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Fertility Support

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Fertility Support

Fertility Support is the only psychotherapy practice focused on fertility and gynaecological issues.

Our team includes specialised psychotherapists who have ample experience working on issues such as: assessing fertility options (including IVF, surrogacy, donors or adoption), pregnancy-related issues (including high risk-pregnancies or birth trauma), exploring a “child-free” or ”child-less” lifestyle, considering a termination, coping with medical issues such as endometriosis, PCOS or adenomyosis, and dealing with erectile dysfunction, among other issues. Fertility Support offers individual therapy and couples therapy as well as group therapy and one-day retreats. Our aim is to offer individuals a space where they can find compassionate care, understanding and a new way forward.

14/04/2026

is an American writer, director and actress, best known for creating and starring in the TV series Girls. In her 2018 essay published in , she wrote about undergoing a hysterectomy at 31, after years of severe endometriosis and repeated surgeries. Her recent memoir, Famesick, places that decision within a broader history of chronic illness, including Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

She describes a long period in which pain was persistent and severe enough to interfere with work, movement, and daily functioning. Treatments were pursued over time, including multiple surgeries, without offering relief. As this continued, decisions about further intervention were shaped by the cumulative impact of what had already been tried and what had not worked. By the point of hysterectomy, the decision sat within that history.

The hysterectomy meant she could no longer carry a pregnancy, and that loss was tied to a body that had already been a source of ongoing disruption. Her uterus had been associated with pain, medical procedures, and repeated attempts to regain control over symptoms. This gives the loss a particular psychological texture. What is being grieved carries a different meaning when it is linked to something that has already limited daily life over a long period.

In this context, relief and grief can exist at the same time. The possibility of reducing pain can hold real significance after years of symptoms that have affected functioning. Alongside this, the loss of the ability to carry a pregnancy remains. These responses can sit together without forming a single, consistent emotional position, and without resolving over time into something simpler.

Her account brings attention to how reproductive loss unfolds when it is shaped by prolonged illness. It does not occur at a single moment or follow a clear emotional sequence. It develops across years of pain, treatment, and changing expectations about what the body can sustain.

What might change if this kind of loss was understood within that longer history, rather than treated as a discrete event?

09/04/2026

James Baldwin, the African American writer, wrote about the necessity of truth saying, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Healing begins when we are willing to look directly at what hurts. Yet this is often the hardest step, because pain invites avoidance. Repression is one of the ways we protect ourselves from feeling too much, too quickly. It allows us to carry on, but at a cost. What is pushed away does not disappear; it settles quietly beneath the surface, shaping mood, behaviour, and self-perception in ways we may not fully recognise.

In a fertility journey, many emotions are held in this way because they feel too complicated or too painful to name. Grief may be pushed aside because it feels inappropriate to grieve something not yet fully lost. Anger may be contained because it feels socially unacceptable. Envy may be hidden because it feels shameful to resent others who have what you long for. Yet each of these emotions carries truth. Grief reveals love and the wish for connection. Anger shows where injustice has been felt. Envy points toward what matters most.

Naming these emotions does not make them vanish, but it begins to shift them. To say “I feel envy” or “I feel grief” allows your emotional life to be acknowledged rather than buried. What is faced becomes knowable, and what is known becomes something you can respond to rather than be driven by. This is the change Baldwin spoke of, not always a change in circumstance, but a change in how we live with truth once it is finally seen.

Which part of your experience might begin to change if you allowed yourself to face it fully?

07/04/2026

Choosing to become a SMBC (solo mother by choice) involves stepping outside a dominant template that assumes parenthood is organised around a couple. Much of the conversation focuses on what this demands: financial responsibility, managing a household alone, and the absence of another adult to share the practical load. These are real and often decisive considerations.

What is less visible is how this path changes the structure of decision-making. In a partnership, choices about having a child are usually negotiated. Doubt can be shared, challenged, or steadied through another person’s perspective. Responsibility is distributed across two minds.

Without that structure, the process becomes more internally organised. The decision is not filtered through compromise or shaped by maintaining a relationship dynamic. It is formed in close contact with personal values, priorities, and limits. For some, this brings a clear sense of authorship over the choice. The reasoning is less diluted, and the direction can feel more coherent, even when the stakes are high.

This does not remove difficulty. It changes its form. Practical pressures remain, and at times intensify, but the internal experience of choosing can be more direct and less mediated by external expectations or negotiation.

Research on single mothers by choice consistently shows strong psychological outcomes over time, often linked to this level of intentionality and clarity at the point of decision.

When a choice is not shaped through negotiation with someone else, what changes in how you recognise it as truly your own?

02/04/2026

Assisted reproduction treatments (ARTs) are often explained in numbers: success rates, embryo grading, hormone levels, etc. These figures are intended to inform. But when hope, longing, fear, urgency, and meaning are involved, numbers can take on a different weight.

Research suggests there are ways of holding these numbers that are more or less supportive of psychological wellbeing. Let’s, for example, consider this: “the probability of IVF success is 30%.” Personalising the probability (“I’ll be 1 of the 3”) places emotional weight on an outcome that no one can predict. It can create either rigid hope or premature despair.

Similarly, believing that doing everything “right” will land you on the successful side of the statistic reinforces the narrative that outcomes are earned through effort. This belief can lead to perfectionism, pressure, and self-blame when things don’t go as hoped.

What tends to be helpful is to see a number like this one as describing what’s possible (“1 in 3 could succeed”), not what’s personal (“I will be the 1 in 3”). When the number is held as context, it becomes less likely to be internalised as a reflection of effort, adequacy, or worth.

Instead of focusing on trying to land on the successful side of the statistic through effort, it can help to remember that uncertainty in the context of IVF is unavoidable. Naming that can reduce the instinct to interpret every ambiguous or unexpected outcome as something you missed, caused, or failed to prevent.

IVF numbers are not verdicts or forecasts. They are context, part of a larger, unpredictable process; something that can sit beside your hope, not define it.

30/03/2026

On the Woman’s Hour Guide to Life episode, speaks to Kay, 33, about how to talk about infertility.

When you’re trying to conceive or going through IVF, ordinary conversations can become difficult to navigate. Questions that are meant kindly can feel intrusive. Pregnancy announcements can land with unexpected force. Even silence can feel loaded.

Kay is currently going through IVF. She speaks about how these moments build up over time, and why it mattered that a friend chose to tell her pregnancy news privately, with honesty and consideration.

is also joined by Dr Marie Prince .psychologist, clinical psychologist, and , Professor of Reproductive Science for Women’s Health at University College London.

You can listen to this episode of The Woman’s Hour Guide to Life by searching for Woman’s Hour on BBC Sounds.

27/03/2026

Jacqueline “Jackie” Kennedy is often remembered for the composure she displayed after the assassination of her husband in 1963. Less widely known is that before that loss she had already endured a miscarriage, the stillbirth of a daughter, and the death of a son two days after his premature birth. Between these three losses she gave birth to Caroline and John Jr.

Jackie is largely remembered through an image of elegance and restraint. Biographical accounts describe a sharp distinction between this public composure and the intense grief she showed in private, particularly after her baby losses. She understood that these losses would not remain personal but would be absorbed into a wider national narrative and that her behaviour would impact her husband's legacy.

Jackie’s pregnancies were tied to a family’s sense of legacy and a nation’s desire for change. Biographers describe the Kennedy family as operating with a strong sense of generational purpose, shaped by Joseph Kennedy’s political vision. For the nation the presidency and its young family symbolised generational renewal. Within this framework, pregnancy signified continuity and the expectation that the next generation would extend both family lineage and national promise. Jackie's losses confronted this expectation.

Processing grief depends on emotional expression, acknowledgement, and psychological space to integrate what has occurred. Jackie's losses unfolded within a role that restricted these conditions. This limited how fully her emotional experience could be lived and made her grief less likely to be worked through, more likely to persist as ongoing strain.

The expectation to remain composed in the face of loss is not unique to Jackie and continues to shape how pregnancy loss is lived. Pregnancy loss is often endured with limited opportunity for emotional expression.

What changes in the experience of loss when there is space to acknowledge and express it?

25/03/2026

A lovely surprise to be featured in last week ✨

A difficult fertility experience often asks a great deal of people. It involves making repeated decisions under uncertainty, tolerating outcomes that cannot be controlled, and continuing to engage with treatment in the presence of disappointment or loss. Over time, this can shift how the future is imagined, affect one's sense of agency, and shape how people relate to their body, their partner, and their loved ones.

Without space to process these experiences, emotional responses such as anxiety or low mood can become more prominent. People may find themselves relying on control, avoidance, or emotional suppression to manage what is happening.

Grateful to be recognised for providing emotional support within fertility care, and to be included alongside

Thank you and for including me, and for recognising the complexity of fertility beyond its more visible aspects.

– Alejandra Lozada Andrade

24/03/2026

Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, longed for motherhood and carried the sorrow of not being able to conceive. Her poetry speaks of love, loss, and the ache of nurturing without a child to receive it. When she wrote that silence does not protect but separates, she was speaking from that experience of isolation, where grief has no language and longing has no witness.

During a fertility journey, silence can feel like self-preservation. You may stay quiet to avoid awkward sympathy, unwanted advice, or the pain of others’ pregnancies. At first, silence seems protective, a way to maintain dignity and control. Yet over time, what feels like safety can become distance. The more you hold inside, the further you drift from the people who might help you feel less alone.

Silence separates us because it conceals the emotions that most need to be seen and understood. Pain that is not shared remains unacknowledged, and what is unacknowledged begins to harden into loneliness. Speaking, even to one compassionate listener, interrupts that isolation. It brings your experience into relationship, where it can be met with understanding rather than pity or correction.

Connection does not erase grief, but it allows it to breathe. To speak your truth is not to seek solutions; it is to seek resonance. When someone else hears what you have carried in silence, the burden changes shape. It becomes something held between two people instead of one.

Where might you begin to give words to what silence has been holding for you?

19/03/2026

Fertility Support includes 15 experienced psychotherapists, all accredited by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and/or the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC). This reflects rigorous training, ongoing supervision, and adherence to established professional and ethical standards.

The group is composed of psychotherapists who have worked across private practice, NHS settings, and specialist fertility services. It includes published authors, clinical supervisors, lecturers, and contributors to academic and professional literature on fertility, reproductive psychology, and relational work.

Collectively, their expertise spans IVF and assisted conception, pregnancy loss, donor conception, endocrine-related mood changes, and the psychological impact of prolonged uncertainty and treatment cycles. Their work reflects both depth of training and sustained engagement with the evolving evidence base. Many do not simply apply existing models of care; they contribute to shaping how fertility-related psychological work is understood and delivered.

The team works in close collaboration, maintaining an ongoing dialogue. There is a strong emphasis on shared thinking, with practitioners learning from one another’s clinical work, perspectives, and areas of specialism.

The work is characterised by careful listening, emotional attunement, and the capacity to engage with difficult material without simplification. Clients are met with thoughtfulness, steadiness, and respect for the psychological realities of fertility journeys, allowing for work that is both precise and genuinely containing.

Get to know the team through the link in bio.

16/03/2026

During a difficult fertility experience, imagining the future is understandably hard. The uncertainty of each stage teaches the mind to live in short intervals, to plan only up to the next appointment or result. Over time, the future stops feeling like a place you can step into with any confidence. It becomes something held at arm’s length because allowing yourself to picture it has, in the past, come at an emotional cost.

When this has gone on for some time, it can create a sense of suspension. Decisions that once felt straightforward begin to feel conditional, as if they can only be made once treatment gives you permission. Parts of life that depend on a stable sense of “what comes next” can feel paused because you have been living in a state where plans repeatedly need to be adjusted, delayed or undone.

Reconnecting with the future becomes important because living in suspension can quietly narrow your sense of direction. Having even a small point to look toward helps counter the feeling of being entirely defined by the next stage of treatment.

Research shows that this reconnection does not need to begin with large visions or long-term plans. It can begin with small, safe forms of future thinking, the kinds that do not expose you to emotional risk but remind the mind that possibility still exists. This might be picturing something only a few days ahead, or allowing yourself to imagine one moment you would like to experience. These small steps widen the psychological space that prolonged uncertainty has narrowed.

When you think about the future, what feels reachable, and what still feels out of view?

12/03/2026

began experiencing symptoms of endometriosis when she was 13 years old. Each month brought severe bleeding, cramps, nausea, back pain and digestive problems that left her confined to bed for days. One week of every month disappeared from her life. She had to miss school events, exams, auditions and family milestones. The pattern continued for more than 2 decades before she was diagnosed at 36.

Padma's words draw attention to a particular feature of chronic illness: the repeated interruption of ordinary participation in life. When pain regularly removes someone from school, work, social events and daily routines, absence becomes woven into the structure of their life.

Over time, the relationship with one’s own body can also change. When symptoms arrive with such regular intensity, the body can begin to feel unreliable and difficult to trust. Many people living with endometriosis describe the experience of planning their lives around the anticipation of pain rather than around their own intentions or possibilities.

After finally receiving surgical treatment in 2009, co-founded with surgeon . Through advocacy, physician education and public awareness, she has helped bring sustained attention to a condition that for many years remained largely invisible in both medicine and public conversation.

March is Endometriosis Awareness Month. Endometriosis affects an estimated 1 in 10 women of reproductive age, yet diagnosis often takes many years. For many people living with endometriosis, the difficulty is not only the condition itself but the long period during which their experience is questioned or minimised. Greater awareness helps ensure that symptoms that have long been dismissed are recognised earlier and taken seriously.

07/03/2026

One of the most painful shifts during a difficult fertility experience happens when a medical challenge begins to feel like a personal failure. Over time, what is biological can start to feel like a verdict on who you are. This International Women’s Day is a moment to resist allowing fertility struggles to collapse identity into shame. It is an opportunity to feel unstoppable.

Feeling unstoppable, in this context, is not about controlling outcomes but about protecting a stable sense of self in the presence of the unknown. Fertility journeys rarely unfold predictably. Appointments, treatments, and long periods of waiting leave the future suspended, asking people to live without knowing how the story will unfold while still holding onto who they are.

Living with that kind of uncertainty requires an important psychological capacity: continuing to live meaningfully while holding questions that have no timetable and no guarantee of resolution. Much of life still unfolds while important questions remain unanswered. Feeling unstoppable, in this context, means recognising that meaning and possibility can still exist even when the future takes an unexpected shape.

Alongside the uncertainty about what will happen, many can also question whether they will be able to handle whatever lies ahead. As the lyrics of Voices by suggest, there are moments when internal voices ask whether the unknown can be handled or the unusual faced. Feeling unstoppable is not the absence of those questions, but the capacity to hold them while trusting that you can find ways to cope with what comes.

Feeling unstoppable does not mean doubt disappears. It means doubt is no longer mistaken for a verdict about who you are. The unknown may remain, but it does not get to define who you are. Being unstoppable means refusing to let this journey shrink who you are.

Music: Voices by (shared with permission).

Address

239 Kensington High Street
London
W86SA

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 7pm
Tuesday	9am - 7pm
Wednesday	9am - 8pm
Thursday	9am - 8pm
Friday	9am - 7pm

Website

https://www.fertilitysupportlondon.com/

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