IVF This

When you're navigating IVF, it's tempting to look to other people's experiences, statistics, and reassurance for certainty about your own future. In this episode, we're exploring why borrowed certainty feels so comforting, why relief isn't the same as knowing, and how grounded neutrality, self-trust, and self-loyalty can help us navigate what we don't yet know.

What happens when the thing causing you pain is also the thing offering you hope? In this episode of IVF This, we explore the complicated relationship we can develop with IVF through the lens of trauma bonding and intermittent reinforcement. From the emotional whiplash of treatment to the difficulty of deciding whether to continue or stop, we examine how IVF can become synonymous with hope—and why...

Hope can feel like a double-edged sword during infertility and IVF: something we're told to hold onto, then something we blame when heartbreak comes. Join me as we talk about "hope hangovers," why we use bracing and pre-suffering to try to protect ourselves from grief, and how to allow hope without asking it to become certainty.

Join me today as we talk about Emotional Load Shedding during infertility and IVF—how mental and emotional overload builds, why carrying can feel like control, and how to decide what actually requires your attention right now. Learn a simple framework to help you carry, drop, delegate, or defer what's taking up your finite emotional capacity.

Join me today as I introduce the new IVF This Framework! A way to understand and navigate the four emotional terrains of infertility: grief, anticipation, hope, and identity. Because before we can figure out what we need, we first have to understand where we are.

Join me today as we explore absurdism through the lens of infertility and IVF. We talk about why humans desperately search for explanations when we're suffering, why closure may be more myth than reality, and how peace might begin when we stop demanding answers from a world that never promised to provide them. If you've ever found yourself asking, "Why is this happening?" this episode is for you.

 Join me today as we talk about performative coping during infertility and IVF—the exhausting pressure to look okay, stay strong, and keep moving forward. We explore self-gaslighting, emotional honesty, and why coping has more to do with telling yourself the truth than pretending you're unaffected

Join me today as we talk about symptom spotting during IVF through the lens of hypervigilance — why the nervous system becomes obsessed with searching for "signs," how body surveillance takes hold during infertility, and why healing may begin with learning to experience the body as a home instead of a project.

Join me today as we talk about "happiness boundaries" — the invisible emotional rules many people develop during infertility and IVF around joy, hope, and feeling okay. We explore why happiness can start to feel unsafe after repeated disappointment, and why withholding joy doesn't actually protect us from grief.

Resentment is one of the most common and least talked about emotions in infertility and IVF. In today's episode, we unpack why resentment develops during fertility treatment, how it impacts relationships and identity, and how to move toward emotional flexibility, softness, and healing without bypassing grief or pain.

Join me today as we talk about asynchronous grief—when your grief unfolds on a different timeline, in a different way, or at a different intensity than your partner, your family, or the culture around you expects. If infertility, IVF, miscarriage, or loss has ever left you feeling misunderstood or "behind," this episode is for you.

Five years into IVF This, I'm reflecting on what this space has truly been about — grief, courage, and staying with ourselves through terrain we never chose. This episode is a love letter to anyone navigating infertility, IVF, or a life that didn't unfold the way they expected.

What if one of the most honest emotions in IVF is also the one we judge the most? Today we're talking about relief—why it shows up, why it feels so wrong, and why it doesn't mean what you think it does.

Sometimes the hardest part of IVF isn't just what's happening to you—it's what's happening to the people around you. In this episode, we're talking about survivor's guilt: the complicated mix of joy, grief, guilt, and love that shows up when outcomes don't match.

If you've ever thought "I did everything right — why didn't IVF work?" this episode breaks down the Just-World Fallacy, the neuroscience of self-blame, and how to untangle fertility outcomes from guilt, shame, and worth.

IVF doesn't just break hearts—it can fracture your sense of self. In this episode, we unpack moral injury in infertility and fertility treatment, and why surviving impossible IVF decisions isn't a personal failure—it's a human response to an overwhelming system.  

In this episode of IVF This, we explore why the hardest part of IVF, grief, and uncertainty, isn't the outcome—but the emotions they bring up. We talk about emotional avoidance, anticipatory stress, and how building emotional tolerance can reduce anxiety and help you feel more grounded during fertility treatment and life's hardest moments.

Detachment in IVF doesn't mean you stop caring—it means learning how to care without losing yourself. In this episode, we explore the art of detachment during stim and transfer cycles, and how grounding helps you return to yourself while holding hope gently, no matter how this unfolds.  

IVF is full of moments we think will finally make it easier — until they don't. In this episode, we talk about the arrival fallacy, why milestones rarely deliver the relief we expect, and how to support yourself through the in-between.

The last embryo changes everything. In this episode, we talk about why "last" feels so heavy, how meaning gets attached to outcomes, and why it doesn't have to end in a positive to matter.  

The in-between — that space between what was and what's next — can feel unbearable during IVF. In this episode, I explore the liminal space: why it's so uncomfortable from both a brain and emotional perspective, and how you can reclaim this time as a meaningful, even sacred, part of your becoming.  

  Explore how Lucky Girl Syndrome and manifestation connect to the neuroscience of the brain's reticular activating system (RAS), and how to use it in IVF without falling into toxic positivity.

In this episode of IVF This, we're reframing self-care during infertility and IVF—not as bubble baths and pedicures, but as the radical act of compassion, gentleness, and holding space for yourself in the midst of this journey.