Navigating being childless-not-by-choice

#TalkFertility

Sophia Gameiro, one of the creators of MyJourney, a free self-help programme, highlights how it helps to ease acceptance of an unfulfilled wish for children

Are you suffering because you don’t have the children you wish to have? Have you recently been faced with this possibility? Have you been struggling with it for a while and don’t know how to move on?

MyJourney can help you.

MyJourney is a free self-help programme to help you build acceptance of your unfulfilled wish for children. It helps you:

  • deal with the difficult thoughts, feelings, sensations you experience as part of your suffering;
  • develop new insights into who you are and can be as a person and what you value in life; and,
  • explore new pathways in life to renew your hope towards the future.

MyJourney offers:

  • information about what most people in your situation experience;
  • guidance to build coping skills that most people in your situation found useful;
  • many different suggestions to practice and build these skills at your own pace and according to your preferences;
  • journaling moments to help develop new insight about you and your future;
  • mindfulness mediations to help you be in contact with yourself and others;
  • contacts to charities and support groups where you can connect with people in your situation; and,
  • feedback on your wellbeing, to help you make decisions about whether you could benefit from extra support.

Who is MyJourney for?

MyJourney is for anyone who has not been able to have the children they wished for, regardless of how this came to be. Everyone’s journey is different. You can use MyJourney at any point, returning to it if you feel you need help again.

How does MyJourney work?

MyJourney invites you to take ten steps that help you develop skills to address several aspects of your unfulfilled wish for children. We recommend you take one step per week, during a total of ten weeks. However, you can travel at your own pace.

Why and how did we develop MyJourney?

We decided to develop MyJourney when we realised there were no research-informed support initiatives for people struggling with an unfulfilled with to have children. As academics we feel we had a duty of care to fill this gap in evidence-based support.

We worked with APFertilidade – Portuguese Fertility Association, Fertility Network and many people in this situation to create and progressively improve free, accessible and inclusive online support, not only for those people for whom fertility treatment did not work, but for everyone who has not been able to have the children they wished for.

We also think it is our responsibility to evaluate MyJourney and publish the results of its evaluations, as well as all the work leading to its creation, as this will be helpful to help people decide if they want to use MyJourney and/or for anyone developing similar support initiatives. Below you can find links to some of this work:

Here you can find a very short video introducing MyJourney:

 

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