By Dr Marie Meechan, The Fertility Psychotherapist

I grew up in a family where we never spoke about real feelings. Not to our parents, not to our teachers, not to the nuns or priests who moved through our lives with such certainty. We didn't air our dirty laundry in public - that was the rule, unspoken but absolute, in the Catholic household and community I was raised in.

The one place I was permitted to say anything true was a wooden box at the back of the church, kneeling, speaking to a priest I couldn't see and who couldn't see me. Even there, I learned to say only enough - enough to be given my penance, my few prayers of forgiveness - and no more. So as a child, I kept diaries instead. I have journalled my whole life; it was my only real safe space. I wrote in my journals through the twelve years I spent trying and failing to have a child, not realising what they would turn into one day: a PhD thesis, a book, a tool to help others.

I want to tell you why that matters, and what it has to do with the phrase I keep returning to in my work: You are not alone.

A Memory I Didn't Expect to Find

Years after I wrote those journals, while packing to move house, I found them again. I hadn't intended to read them, nor had I planned to open that door. But I was curious, and I did. What came back to me wasn't only grief - it was a memory from long before any of it began.

I was a small girl, playing with skipping ropes in a Glasgow back green, singing the same rhymes my friends and I sang every day until we knew every word by heart. My mother called us up for tea from the tenement window. I raced my brother up the stairs. And later that evening, helping her change my baby sister's nappy, I said to her, delighted with myself: "Look at me, Mummy, I'm practising changing for my very own baby one day."

She turned. Her face was flushed, and something in it frightened me. "Don't have children, Marie," she said. "It'll ruin your life."

I never said anything like that again. Not to her. Not to anyone. Having a baby in my future plans became my most guarded secret.

Unexplained (In)fertility

Fast forward to my early thirties, when I was diagnosed with unexplained (in)fertility, I wonder: is there a psychological connection? I look back now at the chronic sorrow and complex grief I lived with for the twelve years I tried and failed to have a baby.

I've written before about disenfranchised grief - a term Kenneth Doka introduced in 1989 to describe loss that is socially unrecognised or unsanctioned, loss that doesn't fall under society's usual grieving rules. A miscarriage. A cycle that failed quietly, before anyone outside a clinic even knew it had begun. The particular grief of childlessness, never chosen, only arrived at.

None of these come with a funeral. None of them come with flowers, time off work, or the social permission that other losses are granted almost automatically. And yet the loss is real. The pain is real. And the absence of acknowledgement, I've found, doesn't lessen that pain - it compounds it.

This is what eventually drew me into research as well as practice. I wanted to understand why unexplained infertility in particular sits in such a strange, unspoken place - neither clearly a diagnosis nor clearly an absence of one. Even the language resists you. I also researched and continue to work with the wider topic of infertility, which has been defined, in one form or another, for centuries, and the definitions have barely moved: unproductiveness. Barrenness. Failure. A seventeenth-century jurist once described it in the same breath as the plague. The soil imagery hasn't gone away either - a woman's body compared, even now, to unfruitful ground. Centuries pass, and the shame attached to that language somehow survives every one of them.

Being Seen

There's an idea I return to often, from the writer Zoi Simopoulou, about what she calls the reciprocity of seeing: what I observe observes me; what I see, sees me back. Without another person to receive what we're carrying, she suggests, we barely exist. This is how we feel in society as ‘infertile’; invisible, unseen, unheard, and silenced.

I think that's part of why I write. It's certainly part of why I kept those journals for twelve years, because there was no real space for what I was living through. And it's part of why I now spend my working life doing, professionally, what I once could only do on a page, alone: offering people the experience of being seen in a loss that the world around them has not learned to recognise.

Why I Say ‘You are Not Alone’

I use the phrase: ‘You are not alone - I see you, I hear you, you are held’. I don't say this to be warm and fuzzy, but to close the distance of loneliness and isolation. When I work with clients in a session, I'm not adding to a diagnosis. I'm offering recognition.

You are not too sensitive. You are not overreacting. You have lost something real - hopes, dreams, a child who was longed for and never came - and you have very likely experienced these losses without the support that other kinds of loss are automatically given.

I strongly believe you deserve to hear it said plainly, the way I wish someone had said it to me, long before I learned to say it myself.

If any of this has named something you've been carrying in confusion and silence, you don't have to keep carrying it alone. I see you. I hear you. You are held.