Promo for the series "Third Person" (Arch 12)
15 percent of all couples in Israel suffer from fertility problems, and for some of them the only solution is surrogacy.
But this procedure is not simple, whether it is done in Israel or abroad, and it has a heavy emotional cost.
A few years ago Tali (pseudonym), a beautiful woman, with a thriving career and no children, came to me. She and her partner began a surrogacy procedure after eight years of failed attempts to conceive. In the first meetings she was very eloquent, unusually organized in the way she told everything that had happened so far, and also declared that there was no need for her partner to come with her to the meeting, because she currently wants to do the treatment and if she thinks otherwise she will say To me. Tali shared all the details with me and even mentioned that she and her husband love each other very much, and apart from the fact that they don't have children, she doesn't see any problem.
In one of the meetings I asked her about her friends, who are the people with whom she shares her difficulties.
It was the first time there was silence on her part, and Tali said in a quiet, almost whispering voice, "Nobody. I'm jealous, and I'm ashamed that I'm jealous, so I don't share with any friends who already have children. I can't bear the fact that I don't have children and that The ones I know have. I was never a jealous type, and suddenly this jealousy came and completely took over me."
Her next sentence was already with tears of pain, and she asked: What am I doing with her?
with the jealousy?
It can be a very lonely experience.
Rotem Sela in the series "Third Person" (Photo: screenshot, Keshet 12)
I looked at Tali with kind eyes and told her that we would get to know her.
Couples who come to the surrogacy process, come after a journey of countless attempts to become pregnant and turn from a couple into a family.
Attempts that shattered the romantic dream of making love and getting pregnant, attempts that brought with them countless tests, doctors, injections and above all the nerve-wracking wait for an answer, and the great disappointment that comes with every negative you hear.
Every lack of success is a crisis that the couple experiences.
Each failure creates another crack in the faith that they will become a family.
Couples who come to the surrogacy process come with anxiety, negative body image, difficult marital communication, anger at the lack of success, and a host of other unglamorous feelings.
Like any process we go through, we have the option to surrender to it or grow from it.
Growth has to do with the place we give to our emotions.
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To the full article
The most important and first step is first of all recognizing the feelings that exist, putting them down and giving them space.
What does it mean to recognize emotions like jealousy, anger and anxiety - and why is it so important to learn them?
To know unglamorous feelings is to accept with understanding their very being.
remove the shame and allow the vulnerability to be present.
To know how this emotion affects us, what thoughts accompany it, and what can help us and benefit us together with the emotion that exists.
Tali, by her very loud announcement that she is jealous, has already shed the first barrier of shame.
After we got to know the emotion and gave it space, I asked Tali what could help her now with the jealousy she is in.
The answer seemed to flow straight from her - both to tell herself that it's really okay that she's jealous, and also to remember all the other amazing things she has and be proud of them.
Tali came to the next meeting with her partner, and shared with him the feelings of jealousy that she experienced and like a large stone dropped from her.
It was a very exciting meeting.
The unglamorous feelings are part of our emotional system just like the right side of the body cannot exist without the left side, so too the emotional system in order for it to work well we need to recognize and give space to it all.
Repressing and hiding the emotions can cause outbursts of anger, eating disorders, depression, severe cynicism and even a drastic decrease in our quality of life.
Hila Schlesinger is a psychotherapist and accompanies couples in the surrogacy procedure at Manor Medical from the Danal Group and the owner of the podcast "A Place for Feelings"
health
psychology
Tags
surrogates
fertility
Third person