What If Infertility Is Here to Teach Us Something?
How Infertility Can Transform Your Life, Relationships & Emotional Resilience
Infertility is often seen as a relentless battle, something to endure, fight against, or overcome. But what if it’s more than that? What if infertility isn’t just a roadblock, but a reckoning? A force that rips away illusions, exposes hidden wounds, and pushes us to grow in ways we never imagined? What if, beyond the pain, frustration, and waiting, infertility is an invitation…to transform, to break open, and to see ourselves with raw, unfiltered truth?
The Default Narrative: Infertility as Suffering
For many, infertility is framed as a purely medical issue, a problem to fix, a battle to be won with science, persistence, and sheer willpower. The emotional toll of grief, rage, anxiety, isolation is often treated as collateral damage, something to push through rather than sit with. But what if those emotions aren’t just burdens? What if they are signals…clues pointing us toward something deeper that demands to be seen?
The Hidden Lessons of Infertility
1. Reframing Control & Surrender
Infertility has a brutal way of exposing our illusion of control. We track, we test, we follow every step, and yet, sometimes, it still doesn’t work. It’s maddening. It’s unfair. But it’s also an invitation: to let go, to surrender in a way that is not passive but profoundly active. Surrender doesn’t mean giving up. It means trusting the unfolding, even when it doesn’t make sense.
2. Uncovering Deep-Seated Beliefs
Through the lens of my mentor Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry, we can begin to ask: What buried beliefs about my worth, my identity, my value are rising to the surface? Many of us have internalized the idea that our worth is tied to achievement, including parenthood. Infertility forces us to confront this conditioning. It strips us down to the raw question: Who am I if this doesn’t happen? And what we find in that answer can be liberating.
3. Deepening Our Relationships
Infertility is a relationship stress test like no other. My other mentor Terry Real’s work shows us that crisis doesn’t just reveal cracks, it forces us to decide whether we will repair or let them deepen. Some relationships don’t survive infertility. Some become unrecognizable. But some, when held with honesty and courage, grow in ways that would never have been possible otherwise.
And here’s something we still don’t talk about enough: men are deeply affected by infertility too. Some quietly shoulder their partner’s pain, feeling pressure to “stay strong,” never giving voice to their own grief, fears, and insecurities. Others receive the diagnosis themselves, navigating shame, identity crises, and the devastating realization that their path to fatherhood may not look the way they expected. And then there’s the couples faced with unexplained infertility, left stranded in a space of uncertainty where no one can tell them what’s wrong, or what to do next. That was us.
Infertility doesn’t just test our partnerships. It disrupts all of our relationships, our friendships, our family ties, even the way we relate to ourselves. It makes us question who will stand beside us and who will disappear. It forces us to relearn connection, to redefine love, to build resilience not just within ourselves, but with the people around us.
4. Expanding Our Emotional Resilience
Emotions like grief, jealousy, and anger are often seen as the enemy. We’re told to suppress them, to “stay positive,” to “be strong.” But what if these emotions are not obstacles but teachers? What if sitting in the fire of grief is what allows us to transform? What if jealousy is a signal pointing us toward something unhealed? What if anger is a boundary we haven’t yet set? Infertility forces us to build emotional resilience not by ignoring our pain, but by leaning into it and learning from it.
