marisadarrigo

Those who fail to have children are not always “sick” in the body (the rate of idiopathic or causeless infertility is in fact as high as 39 percent), always instead “suffering in the soul.”
They are people frequently carrying feelings of anger, shame, envy, and a sense of failure resulting from their frustrated desire. After all, the way we have been programmed, it is from desire(sexual desire and biological desire to reproduce) that life arises. All this can activate a particularly painful personal and couple crisis.

The very choice to intervene may highlight resistance, underlying ambivalence (recognizing, for example, that there is a problem, agreeing to ask for help and having one’s intimacy “violated,” etc., etc.) or unrealistic escapism.
Undertaking PMA(Medically Assisted Procreation) treatment then involves frequent resistance and means starting a journey that is very physically strenuous and costly in terms of emotion, time and money.
Lo studio of the infertility over time has seen a gradual broadening of vision: from a lens focused solely on the woman and her empty belly, the gaze first widened to include the man, his reproductive organs, then the couple, the interaction between male and female factors, and the quality of the relationship.

Procreative failure is in a psychological sense a real grief and, as such, of slow and complex processing. It forces a redefinition of personal and couple life plan. It also places sexuality in a different perspective.
We speak of a couple when a relational space (the WE) is created between two individuals based on a covenant of reciprocity and alliance, a covenant of personal trust that is not totally conscious as it is also determined by each person’s desires, needs and projections.
The discovery of a procreative difficultyimpossibility generates a real earthquake. In fact,infertility is found to be negatively associated with relational, sexual, and psychosocial well-being and causes elevated levels of stress and tension.
Skip contract and couple’s project; difficult questions arise “Is it really me you want?” “Is it really you I want?” “What is the point of our being together?”
The alternation of feelings is strong and swirling: anger, accusation, guilt, rejection, need for confirmation, resentment, regret. For some couples, it becomes impossible to talk about the topic, either because they do not want to hurt each other or because they do not feel understood. This increases closure, isolation and the resulting experience of loneliness.
Everyone responds in a personal way and sometimes with different intensity and speed. In some cases, it is one of the two (most frequently the woman) who becomes the driving element, and the other takes a gregarious role almost to please and please the partner.
The situations are multifaceted and each couple is a universe apart, albeit in the shared common experience of redefining plans and perspectives.
These elements are modulated by the quality of the couple relationship determined in turn by the type of attachment of the individual partners.

People who have a secure attachment style do in fact trust each other, handle anxiety and fear better, and are able to compromise. The insecure may tend to avoid conflict because they are unable to state their positions and accept the idea of support from the other. Or manifest ambivalence, tending to dominate the situation and putting pressure on the partner.
However, it should also be said that in some cases this complex situation can be an opportunity to “choose” oneself again, a kind of “renewal of promise.” The couple is able to come to a deeper and more mature knowledge, understanding and acceptance of each other. All of this, however, goes through a process that involves real questioning, crossing the line, pain, disappointment and accepting the downsizing of one’s ideals.

Also with regard to the effects of a condition of infertility/procreative difficulty on sexuality, the landscape is very varied, complex and diverse, again depending on the personological structure of individuals and the type of couple relationship. Some, for example, question the very meaning and value of sexuality (as it is decoupled from a procreative purpose), while others experience it as a kind of compulsive need, so you have to try, try, try…
Couples, however, tend to be reluctant to talk about it (although at the origin of procreative difficulties there are also moderately frequent sexual difficulties), driven as they are by a need to normalize and perhaps even to keep their intimacy protected.

Purposeful intercourse is agreed to be strongly disruptive to the fluidity and naturalness of sexual relations, so much so that it causes a lowering of desire and level of participation. In contrast, the use of PMA techniques does not seem to be a particularly disturbing element on this level.
The change of perspective in this dimension, again starting with the enhancement of desire in this case between the partners, could be access to a more joyful sexuality because it is free from the obligations of reproduction.

One of the functions of reproductive psychology is to be able to put people at the center, highlighting the continuous interaction between biological, psychological, relational, social, and cultural factors.
That is, the focus needs broadening from individual complexity to relationship to include influences arising from the expectations of parents, extended families, and the social and cultural group to which they belong.
It starts with the couple and this represents, among other things, the confluence point of two different family systems. Moreover, a bond is established between the partners that has nothing biological, but is cultural and exogamic.

Families of origin can be either an important resource or a critical issue depending on each case, and depending on the level of autonomy and disengagement achieved by each individual member. Indeed, they can fulfill a role of containment and support or they can exert pressure, amplify anxiety, and act out attitudes of hostility.
This happens, for example, when for strictly personal or cultural reasons there are very strong expectations of having a grandchild or when, in the presence of an existential fragility on the part of one of the members of the couple, a new birth is seen as a saving breakthrough and an opportunity for healing or again when a diagnosis of infertility is used as a tool to validate perplexity and disagreement regarding the formation of that specific couple, etc.
There could be so many examples and, if we want to look at them in their narrative dimension, they stand to show how already only the project of a child to be born is located within a network not only of relationships, but also of stories, expectations, goals and projections.

Although almost all couples say they do not feel the emotional and social pressure from the parents’ expectation of becoming grandparents, a good majority fantasize the desired child as a “gift” to the parents.
Experiences related to a condition of infertility, which already contemplate the anger of feeling deprived of a “right,” the feeling of having been “robbed of the future,” then include feeling guilty for being incapable and disappointing parental expectations or, in cases, for example, of problems that could have been prevented, a form of resentment for having been poorly cared for and protected by them.

Therefore, it is very important to be able to place the couple within the complex relational and cultural system represented by families of origin, so that she can cope with the impact resulting from an infertility diagnosis, can feel free from conditioning, and can make choices (including with regard to PMA techniques ) in awareness of her own needs.
Then there is the whole aspect of social conditioning that concerns both the more purely cultural aspects and the range of extended parental and friendship relationships, the so-called social.
Prejudices are still very much present in contemporary society that, viewing fertility as a gift, symmetrically judge infertility as a kind of curse or divine retribution.
At the same time, an increasingly convinced view of the omnipotent power of science and the possibility through it to overcome all limits dominates.
Acceptance and appreciation of the limit, as a defining and defining element, are not part of our baggage for growth and survival in contemporary times. In the absence of these basic requirements, the same techniques in the procreative field can represent, with reference to age, for example, a kind of illusion that, on the basis of ” anything is possible,” provides women with an apparent freedom of choice that actually turns out to be in a real trap.
Within this framework, it is easy to pick up implicit or explicit pressures from the social environment to engage in certain behaviors.

Loss of personal esteem, a consequent sense of shame often lead to a failure to talk about it with friends and family, increasing a state of isolation and social withdrawal, which is often accompanied by a kind of avoidance. One tries not to think about it, but in the meantime the “avoided” thought works under the radar damaging the whole structure.
People often hide infertility because they fear familial and social stigma, just as they fear their own negative feelings and projections that they feel they are the object of.
In a world made up of “little families,” it is easy to feel “out of place.” This can cause anger and disappointment with respect to couples with children who envy each other (without being able to accept this feeling that more than others is the object of social but also personal stigma) and with respect to whom one feels placed as if in another dimension. At the same time, one looks with suspicion in the other for an attitude of special care or sensitivity, because this contributes to a greater sense of one’s own diversity.
In this respect, too, it shows how couples need to be accompanied in a process that takes time, to allow a transition through grief, loss, and disappointment toward awareness and feeling and becoming protagonists of their own lives and choices.