I realized that in my last entry, I was complaining about...complaining. So - enough complaining. How about something positive for a change? No, I'm not pregnant. But last week in my Mind/Body Class, we talked about reframing negative thinking. In addition to spending 75% of our daily conversations on negative topics (let's face it, we have more fun joking with coworkers about That Jane and her New Office and how She Thinks She's So Great than we would talking about how nice it is that our assistant always makes sure the water cooler refill is changed), when dealing with infertility, it's pretty common to have a constant negative loop playing in your mind.

For me, the hard part is trying to stay hopeful (if you think you'll get pregnant, you will sort of thing) while not getting my hopes up to the point where I'm really let down every month. And I can't help it - negative thoughts creep in all the time.

Here is the exercise that we did, and I highly recommend it:

Write down three frequent negative thoughts.

My three were:

1) It won't work for us ("it" being IVF or IUI or anything)
2) It's my fault because I'm fat
3) Maybe this means that my husband and I aren't supposed to be together

I feel the worst about #3, but I share it with you because several of the women in my group told me that they had the same thought! And almost half of us had either #1 or #2 - so if you were thinking any of these things, you're not alone.

Next, ask yourself the following questions about each of your negative thoughts:

1) Is this thought true?
2) Where did I learn this thought (where did this thought come from)?
3) Is this thought logical?
4) Is this thought contributing to my stress?

For me, thought #3 was not true and not logical, was contributing to my stress - and I guess it came from not being able to find any logic or make any sense out of why, when so many abusive, neglectful and hateful people can have children, my husband and I can't.

I'm still working on dealing with thoughts 1 and 2.

The next step was to reframe the thoughts. For #1, it was pretty easy: how will I know the technologies won't work for us? They might not work, but they might work! We have good numbers, no known problems, and have a good chance of having an assisted technology work.

With number two, I decided that my weight is one of the very few things in this whole that I can actually control. And while it's probably irrelevant, why not take control?

Now I have reframed thoughts to combat my negative thoughts:
It won't work becomes it might work.
I'm too fat becomes I'm doing something to try to lose weight and get into better shape.
Maybe we don't belong together becomes Thank God we have each other - no one could help me through this in the way that my sweet husband has.

- L.