13: Coping with Infertility with Erika Labuzan-Lopez, MA, LMFT, LPC
Posted: September 11, 2020
Welcome! My guest today is Erika Labuzan-Lopez, a psychotherapist in private practice in Houston, TX. Erika’s practice focuses on couples’ issues, infertility, new parents, and post-partum issues. Erika offers individual and couples therapy along with workshops for parents and couples. Infertility is an experience that touches SO many lives, and Erika will help us understand why this is difficult to deal with and how friends and family can best offer help. Let’s jump into this topic with Erika!
What you’ll hear in this episode:
- From www.resolve.org, we get the following statistics about infertility: 1 in 8 couples have trouble conceiving on their own, and about 7.4 million women have received fertility treatments during their lifetime
- Misunderstanding leads to isolation
- Infertility and Secondary Infertility defined
- Even healthy, fertile couples only have a 20% chance of conceiving in any given month!
- Unique challenges faced by couples with infertility
- Science over romance
- Differences in attitudes toward infertility from men and women
- The monthly cycle of GRIEF
- Myths and misperceptions around infertility:
- “It’s always the woman’s fault.”
- “Maybe we just need to relax.”
- “Life will never again be normal for us.”
- The therapy process
- How friends and family can support loved ones with infertility
- Four types of responders (and how to deal with each one):
- The Fixer
- The Minimizer
- The Blamer
- The Existentialist
- Erika’s words of wisdom: “You are NOT alone.”