Saff Mitten: Do You Ever Worry Your Friends Are Getting Bored of Your Long IVF Journey?
Saff Mitten, Counsellor and Psychotherapist at Saff Mitten Counselling and Psychotherapy, shared on LinkedIn։
”Do you ever worry your friends are getting bored of you and your long IVF journey?
A lot of women have this fear.
When infertility and IVF go on for months or years, you may start to feel like you never have anything good to share. You’re still waiting. Still struggling. Still dealing with pain and disappointment and loss.
But because of this, you might worry that you’ve become boring. That you keep talking about the same things, the same worries, the same sadness. That you’re always down and bringing everyone else down too.
You may even find yourself apologising. ‘Sorry, I know I keep going on about this.’ Because you’re tired of living it, and you imagine they must be tired of hearing about it.
You miss the person you were before all this, and wonder whether your friends miss her too. Whether they still want to spend time with you when you have less energy, less enthusiasm, and less to contribute. Whether needing their support for so long has made you a burden.
So you might start saying less. Pretending you’re doing better than you are. Worrying that being honest will push people further away, even when you really need their support.
Friendships can become complicated when your lives take very different directions. Some people struggle to understand what you are living through, or how to keep showing up when they can’t make it better. And sometimes friendships do change or end, adding another painful loss to everything you are already carrying.
That can feel like confirmation of what you feared: that you were too down, too demanding, too much. But a friendship changing or ending does not mean those fears were true.
Struggling for a long time does not make you a burden. You don’t have to have good news to deserve someone’s company, care or interest.
Many friendships do survive this. Staying connected takes effort on both sides, and that responsibility shouldn’t fall entirely on you.
I’ve written more about how and why friendships can change during infertility and IVF on the resources page of my website if you would like to understand this better.”

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