Not pregnant yet? You bet!. Rimma Efimkina

comparatively a short time since Bert Hellinger’s Love’s Hidden Symmetry29 was published. Its main idea is that every person within the family system has a place he has an inherent right for. If he is deprived of that place for some reason, it ends badly for the whole system. The same works for entrails. Each one of them has a place, a territory, boundaries that are as sacred as the borders of a country. Any intervention is possible only upon obtaining the “permission” of the organ; just as well as when going to another country one should obtain a visa.

      Violating boundaries

      Say, what good two kidneys are?

      Better a kidney and a car.

Internet meme

      Unfortunately, medical interventions are violation of the boundaries without the “permission” from the body. I know this both from my experience of psychotherapy sessions and my own. For example, there was a time when I had a blood sample taken to check out my hormones and prescribe the treatment. When a nurse took out the needle from my vein, she accidentally dropped some blood on my arm. She took a wet piece of cloth from the sink (usually they clean the sink with such cloths) and wiped the blood from my skin. I was told return to have my blood sample taken one more time in a week. For this whole week I could not shake the disgusted memory of the wet cloth. Besides, I couldn’t forgive myself for being so tactful as to keep silent, instead of telling about my resentment. The day before the blood test the skin on the inside of my elbow was covered in red itching spots. When I understood that this was the way my body reacted to the procedure and to upcoming hormonal treatment, I didn’t go to the hospital any more, a started looking for other ways of treatment and I did find them.

      Personally, I’m not lucky with medical procedures, lots of bad things happen to me. When I had my eczema treated with quartz lamp, I made it worse by getting my leg burnt. The thing was that the lamp was loose on its pole and was coming down bit by bit, but I didn’t notice as I was wearing safety goggles. After curing the burn I’ve got another prescription for injections that should have been done according to a special pattern: the dose of the drug should have been increased from one to ten units. The nurse who supposedly was very familiar with this drug didn’t read the prescription and started with the maximum dosage of the drug. As a result, my whole body was covered in eczema…

      If I studied psychology when I was young, maybe it would have been different. However, I doubt it. It is due to the negative experience that I was able to hear my body and had some insights as a result of difficult and hard inner work.

      “Jumble”: post scriptum

      But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.

Leo Tolstoy

      I guess, Lida also needed to get there. I didn’t hear from her for a long time, and then I got an email from her:

      “It’s been three years since I moved. Several days ago I heard that you were planning on visiting our city. I was reviewing the program for the conference and found your theme. I would be glad to see you if you have time”.

      I used this opportunity to ask about the children. Lida said that her husband and she got divorced as he left her “for a twenty-four year old”; that she does not have children, she was “married to her work”. Sometimes she was perfectly happy, sometimes she missed Siberia, her friends. She bought an apartment, she took a mortgage. She joked about this: “In Russia we exchanged death penalty for mortgage”.

      In a couple of years I received one more message from Lida:

      “You may congratulate me on a new husband!”

      “Yes, I got that already, congratulations! And on the new second name as well!”

      And finally, the long expected message:

      “Hello, Rimma. I wanted to boast to you that I gave birth to a boy. I know you will be glad for me. Now I cannot imagine how I lived without him all these years”.

      “Lida, all these years I was afraid to ask you if you had children? I remember you session on this subject. Was it IVF or you made it on your own? I’m not just glad, I’m happy!!! I have a grandson, he is six months, it’s a bliss!”

      “Yes, I saw the photos of your grandson, he is great! I had IVF done in Moscow, my second husband literary forced me to go through with it. I didn’t even dream of it, I just lived enjoying my life. I gave birth on my own, I tried so hard and listened to what doctors told me to do. When I was pregnant, I read my notes of your lectures on developmental psychology, I try not to become a “crazy mommy”.

      Now I think I didn’t just have to go through it all, but I have also truly accept this, so that the pain stopped being so painful, pity dissolved in love and all of this became my valuable experience. I am very grateful to God and to doctors”.

      Skeptics might say that this is the case when no psychotherapy worked. What did work was the infamous IVF and there were no negative consequences! It is both so and not so. Yes, IVF did work, I’m very happy for Lida. However, now it is not the same Lida who once addressed the doctors for the first time about her regular sex life with one partner for two years not resulting in pregnancy. The girl was healthy at that point, at least physically. Usually, sterility in such cases is a result of subconscious wish not to have a baby for some reason. In Lida’s case I suppose it was due to her unconscious wish to push aside the problems of her five relatives who behaved like babies and take care of her own baby in her own family. This desire conflicted with the mistrust to her partner on whom, as Lida had guessed, she could not rely on. Later this lack of trust was confirmed when her husband left her for another woman.

      If we turn back to the moment when Lida went to doctors, one can only regret that she had a wrong address: as we all remember, medical procedures did not bring the desired results. What she did need at that point was to see her controversial situation. However, medical system gives a chance to every customer who is healthy enough (I remind you that it “helps” not ill women, but healthy women who made it through numerous difficult tests!) to undergo standard methods that are useless in the best case scenario, and it the worst case scenario they damaging to women’s health.

      Robert Mendelsohn is sure that treating patients with today’s standard medical methods can seldom be effective, it is often more dangerous than the disease it is supposed to treat. It happens because modern medicine went too far using the methods designed for extreme situations on daily basis. Should we be surprised that when we come to a doctor we are treated not like a person who needs help, but rather like a potential consumer of miracle factory products?30 There is some bitter irony in the fact that the doctor is perfectly aware of the cost of these modern and useless procedures!

      Why did IVF worked when Lida’s body was deprived of the ability to function naturally because of all the interventions? Why hadn’t it worked before? Unlike women who spend their lives in a race for conception, Lida accepted her life and everything in it. She didn’t bet on becoming a mother in her second marriage, her life was filled with her art. If that try wasn’t a success it wouldn’t have broken her heart and wouldn’t have bankrupted her emotionally. The thing is that the procedure is useless, if a woman is not ready to open herself to new experience. It’s not the procedure that causes the problems, but the state on one’s mind. Conscious choice does not equal the choice made out of fear and desperation. It is totally different.

      How about a kiss?

      Artificial insemination specialist leaves the farm after having his job done. A cow puts its head in the window of his car and says: “How about a kiss?”

A joke

      Angela,

29

Bert Hellinger, Love’s Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work In Relationship.

30

Robert Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic.