Gefen Fertility New York

Healthful Woman is an excellent podcast and I highly recommend it. In this current series, Dr Nathan Fox, discusses infertility related topics from various perspectives.

This podcast is a ‘must listen to’ regardless of fertility status and experiences. The Brief’s story and subsequent discussion is poignant, thoughtful, inspiring, and not without its humorous moments.

For me, there were multiple take aways, but it reminded me that when life throws us curveballs we never imagined we were prepared to handle - that we can move ourselves in intense hard ways for things we deeply desire.

Happy listening - prepare to laugh and cry.

PS Stay tunes for details about our upcoming NICU support program.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healthful-woman-podcast/id1505875002?i=1000488337135

‎Healthful Woman Podcast: “Gestational Carriers: Building a Family with the Help of Another” - with Adina and Simon Brief on Apple Podcasts ‎Show Healthful Woman Podcast, Ep “Gestational Carriers: Building a Family with the Help of Another” - with Adina and Simon Brief - Aug 16, 2020

Happening next week! Let's support each other. DM/Email us.

This time is creating many challenges. One aspect people are sharing is that the lack of their normal life distractions is impeding their ability to carve out a specific worry time. All the coping skills - seem to be even harder and there feels like so many more opportunities to worry. Nevermind, more things to worry about.

What are you doing to create distractions and meaning in your day - if you find yourself worrying more? Post and share! Join our community!

The challenges of COVID are many and while most fertility treatments are on hold - we can still be helping ourselves and preparing our mind and body for the next step.

Start now with this group.

Gefen-Rimon Zoom CBT Mind/Body Webinar with Dr. Rhonda Adessky in English. Thursday April 23rd

Zoom link: https://huji.zoom.us/j/94249904457?pwd=YjdzMDdYdlhEN2NlS0VBbUw2cU52Zz09

Gefen-Rimon Zoom CBT Mind/Body Webinar with Dr. Rhonda Adessky in English. Thursday April 23rd

Zoom link: https://huji.zoom.us/j/94249904457?pwd=YjdzMDdYdlhEN2NlS0VBbUw2cU52Zz09

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting now Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, confer...

Covid-19 has wreaked havoc in many peoples lives - in ways both big and small.

Fertility challenges - in a normal world - create sadness, a fear of the unknown, and sense of loss of control. People have to manage their disappointment and sadness.

However, this is a new and different type of situation, with its own set of frustrations and disappointment. The recommendation to not start new fertility treatments, and potentially cancel others, can be devastating to those struggling to start or grow their families.

CBT fertility treatment can not take this away, but, as a group, using CBT mindfulness therapy can help make it manageable.

PM or email Gefen Fertility NY if you are interested in joining a Zoom group to help guide you through these challenging times.

I am continually struck by the guilt that women carry and feel about the seemingly control they have over the lack of getting pregnancy, their miscarriages and losses. That somehow their actions caused these events to happen.
You are not that powerful. How can we let it go?
I would love to hear from people about the things they feel guilty about with fertility and infertility.

I am struck by the amount of people who see me now - people who I have known and interacted with in many different ways for many years - who are sharing stories with me. Stories of their own fertility journey's. Stories of hope and stories of sadness. Stories that are happening right now and stories from 20 years ago.

Fertility and infertility for many years was a journey faced alone. People mourned their losses, miscarriages, and negative pregnancy tests in silence.

We are stronger as a community. We are stronger when we have others to lean on in. We allow ourselves the unexpected opportunity to be supported and loved. We don't need to be alone. We can be strong and still allow others to help us - we are stronger together.

Trying to conceive can do something strange to people. It can make your imagination run wild in ways you never knew. The power of the one line versus the two lines on that pregnancy test can in a moments notice make your brain spin.

Sometimes these imaginative thoughts can create a sense of hope but other times despair or even jealousy.

People talk about their very real feelings of not wanting to go places where there are kids - because it heightens the absence of what they dearly cove, causing more pain.

I think, aside from stirring raw emotions, there are cognitive assumptions that we are making most of the time we are outside that are not true.

We look around the world and suddenly we imagine that all the children running around the world came to these parents easily. The truth is that we have no idea what is behind each child's story. Some people are overwhelmed by the fact that they got pregnant, some people have children super close in age because it was hard to get pregnant the first time, some are after miscarriages (early or late), pregnancies after still births, some are from rounds of clomid, iui, ifv, donor eggs, donor s***m, adoption, surrogacy and some are just lucky easy G-d blessed conceptions.

After we have our ten minute cry of frustration and sadness, if we took a breathe and try to reorganize our thoughts and remind ourselves that this is my challenge today and all these babies running around - are not what I do not have - but something that most people have had in a variety of different ways - it can create hope instead of sadness and jealousy - allowing ourselves to be around people, families, and the world.

I am a Clinical Phd Psychologist and the director of Gefen Fertility NY. I am also a mother of twin girls. Twin girls born at 32 weeks, after a one week hospitalization - as my water had spontaneously broke at 31 weeks.

For those who don’t know me - I would say I am an optimistic and get it done person with a deep reserve of energy - but when I sat in the cab leaving Mt Sinai hospital with my small babies in the NICU - I lost it.

I just cried and looked at my husband and said ‘I have nothing left in me - to make this feel OK.’ After a few minutes I said, ‘In truth, I know I will push through and find the strength, and remind myself how lucky I am that I have 32 week old healthy twins, but for five minutes I need to feel sad and overwhelmed that this wasn’t easy’.

Most of the times our stories end well - in whatever struggle we are going through in our lives. But we also need to give ourselves that ten/fifteen minutes of sad/worry time each day before we can start to remind ourselves of all the times we have been strong before, about the opportunities in front of us, about all the possible positive thoughts that can come from the situation we are in.

Gefen fertility and CBT for fertility is not about denying your pain - its about giving your pain a place - and then figuring out how to also find your inner strength on whatever journey you are going through.

We believe you are stronger than you ever knew it or imagined it.

A lot of articles being shared about the trauma of miscarriage. I am struck, in a sad but good way, by how often people are sharing their stories. However, it is clear that the trauma - whether it happened a day ago , a year ago, or twenty years ago - is very present and real.

This article talks about the depression and anxiety associated with repeat miscarriages and fertility treatments. The medical professionals, the best of them, often cannot - for a variety of reasons - attend to the psychological impact that miscarriage and fertility treatments have.

But we can. Gefen Fertility - support for the pain and struggle you are going through with an eye towards mental health to increase physical health.



https://news.yahoo.com/4-miscarriages-had-depression-anxiety-184100748.html

After 4 miscarriages, I had depression, anxiety, and PTSD. My doctors just told me to keep trying for another pregnancy. PTSD can affect war veterans and women who have miscarriages in similar ways. But doctors are missing the warning signs.

Fear. Being scared, like anything can be a good thing. If used correctly - it alerts our bodies flight and fight response to attend to the danger ahead.

What happens to our body if we are always in a state of fear? When do we listen to our fears? When do we question our fears?

Fertility, infertility and parenthood are all about balancing our fears. Sometimes we need to listen and attend and sometimes we need to listen and question.

When we can calm our bodies down - good things happen.

How do you know when your fears are starting to control you and your body?

This is a great Time Magazine special edition - look out for it and splurge.

"That said, it's the recurring, 'chronic' bouts of stress that he and other experts say are the greatest threat to a person's health. "A stressor that lasts for a couple months or longer is the type you really worry about," he says.

Trying to get pregnant. Attempting fertility treatments. Coping with failed fertility treatments and trying new ones. IVF. Pregnant after one or multiple loss. Miscarriage. Late term pregnancy loss or still-born.

The terms chronic stressors', doesn't do these justice, but nevertheless our body experiences them as chronic stressors, and for some trauma, that can impact a person for more than a few months. They are not in our control.

How do you cope? How does stress emotionally impact you? In what ways do you know stress impacts your body? How do you imagine it impacts your body - in ways you don't know?

Let us help you, as a group, manage your stress, your trauma and alleviate some of the impact it is having on your physical and emotional health.

Gefen Fertility - not Gefen Infertility. Infertility is the self identification of a group that ‘is not’. However, fertility is the journey towards motherhood/parenthood - and its about ‘not yet’.

Gefen Fertility - you are part of the journey - and yours may look different. We want to help you through the ‘not yet’.

"Infertility changes how you see yourself and the world. Somewhere along the journey, many of us stop feeling as though it is something that is happening to us, but instead begin to believe that it is a part of who we are." - Regina Townsend

Read her full article below.

She is describing a painful reality but we are more than one things that we are going through in our lives - even when we don't feel like it. How can a person be experiencing something but give it a place within us, that honors and respects the process, but allows us to be productive and present in other areas of our life?

Gefen CBT support groups aims to accomplish these and other goals.

Message us. Comment below. Follow us. Email us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/parenting/the-lasting-trauma-of-infertility.html

The Lasting Trauma of Infertility Even when it ends with a healthy baby, a long struggle to conceive may exact a brutal toll.

This morning at SoulCycle an instructor said something that I thought was fitting for what Gefen is all about. He said, almost all of our negative thoughts aren’t true - they have no proof behind them.

Such a simple idea but hard to realize and actualize. Our negative thoughts - limit us.

How can we honor our negative thoughts and fears, that come from real experience, but not let them control us? How can we allow ourselves the time and space to be sad or worried but march on towards health and future wants.

Gefen Fertility CBT. Thats what we are about.

A good friend of mine shared this article with me and I want to share it with all of you. Getting and being pregnant is never uncomplicated - sometimes we just perceive it as uncomplicated. When is the fear and the level of perceived potential for complication, make the idea of getting or being pregnant too much to handle? What if we want to handle it but can not emotionally get past our sense of fear and anxiety? We live in a world when the worst case scenarios are all around us - how do we remind ourselves that endless bouts of worrying isn't helpful? That most of the time things work out OK? That nearly almost all the times we are stronger than we imagine ourselves to be?

Follow us. Message us. Email us. Share your comments.

What Was Going Wrong With My Pregnancy? As a mother-to-be discovered in her distress, much of prenatal medicine is still a mystery.

Miscarriage, fertility treatment cycles that fail, and trying to get pregnant on your own that is feeling like an endless process. All different experiences with but ranging degrees of sadness associated with them, but feelings that left free to roam and not contained can take us down a hopeless pathway. The 'it will never' or 'i will never'...dialogue.

Gefen Fertility can help support you in your sadness, and frustration but shift the mindset away from hopelessness and depression and towards an increase in mindfulness, wellness, increased mental health and potentially even fertility.

Message us. Email us. Follow us.

Welcome!
Gefen Fertility is grounded in a cognitive behavioral therapy approach to support couples going through various fertility stages.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy(CBT) and what does it have to do with fertility support? The way we think impacts how we feel and how we behave.
A person's fertility experience in so many frustrating and hard ways is outside of one's control, but how we engage with it in our lives, in the here and now, is within our control.
Keep following us to learn more.
Meanwhile check out Keren Gefen Fertility website in Israel to learn more.
https://www.kerengefen.org/

Keren Gefen - Home Keren Gefen Organization Mind/Body for Infertility