Handling the Stress of Infertility
There was a great article about adult resilience recently in the Washington Post; namely, “whole-life resilience, that ability to bounce back when upsetting or stressful things happen.” The author was talking about ways he tried to wrap his brain around normal, everyday stress, though once he dipped into the Pain Olympics, my brain instantly turned to infertility and loss.
He tells the story of a person who goes to a hospital waiting room when she needs to gain some perspective on her own problems. She looks at the people waiting and realizes that whatever she’s dealing with isn’t as bad.
The author points out that we can’t minimize our own emotional suffering just by pointing out that we would be feeling worse if we were in that person’s position. We have no clue how we would deal with their pain because it’s their pain. And, frankly, we have no clue what other factors are at play with their stress or situation.
He writes, “Who gets to judge another person’s suffering? Aren’t there degrees of it that are relative to an individual’s own experience? Does someone really suffer less just because his life has been less fraught, say, with poverty or extreme trauma? ”
He goes on to dissect one of Viktor Frankl’s ideas, stating: “Even small-scale suffering shouldn’t be dismissed outright: It may look like nothing to an outsider, but to someone who is hurting, it can fill all their emotional space.”
Fill all their emotional space.
Isn’t that a perfect description of it? Regardless of your infertility situation, it’s filling your emotional space. It coats each one of us evenly inside, even if the amount may be different if poured into another vessel.
But that’s sort of the point. It can’t be poured into another vessel. You get your own liquid filling your own emotional space when the stressors pour inside.
An interesting take on the Pain Olympics.
4 comments
Wow, loved this post, especially the point about emotional space being filled. Understanding this seems to me to be the first step in having real empathy for someone else.
One of my friends teaches about our grief buckets. No matter the size, if yours is full, it’s full.
People have different coping abilities and tolerance levels, too. . . and I also think that these can change over time and with experience. So what might seem like no big deal to one person might be devastating and overwhelming to another. And we can sometimes shoulder burdens we never thought we would be able to bear because circumstances dictate that there is no other choice.
Hmmm. I have certainly felt that my grief bucket/emotional space was full – but then something else happened, and it got fuller, and I wished it was back to the level it was when I thought it was full!
And I’ve certainly felt my own pain easier to bear when I have compared it with others – when I’ve found the Pain Olympics work in my favour, because I’ve realised I didn’t want, in fact, to win that particular competition. It made me realise that my emotional space wasn’t in fact filled with pain, but that there was room for gratitude, and even joy, too. Finding gratitude and joy was always the key to my healing.
But I very much agree that the key has been when I have come to these conclusions myself, unprompted. I wouldn’t have thanked anyone to have pointed it out to me, to have told me that my emotional space wasn’t really filled with pain. I needed to know it, to feel it, myself.