Family Planning and Fertitlity Struggle Therapy in California
You thought getting pregnant would be the easy part. Now every month feels like holding your breath, and the weight of it all is crushing. Therapy can help you navigate this journey with more support and less isolation.
What You’re Going Through
When trying to build your family becomes the hardest thing you’ve ever done
You didn't expect it to be this hard—month after month of negative tests. Timed intimacy has killed the spontaneity in your relationship. Hormone treatments that make you feel like a stranger in your own body and mind.
Your life revolves around appointments—monitoring, blood work, ultrasounds, and procedures. IVF cycles that drain your bank account and your hope. IUI attempts that feel like throwing darts in the dark. Every procedure is filled with hope and anticipatory grief.
Everyone else seems to get pregnant without even trying. Pregnancy announcements feel like gut punches. Baby shower invitations feel like jabs from the universe. People asking when you're having kids, or worse—telling you to "just relax" or "it'll happen when you stop trying."
You're carrying all of this physically and emotionally while your partner watches, wanting to help but unable to take any of it off your plate. The isolation is suffocating because you can't talk about it openly without people offering unhelpful advice or judgment.
You're no longer sure which way is up. Everything feels foreign, and the path forward no longer feels guaranteed. You're silently questioning how much more you can do, what it would look like to stop, and what life would be if this doesn't work out. You're tired of being on this seemingly endless rollercoaster of hope and grief.
How Therapy Helps
Therapy for fertility struggles creates space to process the grief, frustration, and uncertainty without judgment. We work together to help you navigate the emotional rollercoaster of treatment cycles, relationship strain, and the weight of decisions you're facing. Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), we'll help you reconnect with your values beyond fertility outcomes and find ways to live meaningfully even in the midst of this struggle. We'll work through grief—for the timeline you imagined, the ease you expected, the versions of your future that keep shifting.
If you've experienced pregnancy loss along the way, we can address that trauma, too. We'll work on managing the anxiety around procedures, the hypervigilance around your body, and the triggers that come with other people's pregnancies. This includes helping you identify and set boundaries around insensitive comments, as well as navigating social situations that feel unbearable.
We'll also address the relationship dynamics—how to communicate your needs when you're exhausted, how your partner can support you, and how to maintain connection when the most intimate parts of your relationship have become clinical.
This isn't about staying positive or finding silver linings. It's about holding space for how hard this is while finding ways to protect your mental health and your relationship through it.
What Gets Better
You learn to advocate for what you need—from your partner, your doctors, your family—without guilt or apology.
You stop pretending everything is fine. You find people who actually get it, and you let yourself be honest about how brutal this is.
You develop strategies for managing pregnancy announcements and baby showers without falling apart. You learn when to show up and when to protect yourself.
The relationship strain eases as you both learn to communicate through this together instead of suffering separately. Intimacy can feel less clinical and more connected again.
You start to separate your worth from your fertility. You reconnect with parts of your identity beyond trying to conceive. You begin to trust yourself to make decisions about whether to continue treatment, when to stop, or what path forward feels right.
The grief doesn't disappear, but you learn to carry it alongside hope. You find ways to live your life now instead of putting everything on hold until you are pregnant.
You start to feel like yourself again—not the before version, but someone who's weathering this storm with more strength and support than you thought possible.
