I’ve never been to a psychiatrist before. Add it to the list of things I didn’t anticipate for myself. Not that it’s a bad thing. I actually advocated for myself to see one. I thought I had an idea of what to expect but I’ve been absurdly wrong. To be fair to myself, I’d say my experience has been unusual and probably not the norm.
I have a history of feeling like I’m not believed or I won’t be believed. And this stems from not being believed (go, figure!) by people in my life or medical professionals. I don’t always wear my emotions on my sleeve and so I get the sense people might have a difficult time feeling me out. I’m guarded, we could say.
So when I am meeting with a Board Certified Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, I tell myself to be fully and completely honest. This is hard for me. I don’t like to reveal the dirty parts, the messy parts, the ugly parts. Those parts have been simmering beneath the surface for so long I get nervous that if I bring them to the surface I will light myself on fire. I also hate that brief moment between me revealing something and the other person processing and preparing their response.
I tell her it all. Not all of it. But more of it than I normally would.
As I discuss infertility, I feel misunderstood. And then quickly annoyed. “She doesn’t get it,” I think. She gives me some clinical advice, encourages me to reframe some of my thinking, and also some shitty anecdotal suggestions. Let me elaborate for those who may not know what I mean. She tells me she once had a client who started taking chlorophyll and got pregnant (eyeroll, eyeroll, barfing emoji). She also told me a story about how some women get pregnant without uteruses (eyeroll, eyeroll, hand-to-face emoji). And the winner, she told me that stress can greatly impact fertility (head-explodes emoji. “No shit doc! Did you go to medical school for that insight?!!! GAH!”) I am frustrated all over again just writing it.
Let me be clear, I did not meet with a Board Certified Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner for fertility advice.
Toward the end of our first session she asked me if I followed any specific religion. I told her the truth which is I grew up believing in God. I was baptized, made my communion and confirmation at a Lutheran church. My family wasn’t “religious” per se, but we went to church on holidays and when we were feeling guilty. Although we weren’t devout Christians, the idea of God was really influential to me and I prayed often as a kid. I understood relatively quickly that adults didn’t really have a clue what they were doing and so the idea that there was a God, an entity that knew-all, was supremely comforting to me.
When I was in high school I found out some difficult, disheartening, and upsetting information about the church I belonged to. I refused to step foot in that church ever again and to this day I still haven’t. I would have considered myself agnostic, I suppose, during my 20s. I remember trying different words on like, “the universe,” “a higher power,” or the worst of them, “source.” But ultimately, I’ve landed back at God. I, personally, have found it impossible to not believe in God after having such a clear knowing as a child.
By the time I started experiencing infertility there was a distinct and profound disconnection with my spirituality. It as a huge hole that I felt. I hadn’t prayed in such a long time that the idea of it was enormously uncomfortable. I also began to conflate God with religion and religion with the church and I couldn’t make sense of some of the injustices that I believed were directly associated with both religion and the church. The God I knew didn’t make sense in the context of the church as I had understood it.
Recently, I have considered myself Christian curious. That’s the only way I can explain it. I believe in God and I am attempting to draw closer to God through learning about Jesus. I wouldn’t say I’m following. I’m still hugely skeptical (not of God, but of organized religion and the church). But I’m learning. I don’t want to be indoctrinated, I want to understand. It’s a journey and I’m not sure how it ends, but I am no longer shutting out opportunities to grow. I have found voices within the progressive Christianity community (I hope this is not a mischaracterization) like Brenda Marie Davies and Nadia-Bolz Weber who have helped me understand that faith isn’t a monolith.
Long story long, I told the NP a version of all that and she told me she also does Christian counseling.
After our first session there was a second. I remember feeling like I was wasting my time. But I’m a compliant patient so I go with the flow. “Maybe this is how things are done,” I thought. As she is trying to better understand why I am feeling so depressed and so filled with self-hatred I continue to get annoyed. Why won’t she just take me at my word? I finally decided to address the elephant in the room. Although I found her insight fascinating (not really) I was less interested in psychotherapy and more interested in discussing medications. She responded exactly how I feared she would. She doesn’t love to prescribe medications when someone is actively trying to get pregnant. That is precisely the response I got from my primary care doctor a few years ago when I left work because I had an anxiety attack.
Let me explain why that response is hard for me. I have been struggling with infertility for 5 years. Prior to that, I had been struggling with intense physical pain for 4 years that hadn’t been taken seriously or addressed. After 6 months of first trying to concieve I went to my OBGYN, and I believe because I was relatively young at the time, she dismissed my concerns and told me to wait another year and come back. If I wasn’t pregnant by then, she would recommend I see a specialist. So a year and a half into my infertility I am then encouraged to see a reproductive endocrinologist. Within my 5 year infertility battle, I have gone through a failed IVF cycle, a surgery with little to no follow-up care, an early pregnancy loss, and an ectopic pregnancy, and months and months and months of negative pregnancy tests. All of this is emotionally, physically, and financially, draining. I have lost so much of myself to this process. So fucking much.
I am exhausted, and tired, and feeling wholly misunderstood and misplaced. When I finally muster up the courage to go to the doctor and let them know that I think I need help, that I am not feeling like myself, and they tell me that the idea that I may have a baby in the future is more important than my mental health now—it is upsetting, to say the least.
I am a firm believer that I can get something out of most situations. There is always something to learn, some way to grow. So by the third session (again, is this normal?) I decide that perhaps I’m not meant to be on a medication and maybe I’m meant to gain something else from my sessions with the NP. To be completely transparent, although I was open to the idea of medications, I was also skeptical. Part of me feels likes how I am feeling is completely valid. I am grieving. I am sad. This seems like a really normal response to the trauma of infertility and pregnancy loss. Wouldn’t you be sad?
I decided at some point to let her know I was interested in the Christian counseling. Why not, right? And this is where things became interesting. I previous version of myself would have found this to be so inappropriate and condescending. But its not. I asked for it and I let her know I was okay with it.
And its actually nice.
It’s not clinical, its spiritual.
She reminds me that I am a child of God and God doesn’t make mistakes. So every time I hear my subconscious whisper, “you’re a real piece of shit ya know” I remind myself that those are thoughts, not truths. God doesn’t make pieces of shit.
She has said to me, “I believe you will have a child.” Which, again, seems super inappropriate, but for some reason it fills me with hope. This woman, who I assumed was going to give me a prescription to make me stop crying all the fucking time, is telling me that she believes I will have a child. It’s wild.
She told me I am fighting a spiritual battle. And this I believe to be true. In all of my grief and my trying to take the “right” steps to deal with it (talking about it, asking for help, etc.) I have felt a little let down. And I always come back to this idea that no one will help me. Which I know sounds harsh and cruel and dismissive of the love that others can give. But its not that others can’t help, because they can. But this is a battle against myself. Only I have the power to change this for myself. What fertility brought to the surface was an enormous amount of shame that I’ve been harboring. Infertility was the catalyst to unearth something that has always existed—a deep insecurity with who I am as a person.
And so I see my meetings with this woman, although at first frustrating, to be a gift. This is a highly unusual situation and I don’t think it is by accident. She said she prays for me and I believe her. She also said that in my spiritual battle, I have to “fight violently” for what I want. I don’t really know what that means. But the idea of fighting violently feels empowering for some reason; as if my anger, that I’ve been told to remedy for so long, is for purpose and by design to fuel this battle. I don’t know. I truly don’t know anything at all.