Infertility As A Psychological Problem. Algorithm For Working With The Problem

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Infertility is the inability to have children. While this concept is more commonly applied to women, it still applies to men. Infertility can be talked about when a person cannot get pregnant after 2 years of unprotected regular sex. If there were pregnancies, but ended in miscarriage, we can also talk about infertility.

Infertility can cause depression, low self-esteem, and a sense of guilt in both men and women. This significantly affects all areas of family life, including sexual.

Forced and deliberate childless marriage: what is the difference?

If the family does not succeed in having a child, partners often experience suffering. But, there are couples who choose this path consciously.

LB Schneider defines a deliberately childless marriage as one where a couple of healthy people can have children, but does not want to do so.

When working with such pairs, you should pay attention to:

1) The individual's need for children, as well as the intra-family needs for them (that is, how the person herself relates to children, or she does not want them specifically with this partner).

2) Working with negative motivation for children. There are the following reasons why couples deliberately abandon children:

- the desire to live for your own pleasure;

- material relations;

- unsatisfactory living conditions (a reason that is often associated with general dissatisfaction with marriage);

- negative experience of past relationships.

In addition, the birth of a child is taking on a new, lifelong responsibility and not every young couple is ready to take it upon themselves.

The ideology of couples with a conscious choice of childlessness is expressed in the following attitudes:

- children have a negative impact on marital relations;

- children interfere with fully interacting with society.

At the same time, forcibly childless couples condemning refer to this opinion.

Forced childless marriage is associated with poor health of the spouses or one of them.

The causes of infertility can be physiological and psychological. Next, we will consider precisely the psychological reasons that cause infertility.

Psychological infertility: what is it?

Psychological infertility is seen as a defensive reaction to some psychological factor. Depending on this, three groups of childless women are distinguished:

1. a woman knows about the possibility of having children, has passed all the examinations and knows that she is healthy, but still cannot conceive a child;
2. social factors, lack of confidence in the partner - the couple seems to be doing well, but the woman cannot get pregnant;
3. - women with deep childhood traumas (here we can say that the woman was born as a result of an unwanted pregnancy). The experienced negative emotions of a little girl are transferred into the life of an adult woman, and she is very afraid to give birth.

The environments of the psychological causes of male infertility are worth noting:

1. unconscious desire to see another woman with you, uncertainty that the woman next to you will become a good mother;
2. lack of self-confidence as a person who can provide for their children;
3. fear that the unborn child might "deprive" his spouse;
4. psychological trauma in childhood;
5. fear of responsibility and much more.

How should a psychologist deal with a problem?

It is recommended to work with the problem according to the following algorithm:

1) Diagnosis of the cause of the problem;

2) Search for the state that clients want to achieve at the end of therapy (this will help determine the course of therapy itself);

3) Relieving stress from each of the spouses;

4) Working with the true desires of a woman / man.

These may be the following desires: to keep a husband, to be like other women who have a child, to be needed by someone, to give birth to a child in order to escape loneliness, etc.

5) Working with the desires of a man.

6) Expand the goals of the couple.

Thus, we see that the solution to the problem of psychological infertility is possible, the main thing is not to deceive yourself and not force you to do what you do not want.

Be happy, confident in yourself and your partner.