find out about the fertility seminar that’s coming up on April 30th or about the work that you do as a fertility and adoption coach?
Anne: I have a website which is annebelden.com. I can also be reached on my business number, which is 233-5939. My website is a really good place to get a sense of who I am and how I work. I have this event on there and if there are other events I’m doing. Right now, we’re doing a four-week mind-body program with women who are trying to conceive. I have an office right here in Portland where I work individually. One to one with women or couples who are going through infertility and adoption.
Dr. Lisa: Anne, it’s been a pleasure to have you back in the studio after going from Hearty Girls, Healthy Women to ongoing Hearty Girls, Healthy Women in a different way as you bring fertility to women and families in the Portland and Maine area. I hope that people will take advantage of the seminar.
We’ve been talking to Anne Belden who is a fertility and adoption coach and organizer of the fertility seminar coming up at Maine Medical Center on April 30th. We really appreciate you coming in and talking with us again.
Anne: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.