The human body is meant to reproduce. Right? Basic biology tells us that. Our mothers warned us about that. Our heart sings that. When your body fails at something so elementary, so evolutionarily primal, do you ever feel, as someone posted recently, “I’m fairly certain my uterus hates my guts!” Or perhaps even worse, that you hate your uterus’s (or ovaries or testes) guts.
At War with Your Body
One of the saddest things about a chronic disease, such as infertility, is feeling like you are at war with your body. Feeling like it let you down or you let it down. A legacy of infertility for many women and men is feeling less whole, less robust, less masculine or feminine. The ability to procreate is one of the most basic animal instinct and a failure at something so basic cuts deep.
I don’t know whether there is a definite A to Z link between what we think about our body and our ability to get pregnant. While I firmly believe there is a link between what and how we think and our health, I don’t believe that just loving your body will cure any disease whether it be infertility or diabetes. Loving and caring for our body, however, is good for our general health and good for our emotions, and what is good for our general health and emotions is good for our fertility.
Fandom
I’ve been a fan of Dr. Ali Domar for quite a while. In fact, she was one of the first guests we had on the Creating a Family show way back when we started. If you don’t know Dr. Domar, do yourself a favor and grab one of her books—I’d suggest either Conquering Infertility: Mind/Body Guide to Enhancing Fertility and Coping with Infertility or Be Happy Without Being Perfect. And listen to this show we did with her on the Mind/Body Connection in Fertility and Enhancing Fertility. It is still just as relevant now as it was almost 7 years ago.
Do you ever hate your body because of its inability to get pregnant? Or do you think your body hates you?
Image credit: crafty_dame
Hah! Yeah, that phrase has probably passed my lips once or twice.
Never really hated my body or thought my body hated me, but I did wonder if it was karma catching up with me for being such a judgmental jerk when I was younger (and hyper-religious/super-scrupulous). I used to believe the bunk that the Catholic Church dished out about sex and procreation–that sex was only good if a baby resulted from it. Of course, I don’t believe that any more, but it does seem unnatural–as you posted above–that something so primal and basic to human perpetuity does not have its intended results…
I am no longer religious, but that Catholic guilt just never leaves you. I really am sorry for casting judgment against people when I was younger, and I do sometimes wonder if it’s karma, or simply Nature’s way of communicating that maybe the Earth is getting unsustainably overpopulated, and perhaps not “being fruitful and multiplying” can be a good thing for human survival in the 21st Century…but I wax pseudo-philosophical here lol… :p