"Helping you Find Serenity and Strength on Your Path to Healing"
​Counselling for Infertility & Childless Not by Choice
When you’ve longed to have a child, facing infertility or the possibility of a life without children can bring a profound sense of grief and loss. It can affect your identity, your relationships and the future you had imagined, while often feeling as though the people around you don’t fully understand what you’re going through.
When the future you imagined changes
Infertility can be an exhausting and isolating experience. You may have spent months or years living between hope and disappointment, going through fertility investigations or treatment, experiencing unsuccessful IVF, considering donor conception, or facing difficult decisions about whether to continue treatment.
For some, there comes a point when the focus begins to shift from trying to have a child to facing the possibility — or reality — of being childless not by choice.
This can bring a different kind of grief: not only for the child you hoped for, but for an imagined future, a sense of identity and the life you thought you would have.
A space where you don’t have to explain
One of the most difficult parts of infertility and being childless not by choice can be feeling that other people don’t quite understand the depth of the loss. Comments intended to be helpful can hurt, friendships can change, pregnancy announcements and family occasions can become difficult, and you may find yourself feeling increasingly separate from the people around you.
Counselling offers somewhere you can talk honestly about feelings that may be difficult to express elsewhere — including grief, anger, jealousy, guilt, shame, resentment or fear about the future. There is no expectation that you should be “over it”, look on the bright side or feel grateful for the life you have.
Counselling with someone who understands
Alongside my professional training, I have personal experience of infertility, fertility treatment and facing a life without children. This gives me an understanding of some of the emotions, decisions and losses that can accompany this experience, while recognising that your story and your response to it will be entirely your own.
My role isn’t to tell you how you should feel or what decisions you should make. I offer a warm, confidential and non-judgemental space where we can explore what this experience means for you and begin to make sense of what comes next.