When the Body Betrays: Infertility and Body Image

{image credit :: patricio villarroel}

For most of us, the sight of little blue booties or a 20-week ultrasound plastered on facebook is a sweet one. Our hearts are warmed by knowing that a new little life is taking form inside of someone we love. Perhaps it reminds us of those lovely little moments when we were carrying our own child, or it generates excitement for the time in our lives when we’ll be ready to do the same.

But for a smaller, though significant, number, these images send a jab of intense pain through the heart. For women who have been trying to conceive – or who has stopped trying – reminders of the body’s betrayal can be gut-wrenching.

Over seven million women in the United States have spent more than one year trying to conceive, the diagnostic criteria for infertility. This is a little over one in ten women who struggle with what can be one of the most trying and painful experience of a human’s life. And yet, even in the health and body-image world, we usually hear barely a word spoken about how this experience can alter one’s perception of themselves.

In fact, while we do know that infertility is associated with depression, there’s a dearth of research on how infertility impacts individuals’ body image and self-concept. This silence is dangerous because it mirrors the hushed and hidden nature of the issue itself. Couples who are struggling to become pregnant, or faced with their inability to do so, rarely bring this up in the company of others. Ironically perhaps, the color of an infant’s feces becomes appropriate dinner conversation, but detailing your second round of IVF does not.

This type of isolation, whether socially or self-induced, combined with the emotional toll that infertility takes produces all kinds of intense feelings for a woman. She’s faced with working through a form of grief that perhaps few of her loved ones can comprehend. She’s struggling to maintain a relationship with a partner that can be intensely strained by putting intimacy on an egg-timer. And she’s taking a painful assessment of her values in order to make some extremely difficult decisions.

So it’s no surprise that in our society of buck up, cowgirl and sweeping emotions under the proverbial rug, women with infertility turn quickly on themselves, and specifically their bodies.

As women in our culture, we’re simply not used to the fact that sometimes working harder doesn’t produce the outcome that you so desire. We’re taught to believe that if we invest the resources and will into pursuing a goal, we will achieve it. But what about when all of our efforts fail? We feel powerless. We get angry. We get hopeless. And we rage against the bodies that feel as though they are betraying us.

For women with histories of disordered eating, this experience can be especially devastating, and sometimes send them spiraling back into a bitter relationship with food and their bodies. Thoughts of what bodies are “meant” to do swirl through their minds, and the ways in which their own bodies seem to fall short rock their internal world.

And so they do what they know how – they exert control in the only ways they can. Their eating may become restrictive or, conversely, unmanageable, or they may find themselves desperately attempting to bridle their bodies in other ways. They exercise to the point of exhaustion, they chart their basal body temperature with the precision of an air traffic controller, or they analyze every subtle shift in their bodies. And inevitably, as always happens when we attempt to alleviate our anxieties through exerting control on the body, disappointment eventually comes rushing in. And when it does, the pain that is buried and unspoken comes along with it.

Moving this experience out of the shadows is one way to prevent these feelings from narrowing one’s life. This of course comes with a host of other risks – such as feeling exposed and having one’s reproductive organs be, well, out on the table. But carefully selecting individuals one’s trusts to share this experience with can be key to allowing our bodies to release the burden of carrying this on our own.

There are limits to what friends and family can do in terms of support, and so talking to a professional or finding a support group can be helpful in sorting through the myriad of emotions that are triggered as well. For resources and support, check out the Resolve.org page.

Have you ever felt that your body betrayed you? How did you cope with these feelings?