How do you hold space for others through infertility, pregnancy, and the postpartum period while quietly navigating your own recurrent pregnancy loss?
In this episode of the AllPaths podcast, we sit down with Caitlin Vinter, a perinatal therapist and mother of two, to discuss her personal and professional journey. Caitlin candidly shares her three-and-a-half-year path through recurrent pregnancy loss, enduring five miscarriages alongside multiple rounds of IUI and IVF, a blood clotting disorder, and recurring endometritis infections. She reflects on the emotional strain of navigating unpredictable fertility treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges of unexplained loss, and the eventual arrival of her sons following targeted medical interventions and perseverance, all while supporting her clients through their own, often complicated, journeys.
Drawing on both her lived experience and her clinical practice specializing in perinatal mental health, Caitlin offers insights into coping with the profound uncertainty and emotional weight of fertility struggles and recurrent loss. Our conversation covers the heavy emotional toll of cumulative and disenfranchised grief, the importance of finding specialized support communities, the reality of partners processing loss differently, and ways to cope with feeling a profound lack of control over your own body, journey, and future. Caitlin shares the mantras and mindsets that helped her throughout her own struggles, including radical acceptance, staying flexible through twists and turns, and allowing space for both joy and grief.
Caitlin also offers advice to friends and family who are unsure how to support a friend or family member navigating fertility struggles, pregnancy loss, or other types of reproductive grief. We discuss a few ways to show up for a loved one during the episode, but read Caitlin’s blog post, based on her journal entry written about a year into her own family building struggles, for a deeper dive into how choosing action and acknowledgment over silence can make all the difference when helping loved ones feel seen during their journey.
Connect with Caitlin at Era Psychotherapy.
Find support and community at AllPaths’ free, virtual Pregnancy Loss Groups.
TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:
Pregnancy loss, miscarriage, recurrent pregnancy loss, IUI, IVF, fertility treatment, infertility, endometritis, pregnancy after loss, mantra, radical acceptance, flexibility, mental health support, mental health provider, therapist, therapy, group support, peer support, AllPaths Family Building, Return to Zero, grief, relationships, perinatal therapist, PMH-C, Postpartum Support International, resilience, reproductive grief, disenfranchised grief, cumulative grief, for family and friends
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