When we think about fertility, we often focus on hormones, lab results, and treatment plans. But there’s another important piece of the puzzle that doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves: the nervous system.
In this episode of The Fertility Yogi Podcast, Delia Petrescu, Registered Psychotherapist and founder of Get Reconnected Psychotherapy Services, joins host Meena to discuss the relationship between trauma and fertility. Together, they explore how unresolved trauma, chronic stress, medical procedures, pregnancy loss, and the emotional weight of infertility can affect the nervous system and shape the fertility journey.
This conversation is not about suggesting that trauma causes infertility or placing blame on anyone struggling to conceive. Instead, it offers a compassionate, evidence-informed perspective on reproductive trauma, explaining how healing the nervous system can help people navigate uncertainty, grief, and fertility treatments with greater resilience.
Whether you’re currently trying to conceive, undergoing fertility treatment, recovering from pregnancy loss, or supporting someone on this path, this conversation provides practical insights into the emotional side of fertility that is too often overlooked.
Listen to the podcast here:
Full transcript here:
# fertility-yogi-023-trauma-infertility-delia-petrescu
**Meena:** Hi, I’m Meena, The Fertility Yogi. After conquering my own fertility challenges, I made it my mission to help others do the same. In The Fertility Yogi Podcast, I will share Eastern and Western fertility tips, talk to experts, and share fertility stories. We might cry, we might laugh, but most importantly, together, we will learn.
Are you on a fertility journey and searching for a natural way to support your fertility? I’m Meena, the Fertility Yogi, and I understand exactly how challenging this path can be. That’s why I created the Fertility Optimizer course, a step-by-step program designed to help you balance your body and help optimize your fertility naturally.
In this self-paced course, you’ll discover the powerful practices of Ayurveda, fertility-focused yoga, guided meditation, breathing exercises, and lifestyle strategies. These ancient techniques helped me overcome my own fertility challenges and conceive naturally, even after being told I had less than a 5% chance.
Ready to take charge of your fertility? Let’s work together to support your body and create your miracle. Visit fertilityyogi.com to learn more and enroll in the Fertility Optimizer course. Remember, your path to parenthood starts with nurturing yourself.
Today, we’re exploring a topic that is often overlooked but one that deserves compassion and understanding, trauma and fertility.
When we think about fertility, we often focus on hormones, lab results, and treatment plans. But most experiences, emotions, and the stories we carry in our bodies matter too. Trauma can take many forms. Childhood experiences, grief and loss, medical trauma, relationship challenges, or even the stress and heartbreak that can accompany infertility itself.
This conversation is not about blame or suggesting that trauma causes infertility. Rather, it’s about recognizing that we are whole beings, mind, body, and spirit. And that the emotional healing and nervous system support can be meaningful parts of the fertility journey. Joining me today is Delia Petrescu, a psychotherapist and founder of Get Reconnected Psychotherapy Services.
Delia, welcome to the Fertility Yogi podcast. I’m so happy to have you here.
**Delia:** Okay. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure being here.
**Meena:** Yeah. I saw you at the fertility show, and I’m excited that you are here with me today. I was wondering, many people hear the phrase trauma blocks fertility and feel confused.
Can you explain what that actually means from a psychological and nervous system perspective?
**Delia:** Yeah. That’s such a great question, and I actually have a bit of a complicated relationship with that phrase because when it lands without context, a lot of the times what people hear is that this is your fault or this is my fault, so it’s kinda like the blame involved in it.
And someone who’s already in the depths of a fertility struggle, if they’re struggling to conceive, does not need that on top of everything else, right? So I usually like to reframe it that trauma isn’t really about what happened to you, but it’s about what happened inside your nervous system as a result.
And when trauma goes unresolved, your nervous system basically stays on that high alert, so it’s constantly scanning for danger even if the danger is long gone. So even if, for example, if the trauma happened in childhood or a long time ago, there’s this thing that people a lot of the time don’t realize that your nervous system isn’t just running your emotions, but it’s running your hormones, your immune system, your gut.
It’s like pretty much the whole operating system for your whole body. And when that gets stuck in that survival mode, the body’s essentially saying, “This is not really a safe time to make a baby”, right? So it puts that into the back burner, and it’s not about being a weakness or a flaw or something wrong with the body, but it’s just basically evolutionary design.
And I really want to emphasize this, that healing trauma does not guarantee a pregnancy, but what it does is help your nervous system come out of that constant state of bracing, right? So you have more access to your own capacity for dealing with uncertainty, with unknown, and it makes the whole journey itself more survivable.
One way I like to reframe this to clients is that trauma shapes the landscape your body’s trying to work within, and then therapy is how we tend to that landscape. So I tell my clients, “Your body’s not failing you. It’s actually just protecting you the way it always has,” and the work that we have to do is just to help the nervous system learn that it doesn’t have to do that anymore, that the danger is long gone, you’re now safe.
So that’s basically how I address that trauma does block fertility.
**Meena:** So we touched on it a little bit when you spoke about hormones. How does the nervous system impact your hormones? What’s the connection there?
**Delia:** There was a publish I believe it was in the American Psychological Association published under the psychological trauma, and I think they looked at over 200 women who had experienced childhood trauma and found that those with PTSD symptoms reported fewer live births and more miscarriages.
So women who had experienced neglect specifically were more likely to need fertility treatments altogether. And what’s really interesting about that research is that it wasn’t just about the trauma itself, but it was about the way the trauma left behind in the nervous system. And what was really important was that PTSD piece mattered independently.
And when we’re thinking about how it disrupts, ’cause you asked me.. Sorry, I kind of deviated a little bit from the question. So it’s basically when the body feels that it’s in immediate danger, it drives up the cortisol. And cortisol becomes in competition with the reproductive hormones.
So it disrupts the progesterone, it throws off the estrogen balance. So It interferes with the hormonal signals that trigger ovulation. So basically, it changes the whole landscape, as I said earlier, as well.
**Meena:** I don’t know if this is similar, but you hear with elite athletes or if someone’s really stressed out, then they stop ovulating or stop getting their period.
Is that something similar that you’re talking about, just the impact of psychological stress?
**Delia:** Yeah. So when we’re thinking about when the body goes into stress, so for example, if you’re going on a hike and you’re seeing a bear or a tiger jumps in front of you, your body goes into survival mode, then your digestive system goes offline, your reproductive system goes offline.
So it’s now your body is just.. It’s more important to keep you safe rather than digesting the food that you just had or thinking about getting into the reproduction.
**Meena:** When it comes to types of trauma is it only major events that can cause a fertility blocking trauma? What level of trauma actually makes your body resistant to pregnancy?
**Delia:** That’s actually a really good question. The thing is, trauma is not just one type. It’s actually way more than most people assume.
We usually refer to this as big T trauma and then small T trauma. I think it’s important to know that trauma isn’t really defined by what happened, but defined by whether your nervous system was able to process and recover from it. Because when we think about trauma and like what happens to you, we can have two people go through the exact same experience, and then one moves on while the other one carries it for years, right?
So that’s not about who’s stronger or more sensitive, but it’s about what kind of support was available and how your nervous system was already wired at the time. So yes, it includes the obvious things, the abuse, assault, a serious loss. So usually those are regarded as the big T traumas, but it also includes what researchers call the small T trauma.
So this could be growing up in a home that felt unpredictable, you had emotional neglect, you probably never quite felt safe or seen. And this actually shaped the nervous system over time. So when it comes to infertility or struggling to conceive, that is very similar to a small T trauma because it’s like an invisible cumulative trauma that happens.
And not necessarily trauma in that sense, but it’s the stressors that keep on adding up. And then we also have the medical trauma, which is a lot of the times under-recognized in the fertility world. Like when you have to go through so many ultrasounds and so many medical procedures like egg retrievals and all of these invasive procedures, sitting in waiting rooms, waiting to get devastating news that maybe your ovaries are not reacting the same way as you were expecting or the doctor was expecting. Or you might be feeling dismissed by a doctor when something felt wrong. So I wanted to address what research found, is that women going through fertility treatments, they’ve reported anxiety and depression levels comparable to people with cancer or heart disease.
So context really matters, but the fertility journey itself can be really traumatic just through that accumulation of things. So each failed cycle, each loss, they layer. The nervous system doesn’t get a chance to actually fully recover before the next hit comes, before the next egg retrieval, or before the next loss or unpredictability that you have.
**Meena:** Yeah. It’s funny that you.. it just reminds me of a time actually that when I was going through my fertility journey, I was trying all these things to try to get pregnant, and one of them was an item that you can get at the drugstore. And I remember looking at a Shoppers Drug Mart flyer years later after conceiving and seeing that item, and then my body just went into, like my heart started racing.
So I was like my God, this is still stored in me.
And I think small T trauma is not really… you don’t really… when you have a big trauma, you can identify it right away and then think, “Okay, maybe I should go talk to someone about what just happened,” and unravel and process. But with small T trauma, it’s the buildup, and you don’t notice that these are traumas until you’re… it shapes you.
Yes. And you use the word process and when it comes to yogic philosophy, they say, also say that you digest your food, but you also need to digest your emotions in order..
**Delia:** Mm. I like that.
**Meena:** In order to pass. It’s like your food and also your emotions. If you don’t digest them, they stay in your body.
So they knew that thousands of years ago. That you need to talk and do whatever you can do to try to release those emotions, or otherwise they can stay and hide.
**Delia:** 100%, yeah. Well, ’cause they get suppressed, right? I usually use the analogy with clients that if you’re not actually allowing the feeling or whatever is going on for you, it’s almost as if you’re holding a balloon underwater, and at one point your hands are gonna get tired, and it’s gonna jump right in your face, right?
So it’s like the same thing with these emotions, that if we ignore them or if we don’t process them, they’re still there. They’re gonna come up eventually somehow.
**Meena:** Yeah. And it’s shocking when it does come up. You just don’t expect it. It can happen out of anywhere, and it’s… yeah.
**Delia:** I usually tell my clients that sometimes, having, even after, let’s say, having a pregnancy, having the child, so wanted child after, doesn’t heal the infertility. So a lot of the times even if you do have your family, you end up getting the family that you always wanted, years later you might be going to a baby shower, you might be going to a wedding, and somebody talks about, “Oh, my daughter just had a baby, and she didn’t even try,” or “They weren’t even trying.”
And that could trigger you back into feeling how you were feeling back couple of years ago. So it does come up.
**Meena:** Yeah, and it’s not just even just the obvious things like baby showers or things like that. But also just when you turn on your computer or your phone and there’s a birth announcement or someone’s ultrasound or you go to work and you go onto your work email and then your manager says, “Oh, congratulations to so-and-so”. It’s everywhere and you can’t protect yourself. At least you can say, “Okay, I’m not going to that,” if you don’t want to go to the baby shower, you have a choice. And that’s up to you.
But with these other things in life that just pop up out of nowhere, or just you’re in a mall and all of a sudden you see some friend and she’s very pregnant that you haven’t seen in a long time. All these things. Just, yeah. It’s a hard journey. It’s a very hard journey.
**Delia:** And the moment you walk outside, there chances are you’re gonna see someone pushing a stroller, you’re gonna see a pregnant woman. Or when you go grocery shopping, you see baby food in the aisle or diapers and things like that. So the triggers are always gonna be there.
**Meena:** Yeah. And the funny thing is, too, I remember when I would see these things, and it would almost be like a dart would go into my heart. It would just kind of paralyze me, right? When you’re going through it, you want something so badly, and you open the doors and you see someone who has it.
And I wasn’t jealous or anything like that. It was just like a reminder- Mm-hmm … that it’s something I really want, and I’m having trouble having it. And at the same time when you see someone who’s pregnant and there’s a fear, like this fear comes over you, are you also telling your body that this is not something I want, because as soon as you see that, there’s fear? Does that play into it?
**Delia:** Yeah, for sure. Because it drives it with the nervous system, right? And it’s very much related with the hope, that you’re afraid to hope, for the future if … And I have clients that even after they get pregnant, after many losses or after years of struggling to conceive or treatments, it’s almost like they don’t enjoy the pregnancy. So it’s that fear that is driving everything.
**Meena:** So we talked about how repeated losses and failed cycles and the continual, getting a period every month and reliving the trauma… If someone were to come see you for this, how long does it usually take to get to some sort of resolution? I know it’s not a fair question because it depends on the situation, but- Just wondering, what can people expect when they come in? Or online?
**Delia:** It depends on where they are in the journey, and it also depends on how ready they are to explore what is happening for them.
But usually the way I like to work with is always going into the triggers into the body base approaches. Because as we’re talking about trauma, trauma gets stored most of the time in the body. So a lot of the times, when we feel the clenched stomach or things like that, or you feel like a lump in your throat most of the time that’s where I go through, like somatic approaches.
I use a lot of the polyvagal theory. But I try to meet the client where they’re at. And a lot of the times … I do both psychotherapy and counseling, so the counseling is kind of guiding them to get them to where they wanna be when it comes to treatments and to help them as much as I can.
But it’s also the psychotherapy aspect that it’s how do they get to process the emotion? How do they become more aware of what is happening in the body when they’re struggling? And the hardest thing about this is that it’s the unknown and it’s the waiting, right? It’s not knowing when things are gonna happen, and it’s the uncertainty.
So basically part of my work is getting them to extend that window of tolerance to become a bit more comfortable sitting with that discomfort of the uncertainty of the unknown. And that can be very hard, and it can take some people a few sessions, and then others a lot more sessions.
Or some people might get to have a bigger window of tolerance, and then something happens, a loss or treatment doesn’t go exactly how they’re planning to go, and then they’re regressing back. So this is very complicated because we’re dealing with both emotions and the body, the physical stress on the body. It’s hard.
**Meena:** Yeah. And I do a lot of fertility meditation and breathing exercise with my clients. And some … The ones that have very deep trauma, they tell me they have a hard time doing that because it releases so much all at once. So we have to come up with a plan to do it slowly. Just to make sure that it’s not overwhelming. ‘Cause if it’s too much, it’s nothing positive, right? You have to increase the time slowly and slowly to their tolerance and it’s a longer process. But for some people, yeah, they can’t. It’s too much for them, and they shut down then.
**Delia:** Of course, yeah.
**Meena:** And it’s hard to get them to open up again.
**Delia:** And it matters how their nervous system was wired in the first place, right? Because if it’s someone that, ’cause we were talking earlier about a previous trauma, like a childhood neglect or a childhood trauma could actually impact the reproductive years later on.
For a lot of people, if they’re used to chaos or if they’re used to their nervous system being dysregulated, when they’re trying to do a meditation or breath work, it actually feels very unsafe, and it can actually do more damage than actually heal what we’re trying to heal.
So you’re spot on when you say that you have to dip your toes in the water and take it slow.
**Meena:** Yeah. And also, I wanted to ask you a question about mental blocks. I’ve noticed a pattern, and this is not true for everybody, but I did… anecdotally, I’ve noticed something that with people who are having trouble… being the women, if they knew their mothers had problems conceiving or if they were adopted themselves they have a harder time conceiving.
And a lot of times I see them, they don’t know why. It’s more of a unexplained. And I was wondering, can learning about that cause mental blocks? ‘Cause I find sometimes they just have these mental blocks. They don’t have a medical reason apparently that they’re not conceiving, but they just know that their mom had issues or they were adopted because their adoptive parents couldn’t have children. Do you ever see that?
**Delia:** Mm-hmm.
**Meena:** Or is it just something…
**Delia:** It could be, it all depends, right? When we’re thinking about hereditary or genetics, right? If let’s say your mom had a diminished ovarian reserve and she got her menopause much earlier in life, so for example, let’s say like 40 or 45, chances are it might be hereditary.
So if you’re trying closer to 40, then that could be a reason why. But I know you mentioned the unexplained infertility. I have a love-hate relationship with that word. I find- Yeah … that it’s never unexplained. It’s just… … unexplored, right? So it’s, it might not necessarily be a mental block.
If we’re thinking about going back to the stress, how stress doesn’t necessarily affect getting pregnant or not. You can’t think your way into getting pregnant, same way as you can’t think your way out of getting pregnant, right? So just because you’re thinking that you might not get pregnant because your mom, or your grandma, or someone in your family, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s gonna affect it.
**Meena:** Yeah. Okay.
**Delia:** Yeah.
**Meena:** Yeah. I agree with you a lot. Unexplained just means it’s hasn’t been found yet.
Yeah. Yeah. This is a new term that I’ve heard of, and maybe you’ve heard it longer than me, that the body keeps score. Mm-hmm. Is that what you’re talking about with the trauma and just not digesting or processing it, it just keeps score?
**Delia:** Yeah. So it gets stored in the body. And I honestly, I see this every single day in my work. And the most common thing people describe this is that constant tension in the body. Like they’re always bracing for bad news or for a bad cycle. Sleep that never feels restful, so no matter how much they get, so even if they get six to eight hours of sleep, they might still wake up feeling unrested.
And then they might also feel that anxiety is constantly running in the background holding their breath without realizing it, and it’s that kind of exhaustion that doesn’t go away even after that full night’s sleep. And a lot of clients describe feeling like they’re living from the neck up, like they’ve completely checked out of their physical experience.
And that makes so much sense, right? Because you’re- Yeah … like mostly, your body has become that source of fear and disappointment over and over again. And of course, part of you is going to try to escape it. It’s a protective measure. And the problem is it also creates that real distance from yourself, and it’s very hard to live in your own body, right?
And another piece of the body keeping the score is that there could also be that emotional flatness. It’s people who go completely numb after a negative test or a loss, and then they feel guilty about it, and they might say “Well, I should be feeling something, from this, you know? I shouldn’t be feeling numb.” And I always want to name that because I think it gets misread a lot. That’s not someone who doesn’t care. That’s just pretty much the nervous system that has its limits, right? It’s shutting down to protect itself. So for each individual, we have unique ways of how the body keeps the score, how our nervous system reacts, and how it’s protecting us.
And I want people to know that none of this is random. It just makes sense when you understand what the nervous system has been through. And for a lot of people, it can be years and years of fertility treatments and fertility struggles.
**Meena:** Are there any signs that a person might have… if they’re on their fertility journey and… is there any signs that they may be affected by unresolved trauma, if they don’t know they had trauma? Is there any signs that they could look out for if they’re listening to this podcast, are wondering if they have trauma?
**Delia:** Yeah, for sure.
**Meena:** That’s unresolved?
**Delia:** And that happens to a lot of people, right? Because a lot of people when they think about trauma, they think about the big T trauma, right?
**Meena:** Exactly.
**Delia:** The ones that stand out to me the most are the ones people that don’t even realize are connected. So for example, someone who gets to their monitoring appointment and just goes somewhere else, right? So they’re physically in the room, they’re answering questions, but they’re not really there, right?
So it’s … automatically checking out. And that happens so fast that they don’t even notice it. Or someone who gets a negative test and feels absolutely nothing, and then a lot of the times they come to me confused, and a little scared by their own numbness, right? They expect to cry and, but instead they just go flat.
So it’s going back to that emotional flatness that I mentioned earlier. So a lot of people often think that means they’re either handling it well, but it usually means the opposite, that there’s this very specific kind of shame that shows up, and it’s different from grief or sadness. So it’s not just, I’m heartbroken that this is not working, but it’s like that kind of like the thoughts that we’re having, this is something definitely wrong with me.
And that’s a really important distinction clinically, because that shame usually has roots that go way deeper than the fertility journey. And most of the time the journey just cracked it open, right? So it opened up that previous trauma, that kind of shadow trauma that could have been from a long time ago.
And I also notice people who have completely lost their ability to trust their own instincts. So they might second-guess their every symptom, their feeling, their decision, and then they have this gut sense that something isn’t right with their care and they won’t say a word to their doctor. And underneath of it all, it’s this feeling that their body’s the enemy.
So it’s not necessarily the frustration, but something more than that. So it’s a kind of a sense of betrayal, and that’s usually where I would start looking to that, like what is the trauma behind it? What is that wound?
**Meena:** Yeah, I completely understand that, ’cause, when you do everything and you’re taking all the vitamins, you’re taking all the supplements, you’re doing all the yoga, you’re doing whatever like you’re supposed- to be doing, you’re doing. And still month after month negative test. You’re just like wondering what the heck’s going on. I’m doing all the right things. Why isn’t my body responding the way it should be? And yeah, it’s devastating. I find especially if you’re a Type A personality, where your whole life you’ve been working towards something and you accomplish the goal because you worked hard and you accomplished the goal.
And then with fertility, you can do everything and then still not achieve the goal, and it’s hard mentally just to understand that. Yeah. Cause you’re like, ” I’m doing everything. Why isn’t it happening?” It’s like a different equation than- … the rest of your life, where one plus one equals two . Well, it’s not doing it anymore.
**Delia:** 100%, yeah.
**Meena:** It’s very frustrating.
**Delia:** And it’s almost like we get from that shock into that despair mode, right? It’s you’re trying to look for any type of miracle. You hear someone that, oh, they tried this certain tea or they did certain things. And that can create even more headaches.
**Meena:** Have you experienced a situation where someone’s been trying and eventually they decide, “Okay, I’m not continuing on this type of journey, but I wanna have the adoption journey,” and they adopt, and then they get pregnant naturally after? Do you see any of that?
**Delia:** I think I’ve had one client in my whole career, so it doesn’t happen too often. But usually right before trying either a different treatment or stopping the treatment, I always try to guide the clients to still process that grief. So for example- if you’re trying fertility treatments and then you’re going the adoption route, going back to what I said earlier that having a child doesn’t cure infertility, so you’re still carrying on that grief and the infertility can be traumatic for a lot of people. So it’s good to deal with that, process it before going forward.
**Meena:** Yeah. And I just want to acknowledge, too, that when people do start the adoption process it’s very similar in… you don’t know when you’re gonna get the call, whether once you get approved, and there’s so much paperwork, and there’s a lot of waiting. And I think a lot of people- Mm-hmm … they don’t know that it could take years.
And again, you’re at the mercy of the universe, right? Calling you up and being like, “Okay, now it’s your turn.” Yeah. So it’s, again, waiting. Being patient and waiting and, yeah.
**Delia:** And the uncertainty.
**Meena:** Yeah.
**Delia:** And then it’s also such a different process, right? And a lot of times people, they expect that once they go the adoption route, they’re gonna get the baby, right?
Everybody wants to have an infant. And most of the time it doesn’t happen that way, and then you can become disappointed that the only child that you can adopt is a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old. So then it puts you at a point that you have to make a decision. And it still brings a lot of grief.
**Meena:** Yeah. So what types of therapy or healing approaches are, in your opinion, the most effective for trauma and when it comes to fertility?
**Delia:** Yeah. So I’m gonna speak a lot about one type of approach that I’m trained in. I’m trained in accelerated resolution therapy, and I find this approach beneficial for reproductive trauma because it works with how the nervous system stores the traumatic memory and the images, and it can actually move a lot faster than traditional talk therapy.
And for example, when someone is in the middle of active fertility treatment and that speed can matter, this type of therapy can help with a variety of concerns. So for instance, if someone is fearful of that egg retrieval, I’ve had clients that had needle phobia, and we know how many injections we have to do through just to have the egg retrieval.
Or overcoming a fear of an ultrasound imaging after having experienced sexual abuse previously in life. Or even calming the nervous system right after an embryo transfer. And I wanted to bring an association with EMDR, ’cause it’s very similar to accelerated resolution therapy.
And EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. I know it’s always such a mouthful. So they both work through a similar mechanism and has a really solid research behind it. And what both of those have in common with somatic approaches is that recognition that trauma lives in the body.
The body keeps the score, and not just in the story that we tell about it. And you can talk about what happened, about what is stressing you, about what worries you 100 times, and still have your nervous system responding like it’s still happening. So it’s like similar to what you mentioned, that years later something can still trigger you when you’re going to a party and somebody talks about it, right?
Like your nervous system is still responding to that. And body-based work reaches basically more than words alone can. Also nervous system regulation work, this could be done through somatic approaches or polyvagal theory, and it’s basically building what I also mentioned earlier, building that window of tolerance and the capacity to stay present with hard things without shutting down or flooding ourselves by dysregulating ourselves.
So I usually use this as a base when it comes to fertility treatments, because we hold so much uncertainty for such long stretches of time. Like I know you mentioned the waiting and just waiting and more in the unknown, and that takes real tolerance for uncertainty and that unknown that we don’t know when it’s gonna happen or whether it will happen.
But in the end, I don’t think one approach fits everyone, but I do think that body-based work should be non-negotiable when we’re talking about reproductive trauma or trauma in general.
**Meena:** Okay. That’s good to know. How do practices like breathwork or meditation or yoga support trauma healing alongside psychotherapy? Do you have an opinion about that?
**Delia:** Yeah. And I think they’re all really great, and they all have in common is that they bring it back into the relationship with your body, and that’s exactly what trauma takes away. And breathwork directly activates the vagus nerve and can shift your nervous system out of a stress response in real time.
There’s lots of research on how slow diaphragmatic breathing lowers that cortisol. Yoga can also build the interoceptive awareness, which is basically your ability to notice and stay with the body sensations. And that can be the base and foundation for trauma recovery.
And I believe it’s research on yoga specifically for women with infertility has shown that it can really reduce their distress when it comes to going through the fertility treatments. Meditation also builds on… this is called from acceptance and commitment therapy, the observer self.
So it’s the part of you that can notice what’s happening without being completely swept away by it, right? So it’s almost noticing when you have that tension in your chest, noticing that anxiety shows up in your shoulders or whatever it shows up. And this capacity through breathwork, through yoga, it can be really worth cultivating for…
And not necessarily just for a fertility journey, for everyone. But the one thing that I always say, and you mentioned this, to go slowly, right? So for someone who experienced trauma, the body awareness can actually feel threatening at first. A nervous system that’s been in survival mode for a long time can actually experience it as dangerous.
So we gotta follow what feels safe and don’t push, and expand from there. So just dipping your feet in the water first before you go jumping in.
**Meena:** For the people especially if they feel the opposite of anxiety where they feel numb instead and they’re disassociated from their body in some ways.
The breath in yoga, it says that the breath is the bridge between the mind and the body. So when you do your yoga and you’re doing the inhale and exhale during your yoga postures, it helps connect the two. It’s a whole system. The whole system needs to be working together in order to help heal.
**Delia:** Yeah. And you brought up a really good point . It’s the mind-body connection, right? And, and I think-
**Meena:** That is the connection, the breath.
**Delia:** Yeah, for sure. And if we think about it, what’s amazing and fascinating about the brain is that if you close your eyes, and that’s why meditation works, and mindfulness, and it’s similar to that, it’s when you close your eyes and you’re imagining for example, your favorite dessert or your favorite food. The moment you start visualizing it your stomach starts digesting it, your mouth starts salivating, so it’s as if it’s right there in front of you.
So it’s the same thing- with the breathwork when you’re telling your body that, “Hey, this is safe. There’s no danger. There’s no bear in front of me,” it can really connect that and communicate between that- … safety.
**Meena:** 100%. Yeah, I agree. For someone who’s listening who’s experienced trauma and is struggling to conceive, what message would you like to give them?
**Delia:** Yeah. So I want the person listening to know that what they’re carrying is a real wound, and it’s not necessarily an overreaction, but it’s a wound. And like any wound, it doesn’t just disappear because you’re busy or because you’re staying positive or because you have yet another cycle to focus on. So untreated wounds don’t heal on their own.
It’s almost like they get covered up. It’s almost like you’re putting a Band-Aid on top of it, and then you just forget about it. So with the infertility world it’s very good at keeping us focused on the next step, the next cycle, the next treatment, the next protocol, the next appointment.
In a way, that leaves us with no room to acknowledge how deep that emotional wound actually goes. And it doesn’t give us enough time to actually process it before going into the next step. So people keep moving forward while quietly bleeding on the inside, if I can say that, and then they wonder why they feel so lost.
So I want people to hear that the psychological wound of infertility is real, and it is very serious, and it deserves real care. And getting actually support from someone who understands what this journey does to a person, to their sense of self, to their sense of their body, their relationships their vision of the future, ’cause it threatens your imagined future.
And the bravest thing you can do right now in the middle of this is to say that, ” this wound that I have right now needs attention.” And whatever happens at the end of your fertility journey, however your story unfolds, you deserve to come out of it with yourself still intact. And that’s basically what this work is really about, not just your fertility but you.
**Meena:** That’s beautiful. So if people are interested in talking to you, how do they find you?
**Delia:** Yep. So I have a group practice called Get Reconnected Psychotherapy Services. But they can also find me at fertilitywithdelia.com. I also have an Instagram page @fertilitywithdelia. So they can find me either on social media or through the website.
And yeah.
**Meena:** Perfect. And I’ll put that in the notes too so people can look you up and contact you. Perfect. Thank you so much. It was so nice speaking to you. It was such a fascinating conversation.
Trauma is such a mystery, and it’s nice to break it down and realize how much it can affect fertility.
**Delia:** For sure. So thank you. And I think we definitely needed a lot more than half an hour to address this. But it’s definitely such an important topic. And thank you so much for having me as a guest.
**Meena:** Perfect. Thank you so much.
**Delia:** Thank you.
source https://getreconnected.ca/blog/trauma-fertility-yogi-podcast-ep26/
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