When Trying to Conceive Becomes a Grief Process

If you’re trying to conceive and finding that the emotional weight of it is quietly taking over every area of your life including your focus, your relationships, your sense of yourself, this post is for you. Registered Clinical Psychologist and Clinic founder, Michelle Sorensen, shares insights for women at every stage of a fertility journey.

I’m Michelle Sorensen, a registered clinical psychologist and the founder of Resiliency Clinic. We work with women in Ottawa in person and with women across Ontario and Quebec virtually. Over the years, I’ve heard from women at every stage of a fertility journey whether it be from some a few months in, some years deep, or some processing pregnancy loss. What I notice, almost every time, is how much has been building before they finally reach out. Most already know they need support. They’re anxious, depleted, grieving and they just haven’t had a place to put it.

In Canada, roughly 1 in 6 women trying to conceive experience infertility, according to the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society — and that number has been climbing alongside the trend of delayed childbearing.¹ What gets far less attention is the psychological toll: research consistently shows that between 25% and 60% of people going through infertility experience clinically significant anxiety or depression.² Many are dealing with both — and research has compared that emotional weight to the toll of other serious health diagnoses.³

Why So Many Women Trying To Conceive Don’t Ask for Help

If you haven’t reached out for support yet, that makes sense. Most women I work with waited longer than they needed to, and the reasons are almost always the same.

The calendar is already overwhelming. Between monitoring appointments, bloodwork, ultrasounds and procedures, the idea of adding one more thing, even something helpful, can feel like too much. For women across Ontario and Quebec, virtual therapy removes a lot of that friction. You don’t have to be in Ottawa, and you don’t have to leave the house.

The “just relax” comments shut things down. When someone says “try not to stress” or “it’ll happen when you stop thinking about it,” the message most women receive is that others can’t handle the real weight of what they’re going through. So they stop sharing it. They get quieter. And the pain gets heavier.

Nobody calls it, or acknowledges it, as grief. So women keep moving forward, to the next cycle, the next appointment, the next decision, without ever stopping to name what’s actually being lost along the way.

Trying to Conceive Is a Grief Process

One of the most clinically useful things we offer is a way to name what’s happening: this is grief.

That’s true whether you’ve had a confirmed pregnancy loss or not. Every cycle that doesn’t result in a pregnancy is a loss. Every negative test. Every month that passes. The pregnancy announcements, the baby shower invitations, the casual “so when are you having kids?” these land differently when you’re in this. The losses accumulate in real time, without a clear endpoint.

What makes this particularly hard is that the fertility process rarely gives you room to feel any of it. There’s always a next step: the next cycle, the next appointment, the next decision. Before you’ve had a chance to absorb what just happened, your body is already on to the next thing. Grief needs time and stillness, and fertility treatment offers very little of either.

Grief also doesn’t move in a straight line. Denial, sadness, anger, bargaining: women trying to conceive can cycle through all of these in the span of a single week, then start again. When that emotional pain goes unprocessed for long enough, it tends to resurface later. Sometimes in a postpartum experience. Sometimes in a relationship. Sometimes in how someone sees themselves years down the road.

What Women Are Often Carrying Alone

This is rarely one clean emotion. Most women describe something more complex, like grief alongside hope alongside anger alongside shame, sometimes all in the same afternoon. These are the topics that tend to come up in our sessions:

Emotionally

• Grief that has nowhere to land: each negative test, failed cycle, or lost pregnancy
• Anxiety and depression that can be hard to separate from the stress of treatment itself
• Guilt and self-blame, even when there’s no clinical reason for it
• Painful, complicated feelings when others announce pregnancies or have babies
• Emotional exhaustion from months or years of hoping and then not

Around Identity

• Questions about womanhood, body image, and what it means when your body isn’t doing what you want it to do
• Feeling out of step with friends and family who are moving into different life stages
• Loss of control over your body, your timeline, your plans
• Hard questions with no clear answer: “Who am I if I don’t become a mother?”

In Relationships

• Strain on partnerships: different ways of coping, intimacy that starts to feel medical and scheduled rather than connected
• Not knowing what to say to each other when you’re both struggling
• Friends and family who want to help but don’t quite know how — and the work of managing that
• The ongoing calculation of who to tell, and how much

Around Treatment and Decisions

• The physical toll of medications, procedures, and constant monitoring
• Financial stress that often goes unspoken
• Decision fatigue: whether to pursue certain options, when to pause, what comes next
• Preparing emotionally for outcomes you can’t predict or control

What Therapy Actually Does Here

You don’t need to have reached a breaking point to benefit from talking to someone. And for women across Ontario and Quebec, virtual therapy means you can access this support without adding a commute to an already full calendar.

Therapy during a fertility journey isn’t about eliminating stress so that you can get pregnant. It’s about making sure you’re actually present for your own life while this is happening, not just surviving each cycle.

In practice, that often looks like:

• Building concrete strategies for managing triggers for the pregnancy announcements, the comments from well-meaning people and the hard days after a negative result
• Working toward self-compassion rather than self-criticism, which tends to be the default when you feel like your body has let you down
• Improving communication with a partner who is going through this alongside you but coping differently
• Staying connected to the parts of your life that exist outside of this process
• Learning to tolerate uncertainty without it taking over everything
• Thinking through what a full, meaningful life could look like whether or not it includes pregnancy

For many women trying to conceive, this kind of support is what makes the difference between enduring a fertility journey and being able to actually get through it.

We Work With Women Across Ontario and Quebec

Resiliency Clinic is a psychology and psychotherapy practice founded by registered clinical psychologist Michelle Sorensen, with a team of 20+ therapists based in Ottawa. We offer in-person sessions for Ottawa-area clients and virtual therapy for women anywhere in Ontario or Quebec. We’re not here to tell you to relax or look on the bright side. We’re here to help you work through the real weight of this and connect the dots between what you’re carrying now and what you need going forward.

If you’re ready to talk, or just want to find out whether this could be a fit, reach out for a free 15-minute consult call. No commitment or pressure.

References

¹ Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS). Fertility FAQ. Available: https://cfas.ca/fertility-faq.html

² Rooney KL, Domar AD. The relationship between stress and infertility. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience. 2018;20(1):41-47. Available: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6016043/

³ Domar AD, Zuttermeister PC, Friedman R. The psychological impact of infertility: a comparison with patients with other medical conditions. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology. 1993;14(Suppl):45-52.