Fertility and pregnancy concerns can begin to consume your entire life and impact your relationships.

How do you feel after spending time with certain family, friends, colleagues?

Who do you surround yourself with? 

Do you feel Supported? Drained? Upset? Understood? Agitated?

If you are feeling drained, upset or tense, it’s a sign that a boundary needs to be put in.

It can feel difficult to know and state your boundaries, communicate them with others and maintain them. Also, if you’re not used to it, setting your own boundaries with others can feel like you’re shutting people out but in fact, you’re showing others how to treat you. Your own boundaries set out on how long or how far you let treatment go on for. Setting boundaries is showing others how to treat you.

Boundaries also help you can feel considered and valued by others with a dynamic of mutual respect.

One thing that makes boundary setting difficult is others can decide to respect them or not. Someone else can work on changing their behaviour or they could decide to ignore your boundaries. You can’t control how people respond to your boundaries but you can decide how to respond to their potential breaking of your boundary. Likewise, if someone has a negative reaction to your boundary, their reaction is on them, not you, to take responsibility for. So if someone tries to make you feel bad for putting in a boundary with them, don’t.

There may be a teething process where others get used to the new expectations of your relationships or topics that are up for discussion and that’s okay. You can repeat your boundaries and hopefully, things get easier with more respectful communication for you both. However, if you’re in a dynamic where you are repeatedly stating your boundaries and they are in turn, repeatedly being ignored or disrespected, there could be a decision to take time out of that relationship for your own mental health and for your family.

If someone disrespected your boundaries before, it can happen again. Recognise people’s patterns. Intrusive questions are always going to hurt but being surprised by them can shock or freeze you out of the response you’d like to have.

In my own experience, with boundary setting, I’ve had to make some very hard decisions on who and what family have access to me as a person in relation to how I felt safe and who in my family respected my boundaries and me enough to help me uphold that level of safety. Part of the reason, I made those decisions was wanting to start my family and know that unhealthy, toxic and abusive family dynamics stopped with me.

I want any future children I hope to have to grow up with their own sense of identity, free from others’ unrealistic expectations, they treat others with kindness and compassion because it is modelled to them and they want to and they aren’t conditioned to be nice to people because they feel obligated or coerced to.

Pregnancy or starting fertility treatment can bring up a lot of conflicting emotions about your family history, family dynamic and thoughts of how you’d like your own family to be.

Trust your gut!  If a situation or someone, is giving you an uneasy or tense feeling, particularly around others’ comments on your fertility or pregnancy, it may be time to establish some boundaries that help you to feel more comfortable, safe and respected.

You’re under no obligation to answer any intrusive questions. You have a right to privacy and you also have a right to create a dynamic that feels best for you for your future family.