Therapy for Infertility & Miscarriage in Midtown Manhattan

Therapy for infertility or miscarriage in NYC

Our team of therapists with doctoral-level training bring knowledge and compassion to helping women or partners process the complex or painful feelings that come up with infertility and miscarriage. When you’re actively trying to conceive, your attention (and everyone else’s) focuses on the physical or medical side of things - how to increase your chances, how to be as healthy as possible, all the countless appointments, scans, and procedures. What quickly falls to the wayside is how you’re emotionally doing underneath it all.

While each experience is unique, what they can have in common is feeling out of control, uncertain, lost, and often devastated because things haven’t been easy or gone according to plan. Many people struggling with infertility or who have miscarried are in pain, isolated, and find it hard to feel hopeful or connected to the rest of the world that haven’t been through what they have. Anxiety, depression, anger, grief, shame, loneliness, and trauma - are all very common experiences.

We know how crucial it is that your emotional well-being is supported throughout any of the unexpected challenges or losses in your journey to conceive. If you are struggling with infertility or experienced a miscarriage, know that you are not alone. Professional, specialized mental health support is available. Reach out to schedule an introductory call and learn more about how we work.

How can therapy for infertility or miscarriage help?

Working with a therapist specializing in infertility or miscarriage can give you the support you need. One of the things we see as psychologists is a deprioritization of mental health for physical health resources. Often people will invest in nutritional programs, specialist consultations, and homoeopathic remedies as a way to manage the emotional impact of unsuccessfully trying to conceive or miscarriage. It’s sometimes too painful to open up the depth or intensity of what you’re feeling, and easier to keep problem solving and taking the next steps. We get that.

And what we find is that the emotional impact of infertility and miscarriage isn’t erased with a successful pregnancy. In fact, we often see much higher levels of anxiety during a subsequent pregnancy, postpartum, and into the early years of parenting. We strongly encourage seeking therapy so you can show up to whatever is next for you with support and care. This may be while you’re actively going through fertility treatment, after a miscarriage, or years down the road.

Therapy can help you by:

• Learning to manage stress and strong emotions with practical tools

• Navigating your thoughts, feelings, and reactions around fertility treatment(s)

• Finding meaningful ways to grieve or process unexpected loss(es)

• Discerning between expected ups and downs and when you may have anxiety or depression deserving more focused care

• Establishing support and safe people to share with, as well as boundaries when needed

• Discussing relationship strain, resentment, or disconnect

• Challenging shame or self-blame with compassion and patience

• Talking about new or unexpected difficulties with sex

• Exploring options and decision making

• Processing traumatic moments (e.g., receiving bad news, medical procedures) so you don’t carry the unresolved effects into the future

Types of therapy for infertility or miscarriage

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

CBT can help you notice the particular automatic thoughts, emotions, or behaviors coming up as you experience setbacks or loss. By challenging and reframing unhelpful thought patterns or deeper beliefs, such as “there’s something wrong with me”, you can learn to manage the very real stress, grief, and uncertainty with self-compassion.

Grief Therapy

Grief therapy can help if you’re experiencing significant difficulty accepting or moving forward after miscarriage. While there are many reasons why grief may be prolonged, pregnancy losses are unique in that parents are grieving an imagined future and relationship. When other people in your life aren’t able to share your experience of loss in the same ways, it can be harder to make sense of on your own.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness approaches can help you strengthen non-judgmental observation skills and learn to stay in the present. You can observe your own body sensations, thoughts, or individual moments that signal stress or unresolved emotions. By bringing curious, intentional awareness to a moment, it can inform coping strategies, self-care, or decision-making. Instead of catastophizing the future or getting stuck in the past, mindfulness can help you choose to take things one step at a time.

Psychodynamic Therapy

Making the decision to have a child often brings up a lot - from life and partnership goals and desires, your own parent-child relationships, anxieties or insecurities about parenthood, and a huge life transition. When things don’t go as planned, all of this can get amplified. Exploring connections between past and present experiences can help you make important connections and gain clarity.

Multicultural Therapy

Multicultural therapy celebrates individual differences and all identities as equal and valuable. Infertility and pregnancy loss experiences can make us grapple with derailed life and relationship goals, which are gendered and heteronormative. Having space to discuss these thoughts and feelings openly is important to supporting your sense of self during a time of uncertainty.

Trauma Therapy

Having your wish of becoming a parent not happen as you hope is often devastating. Sadly, the reality that few people can talk about their deeply personal experiences with infertility or miscarriage with others only compounds the pain, uncertainty, and grief. The likelihood of these experiences having a traumatic impact also increase exponentially with successive setbacks and losses. Trauma therapy acknowledges the profound and unique emotional impact of what you’re going through and creates safe space to process and heal.