"I learned that children are a gift, an infinite privilege." Interview with psychologist Olga Carmona

We started yesterday this interview with psychologist Olga Carmona, co-director of Psychology CEIBE, in which she explained the hard process that can be assumed, from the emotional point of view, the diagnosis of fertility problems and the sometimes long path of treatments. We continue to delve into these issues today within this week in which we are going to talk in depth about infertility and sterility.

Olga, in addition to being a psychologist, can explain a lot about this process. She herself went a long way looking for a son who did not arrive and receive the news that she could never get pregnant, in the end, against any medical prognosis, conceive two children naturally.

How should a medical professional give such news?

With a lot of tact but at the same time with honesty, explaining the phases of the process and above all, helping to moderate the expectations of the couple, which at the beginning of the treatments are usually excessive regarding what the medicine can really offer.

They should also help them to dose their forces, explain to them that it can be a long process and with stages where it is necessary to rest, not only from a physical point of view, but also emotionally.

Now I ask you as a woman, how was your itinerary for fertility problems?

My journey through my infertility was no different than many women I have met. What was different was the outcome.

Despite being a psychologist and even having supported women who suffered a similar process, I was not able to save myself any suffering. I went through each and every one of the stages described except for one: acceptance.

I never resigned myself for eight years to not being a mother, but I think I had the lucidity of knowing when to stop. Detect when you are losing your way, know that the wear is such that you can drag the couple and yourself, realize that, even if you are successful, you cannot reach motherhood in any way and in such a state unbalanced, and to conclude that pregnancy and childbirth is only part of motherhood, but in no case makes us mothers, was for me a salvation.

It was also a journey of maturity and learning. I learned humility. I learned that believing that we have control over almost everything is just a superb mirage of omnipotence.

I learned that children are a gift, an infinite privilege.

I learned to stop asking questions and flow, let go of control, stop forcing my body and my partner dragged by a desire that began to look dangerously like an obsession.
I learned that sometimes things don't happen when we want them to happen, but when we are prepared for it.

Years after the treatments I got pregnant spontaneously and got pregnant again seven months after giving birth to my first child. Science cannot explain it.

Adoption, insemination, donation of eggs or embryos, does each decision need a different approach?

Definitely. Science goes one way and the psychology of humans for another and my feeling is that behind and without air.

For science it is a milestone to get a woman to manage an embryo of another couple in her womb, but that is only a biological success. Then you have to go to assess how that woman processes gestating a child who is not biologically and yours and also how to explain to the human being who lives in that embryo that is not the biological child of the woman who managed it. This just to give an example, there are a thousand.

However, of all the examples that you have given me, I believe that adoption deserves a separate chapter because in this case, in addition to not sharing any link of a biological nature, the adopted child brings with it an abandoned trace that will always accompany him and that his Parents will have to learn to manage.

And, on the other hand, the adoptive parents are going to have to handle variables, many variables that are left out of what would be the education and upbringing of a biological child. I do not speak of affections, of course, which in my opinion are not different.

They are different paths to become parents, but parents are all, as children are all. I speak of the fact that the path that has taken us to that son contains its peculiarities, and that we have to learn to walk with them.

There are people who abandon the search for the child after several attempts or paths, what reasons are there for it? Is it emotionally very exhausting?

There are many reasons. The road can become much harder than we initially imagined.

We are subjected to brutal pressure as people and as a couple. Each attempt is an ordeal to hope, it is a renewal of expectations, it is the fantasy of touching with the fingertips the most desired, most desired, and then fall again. And each fall is deeper than the previous one and you have to get up again more tired, more sunken, more skimpy. Your entire universe is affected.

Sometimes it cannot be followed because it drags us and destroys us. I think it is very healthy to stop when you feel that you have hit bottom, that you do not find the energy to follow, that you are intoxicating your honest desire to be a father or mother. It is easy for desire to become an obsession and that is not healthy for anyone, nor for the one born, if it is achieved. There are couples who separate during the process or even at birth, what are the reasons?

The main reason is usually the difference in the power of desire. It may happen that in an infertility process one of the two decides to stop earlier. It is usually mostly men who can reorganize their lives without children, can accept before and move on. This opens a deep rift in the couple where guests appear little compatible with love, such as resentment, guilt and self-perception of loneliness.

In any case, the birth of a child, even the pregnancy itself is a new and stressful situation where affections, ties, times, everything must be reorganized.

This is already a pressure situation that must be resolved under normal conditions. If we add to this a previous route of attrition, of emotional roundabout, of constant contradictions, of guilt, of feelings of inferiority, of anger, of frustration, of fighting against it is not very well known that, of review even of our own partner It is not difficult to intuit that the scenario described puts the relationship in a situation of extreme fragility. It takes a lot of balance and a lot of emotional strength to triumph over something like that. And I don't say unharmed, unharmed nobody comes out.

But sometimes the diagnoses fail, as they failed with you, right?

Medicine knows some variables, almost always physical. But not all. There are an infinite number of things that they openly acknowledge. They are able to clone life but not explain it when it arises without the paths for it being available.

Yes, life is always a miracle, even when we believe we have created it consciously. And as such it happens. Regardless of what medicine knows and I think it knows a lot and that fortunately it has helped many people to see their greatest wish fulfilled, and I also believe that you have to let yourself be helped if you can help us, but I insist, in the miracle of life Medicine doesn't have all the answers.

We thank the psychologist and mother Olga Carmona who granted this beautiful interview Babies and more and we invite you to follow this week the rest of the articles we will dedicate to infertility issue.

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