The Identity Trap: Releasing the "Infertile" Label for True Fertility Success
You’ve done the diets, read the studies, and tracked every possible metric. You are a fertility warrior, a master of your protocol. So why are you still not pregnant? What if the very identity you’ve built around this struggle—the “infertile woman”—is the final barrier between you and your baby? It’s a gut punch, I know. But stick with me. This isn't another thing to do. It's about who you're choosing to be.
The Story You're Telling is Keeping You Stuck
You’re not imagining the pain. The triggers are real. The baby shower invites, the pregnant bellies, the well-meaning "any news?" texts—they all sting. But what happens next is where the real work begins. You get triggered and fall right back into the same old story: "This never works for me. I'm broken. Why is it so easy for everyone else?" Your nervous system, already hanging on by a thread from fertility burnout, goes into full dysregulation. You’re not just feeling sad; you’re reinforcing an identity. And that identity has a hormonal imprint, a posture, and a frequency that screams "struggle" to your entire body.
If you keep identifying as the woman who is struggling, your nervous system will just stay dysregulated. Your fascia will stay tight. You are literally broadcasting. I am still her.
The Mundane AF Practice of Radical Responsibility
You want a shamanic release or a massive breathwork session to fix this. I get it. We want the big, sexy solution. But real, lasting change is found in the painfully mundane act of catching yourself. It’s noticing you’re on your third Google spiral about IVF success rates and saying, "Nope. We're not this woman anymore." It’s choosing to put the phone down, step away from the wine glass, and actually feel the ick instead of numbing it. This isn't about perfection. It’s about interruption. It’s the consistent, contradictory action that tells your body and your energy field that a new pattern is online.
This Isn't Just About a Baby; It's About Your Life
Let’s get brutally honest. The control freak energy, the people-pleasing, the need to know every outcome? You didn’t develop that in the fertility clinic. You brought it to the fertility clinic. This journey is just holding up a brutally beautiful mirror to the patterns you’ve been running your whole life. If you don’t dissolve them now, you will absolutely take them into motherhood. Your kids will feel the energy of your unresolved struggle, your anxiety, and your need to control. This work is how you break the cycle—not just for a positive pregnancy test, but for the conscious, present mama you are destined to become.
Final Takeaway
You are not your diagnosis. You are a woman navigating a fertility issue, which is often a cellular health issue wrapped in a control pattern, wrapped in a fear pattern. The transformation happens when you stop outsourcing your power to more information and start listening to the wisdom within. Your body isn't the enemy; the story you tell about it is.
🎧 Press play on this episode if you’re ready to collapse the timeline and rewrite your story.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE: The Identity Trap: Releasing the "Infertile" Label for True Fertility Success
Let's Do This Together 💚
Monica
Listen up, lovelies: Everything I share about health, diet, or fertility magic is my opinion. Yep, it’s all based on years of trial and error, study, reading, listening, and side-eyeing the nonsense out there. What worked for me might be a jackpot for you—or it might be a total flop. Bodies are weird like that. 🤷♀️
Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a doctor, nutritionist, dietitian, or any other kind of licensed health wizard. If you need medical advice, run—don’t walk—to an actual qualified professional. Don’t come back here saying Monique told you to eat kale for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, okay?
As for the products I mention, they’re either what I used during my own infertility rollercoaster or what I wish I’d known about back then. No guarantees, no promises, and absolutely no refunds on your hope budget if it doesn’t work out.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, proceed with curiosity and, above all, discernment. You’ve got this. 💪✨
🌺 Book Your Fertility Breakthrough Session Today
Connect with Monica over on
Youtube || Instagram || TikTok
🎙 Subscribe on your favourite podcast platform:
Apple || Stitcher || Spotify || Google
Full Transcript:
00:00
Hello beautiful and welcome to the Finding Fertility podcast.
00:10
I'm Monica, your mentor in uncovering the hidden layers of your fertility journey. Together, we'll discover the right path for you within the six essential steps to creating the family of your dreams. We'll ditch the overwhelm, tune into your intuition, and build a vibrant foundation for your fertility. Whether it's through gut health, subconscious healing, or energetic alignment, you can unlock your body's natural power to get and stay pregnant.
00:37
Your fertility journey is all about radical responsibility and deeply believing that your body is on your side. It's time to stay consistent, embrace trust, surrender, and create the transformation you deserve. Fighting fertility does not diagnose, prescribe, or treat any fertility issues. What we do is empower you to take control of your health by uncovering the root causes holding you back. Let's do this together.
01:03
Happy Friyay y'all. Welcome back to another episode of Finding Fertility. I'm your host, Monica Cox, and I am completely honored you're here with me, becoming the conscious mama you were born to be. Today, we are talking about identity, when who you are is what keeps you stuck. This is something I wrote inside the courses, Fertile Energetics and Dreams. Remember, dreams is all of it. The diet, the lifestyle, mindset, energetics, subconscious.
01:33
awareness, supplementation, gut health 101. But fertile energetics is just getting into mindset and energetics and energy. Okay, because a lot of you here already have the physical knowledge. You don't need more information, you need to start applying what you know. Here is something that I wish I would have known.
01:57
Way earlier in my journey, not only in my fertility journey, I carried this on into motherhood and entrepreneurship, but if you can apply it in your fertility journey, and this is what we get into coherence with and we practice inside the courses, is when you keep identifying with the narrative that has been created, right? It's real. You're really going through a fertility struggle right now.
02:27
But when you keep identifying as that person, that woman, it is going to keep you stuck way longer than you need to be. So this is gonna go into a little bit more than just mindset, right? It's important to keep a healthy mindset, but this is how you get yourself out of it. And you might not believe me because it is super simple.
02:56
But it's so mundane that this is the way that most of us type A women, our nervous systems run. It's so mundane. We just don't think it's working. It's not quick enough. It's not big enough. It's not a big breath work session. It's not like a shammatic release. All those are important. There might be layers that you need to do around this, but I'm working with a client and she got triggered.
03:25
She was on like cloud nine the week before, and then the next session we have her whole demeanor changed. And I was like, what happened? And she got triggered by friends, friends who were pregnant or friends who have kids. And look, we've all been there. We know exactly how that feels. And maybe you're still in the thick of that. And what happens when we get triggered? And I'm going to use me as an example of what recently just happened in entrepreneurship.
03:55
Obviously I put myself out there pretty big time, social media, podcast, and I'm evolving as I'm going. And for some reason, I just randomly caught some reviews on my podcast. And there's this new review just last May, basically about how crappy I am and that I talk about myself or, I should change the cover of the podcast of not being a pregnant woman on
04:24
a podcast that's all about you getting pregnant. If you don't know, the cover of my podcast is me pregnant at, I was actually 37 in that photo with my natural pregnancy. I'm claiming that shit big time. And I'm helping you claim that too. In telling you that story, sidebar.
04:46
If you love this podcast, even if you just like this podcast, even if this podcast is just giving you one nugget of knowledge to get you through these hard times, I would be forever grateful if you went down and left a rating and review. A true honest rating and review maybe help cancel out some of the weird negative ones. Not that I shouldn't have a pregnant woman on a fertility podcast, but I would be forever grateful. Anyways.
05:14
back to the patterning and back getting triggered and getting ourselves stuck in this reality. If I would have read that podcast six months ago, definitely a year ago, definitely two years ago, I would have spiraled. I would have spiraled back into all those subconscious beliefs that I wasn't good enough, that this was never going to happen, I'm not qualified enough, who am I to be doing this work? And I would have ruminated over that.
05:43
and argued with this like person in my head and just spiraled for days if not weeks over it. Obviously when I saw a comment like it hurt. I'm still human. And I was just like, man, that sucks. Like you can't respond to podcast comments, right? It's not like social media where you can leave a rebuttal. And I sat with that feeling for a while and I was just like, all right, yeah.
06:11
That is that person's opinion. They're totally entitled to it. That's their life, whatever. Maybe what they said is true for them. And I went back into my closet of tools and said, what can I do to shift this energy and get me the F out of any story that I'm going to start ruminating and patterning about and cause more friction and more harm to myself over
06:40
what this stranger on the internet thinks of me. And that is the practice. It is mundane AF. And it's constantly showing up for yourself when you catch yourself in the doom and gloom, in the frequency, in the emotion, in the stories, in the thoughts, in the patterns of we are not gonna live here anymore.
07:07
And if you keep identifying and if you keep living in this story consistently, you're always going to get pulled back into it. You're going to get triggered during this journey until you're not triggered anymore. There was a time, a lot of the stuff I did unconsciously, I couldn't articulate how I did it. Maybe it was the gift of time. I thought, no, cause my journey was so long. But right before I had my IVF baby,
07:35
There was this switch inside of me that I was sick of being that girl, of being that woman, always not a part of the group, not a part of the conversation. I just knew I wasn't, but I knew also that I was putting up guards and I was protecting myself and really creating this other narrative that didn't have to be there for myself.
08:05
And so I chose to start approaching things differently and using the mindset and telling myself like your day's gonna come, it's on its way. know, all, I'm not joking, every family member and friend had multiple children before I had my first. And I had more than enough evidence to...
08:30
say that this was never gonna work. A natural pregnancy wasn't even in my reality, wasn't even in my meditations or my hope box, like it just wasn't there. But I can definitely now articulate to you what's happening. When you are choosing, because you're choosing it, I know it's your reality now, but you're choosing to run that narrative again and again.
08:58
And when you're getting triggered, instead of taking that hour to maybe two days to really feel it, explore it, and find your modality, going back to your toolbox and using those modalities instead of going for the numbness and sitting in it, going back for the drink, going back to social media for scrolling, going back for more knowledge, those control patterns, and then beating yourself up.
09:26
Oh, I know I shouldn't have done that, but I did it and oh, why me? And all this stuff. There's gonna come a point in your journey that you're gonna have to take radical responsibility and start choosing a different narrative while you're still living this one. Choosing to not replay that story in your head or choosing not to have anger or jealousy or resentment towards people who are pregnant, who have kids, who that's what they want to talk about. I can...
09:56
Honestly say when you have kids, that's all you're going to talk about too. That's just part of the game. And I know you know that, but it's really taking that energy, that frequency around how you're showing up to those situations and the replay in your story. And what happens is you get triggered, you fall back, right? Not, maybe not as far back as you once were. And then it just takes you longer because you beat yourself up for falling back.
10:26
So the trick, the hack is to catch yourself. Okay? Okay, I'm having a glass of wine right now. Okay, I'm only gonna have one. I'm going to allow myself to have this one glass of wine. I'm not gonna have three or four because then I know I'm gonna feel like crap. And then I know my gut health is gonna go down. I'm gonna stop here. Or you catch yourself on social media scrolling or searching, Googling.
10:56
Chat-chee- chat-GPT-ing it up, right? You catch yourself. Nope. We're not this woman anymore. I'm not gonna sit in this story. Now, you put the numbness down, whatever it is, even if you go back five minutes later, or even if you give in to that second glass of wine, you then tell yourself again, I'm not going to do this. You know how I stopped drinking? And this is before I was able to articulate this stuff, and I think even before I got-
11:26
all my training in psyche and all this stuff, right? I knew the subconscious mind. I knew what it was all about. So every single night I went to bed and I told myself, obviously, I was in theta state as you're falling asleep, that's your natural theta state. And I would sit there and just tell myself, I'm not gonna have a drink tomorrow. Knowing, consciously knowing, I was going, I had already planned out a drink. And let me like...
11:54
Let me set the scene. I wasn't an alcoholic by this stage. I just, I liked my drink in the afternoons, right? But I knew it wasn't serving my highest purpose. Physically, mentally, being a mother, I knew that if I kept going, I would get sucked into more drinking than I didn't want to be doing. So, I kept telling myself every single night in ThetaState,
12:19
And it took me about six months. Now look, we can do this a lot quicker than six months, but this was just my journey. And I woke up, so I woke up March and I told my husband, I'm going to take April off. April 1st, April Fool's Day. I think it was like a new moon. I was like, this is going to be my jam. And he just, he laughed at me and he's, that's not going to happen. We're going back to San Diego for Easter and we're spending it with your family who are all.
12:49
high functioning alcoholics and like to have a good time. And I said, no, I feel it in my bones. This is different. I'm not gonna do it. And I didn't do it. And then I didn't set a time limit on it. I'm just gonna go, just let's see how it goes. Let's just go, let's go. And the first time I had a drink was for my 20 year anniversary, wedding anniversary last year.
13:14
had a little bit of Prosecco because we got a couple's massage. And I just said to myself, like, you're so in control that because there was a lot of still fear behind if I just have a drink here or there, will I get back into my old patterns? Like I needed time for my old patterns never to come back. And to consistently show myself in the physical reality to, you can get into quantum physics here, like to, what is it called?
13:44
to collapse that time. You take two points, they collapse, that reality is completely gone for you now and it doesn't control you, that pattern isn't there. Now there was times in the early stages where I got triggered and the first thing I wanted to do was have a drink and I had to find something else to calm my nervous system instead of going back to that old pattern. And that consistency,
14:12
of showing up for yourself in the real world is where the magic is. This is why you see people relapse because they're still holding on to the identity of who they are. When people tell me that they're recovering alcoholics, I don't say it out loud, but in my head I'm like, no, you're not. You just don't drink anymore. End of story. You're not recovering from anything. But that narrative keeps them
14:40
a little bit stuck to the story of who they used to be. Real lasting change, like really breaking down those patterns and those old storylines, is the consistency in the mundane and showing up to do a contradictory action after you already cleared any kind of BS that was associated with the habit in the first place. I can almost guarantee 100 % of you listening right now are running the control pattern.
15:09
If you don't control your journey, it's not going to work out for you. And so this conversation that I was having with my client, it was just like, okay, has that worked out? Has that control worked out over the last few years? No. Okay. Are you willing to get curious and see what trust feels like? See if you let go of this narrative of control.
15:35
this narrative that you're the one who doesn't have this, the expectation of this, are you willing to get curious and see what happens? The time's gonna pass anyways.
15:46
Are you gonna be willing enough to see how this works out for you? Remember, I can't promise you a baby. That's not my job. But what I can promise you is that if you consistently show up in this work again and again, and you get radically honest, yep, fell off the wagon, yep, got pulled into those old patterns again, haven't time lapsed it, or haven't collapsed time yet, if you go back into an old pattern,
16:16
You know you haven't collapsed that yet. So that is your job to go, okay, what more do I need to do? Trust me that what more do I need to do is painful because you feel like you have done it all. But I'm telling you, if that pattern is still running there, you haven't collapsed it yet. So there is still more work to do. Now be graceful with yourself.
16:45
when you're doing that work. We're not, we're the only ones judging us. I get other people, I get judged all the time. So there are other people judging, but their judgment doesn't mean anything. It literally doesn't mean anything. So it's only the judgment we put on our story that means anything. So if you can take away the judgment of yourself, and again, that's gonna be a pattern to break.
17:11
So when this is feeling like really heavy and just like, all right, like it's too much, it's because there is a lot. That's the honest truth. There is a lot.
17:22
But if you just choose one thing, okay, I'm not going to identify with my diagnosis anymore. I'm not gonna identify as someone who is infertile. Because I can promise you, most of you here are not infertile. You are dealing with a fertility issue and really you're dealing with a cellular health issue. And then you're dealing with control pattern, fear pattern, self-worth pattern, self-love pattern.
17:53
And when you start unpacking those one by one, it gets easier, but it doesn't stop. I haven't done plant medicine for several reasons and we won't get into them right now, but there was a point in my journey where I really thought, oh, if I just do 10 breathwork sessions, my whole life is going to be different and I don't ever have to do anything again.
18:17
Spiritual hygiene, spiritual work is the same as your physical work. You can't eat healthy for six months and be like, I did that work. So now I get to go back to my Snickers bar and my cigarette and my bottle of red wine. No, your physical health is gonna deteriorate once again. It's just a reaction to your environment. So your spiritual work is the same.
18:45
It gets easier with your diet. Anyone who's done a diet change, you know it was hard at the beginning, but now it's a lifestyle for me. Do I have days where I'm not good at it? Yeah, absolutely. Do I have days that I'm like, I'm so amazing? Yes. But there's this balance, right? And that's when you're in the thick of just learning these things, especially deep patterns, you're going to have to give yourself grace and time to get through them.
19:15
Yes, you can go and get like a shaman to radically release all of this energy. I remember having a client once and she was in my field for a while and then committed to a one-to-one package. But at the beginning of her one-to-one package, she just saw this amazing shaman out in the jungle. And she was like, yeah, he said now I am fixed and all will be good.
19:41
And which I believe full heartedly that man did amazing things for her. But what these gurus might be saying to you or these practitioners who are like, oh, you got to show up this way. You have to show up for yourself after that energetic clearing, after that emotional release, after that. You have to do the physical work and start patterning. And this is where
20:09
the science comes in, the neurons at fire wired together, you have to build that new habit, that new pattern. And that's by taking the contradictory action, whether it's a thought, whether it's I'm in a really crappy mood, I'm gonna go hug a tree, whether it's finding a different modality that is not numbing. So you're not reaching for the drink, you're not reaching for your phone, right? Like hopefully no one's smoking here. So how these...
20:39
Identities create loops in the body, in the field. So every identity comes with a story, a set of emotions, a frequency, a behavioral pattern, a posture, a breath, a hormonal imprint. This means if you keep identifying as the woman who is struggling or infertile, your nervous system will just stay dysregulated. Your fascia will stay tight.
21:08
Your field will keep seeking the same outcome and you are literally broadcasting, I am still her. Even if you consciously are moving forward, which I know you are, you're doing the work. So this is why the deep change doesn't come from doing more. It comes from dissolving the parts of you that no longer serve the version of your stepping into. And the
21:35
missing piece in a fertility journey, right? We're so hyper-focused on this fertility journey that we don't realize that this pattern came before. They were already there. Very rarely does someone get into a fertility journey and then become so type A, over-controlling, need to know all the knowledge. It just doesn't happen that way for the most part because you are high functioning.
22:02
at high level and most likely your nervous system was hanging on by a thread already, contributing to the fertility issues. But if you allow it, if you choose to see that this journey might be the brutal, beautiful light that you need to see these patterns that you may have been running for years, your whole life.
22:29
The people pleasing, the over responsibility, the high achieving, the chronic doing, the subtle self-sabotage, the over identifying with the diagnosis, the struggle, or who you are, your identity, who your family thinks you are. Because the reality is how you do one thing is most likely how you do everything. And what I'm seeing is that women are
22:58
taking that radical responsibility, they're quitting their high stress, high powered jobs, getting into a more even flow of what they want to do. But what they're doing is they're, okay, I've released that control there, but now I'm hyper focusing on the control here, the fertility. Why isn't it working? You're just running the same pattern in a different way in your life.
23:28
I think I said this on the podcast before, but if you Google, have children, but I still deal with infertility. I'm telling you now, if you do not work on these things now, you will bring not only these same patterns into motherhood, which I'm gonna raise my hand up, is not fun. It's not healthy. But you are gonna bring that identity and that anger and that hurt and that resentment into motherhood. And the facts are that your kids will
23:57
pick up on this BS without knowing this is why I talk about becoming conscious mamas. Give your kids that energy, that frequency. That's what they picked up on. There's this Breastwork duo that I follow, super amazing women. And she did a post about how she remembered her always needing belonging and not fitting in or always wanting something that she couldn't have. She feels like it came from
24:26
bottle fed, not breast fed. And as a baby wanted the breast and not the bottle. And I believe her, but I want to push the conversation a little bit more forward as well. What if it wasn't about the breast or the bottle, but the actual connection and energy from the mother, from the main caregiver, right? What if it was that? Because
24:51
As we know, your body doesn't identify the difference between being chased by a bear or getting cut off in traffic, right? Your nervous system is firing. And I'm wondering if we're missing the point of it wasn't the breast or the bottle. It was the energy that the mother has. I, breaks my heart when I think about it, like I did my second, I wasn't nearly as present with my first.
25:19
and for many factors, but a lot of old patterns came back for me. A lot of not being worthy, like proving my worth from having a real job and making real money and all this BS, right? And so I'm wondering if it's more so the energy behind the doing that made her feel like she never got what she wanted or she didn't fit in, whatever it was.
25:47
So it's important when you're going through this journey to gain this awareness, this consciousness about there's more than what we see with the connections. My kids are, especially my eldest, are so in tune with things. And I'm on my own journey of now learning this stuff.
26:12
and applying it into motherhood. And I don't have any regrets. Our journeys are our journeys. But if I could go back in time, I would go back even when, just when I had my first son and started learning this stuff and being able to apply it during those younger years of my children's lives. So I really hope that I can give you the gift to do this for yourself now and see and just shift as much as you can. You do not have to be perfect.
26:41
You don't have to have everything figured out. I truly deeply believe that your children's souls are coming into this world at a certain level of, mom, we're gonna figure this out together, but thank you so much for having a certain level of consciousness. So I don't have to deal with other BS that I see other kids having to deal with. So I really hope that this shift can start here.
27:08
When you unhook from the identity that says, is who I am and this is how it has to be, because you're not just healing for your fertility, you're healing for your life. You are becoming the woman who doesn't just get pregnant. She becomes someone who holds boundaries, who trusts her body, who no longer over functions to be loved, who doesn't need to be
27:34
defined by her experiences and her titles or her diagnosis. I really hope that this is the upgrade, the timeline shift, the quantum jumping, the collapsing of time, the portal. And the fact that you are open enough to maybe consider that your fertility journey is the thing waking you up to all this means that you are wise.
28:02
and that your soul is ready to do hard things. Okay, my beautiful friend, that is my rant for today. I hope you have found it really impactful and really motivating to start taking radical responsibility and showing up for yourself in a different way. Next week, we have a pretty intense episode with my colleague and friend, Abigail White. We are talking about taking
28:32
more responsibility and accountability, especially when you are using intuitive guidance from someone else. And it's a juicy one. I'm a little bit nervous about it. It's totally honest, but I think the conversation is really needed. And I really hope that people come with an open mind and open heart and just see how maybe
28:58
It can be helpful when you're moving through because obviously I'm highly intuitive. Abigail has amazing gifts. We consult together. And sometimes you don't hear what you want to hear. So until then, have a wonderful weekend and we'll see you next Friday on another episode of Fighting Fertility. Thank you once again for tuning in and becoming the conscious mama you were born to be.
29:23
Remember I wasn't some magical unicorn who stumbled into fertility success. I stayed consistent. I put in the work and I made it happen. And guess what? You can too. And I have something for my loyal podcast listeners, but here's the key. This is only for women who are feeling burnt out, frustrated and stuck in the cycle of endless research. And you're at a point where you are screaming, I have tried everything. Why isn't this working?
29:53
This only works for women who are ready to take a radical responsibility for their journey and start listening to their body's innate wisdom. Because deep down, you know you can heal and achieve your ultimate goal. If that's not you yet, that's okay. Not everyone is ready yet to show up with ease, deeply connect to their energy, unlock subconscious patterns, and listen to their body's ability to come into full
30:22
coherence. But for those who are ready, I'm offering something I only do with my paying clients and this is a fertility breakthrough session. This is the first thing I do even before I start really deeply working with someone in a coaching package. It's a deep dive session where we look at exactly where you are right now, what's keeping you stuck, and the easy shifts that can change everything.
30:50
But fair warning, these sessions are very limited and go fast. So if you're interested in checking out my superpower for uncovering exactly what's been overlooked, jump into one of these free calls. They're deep, they're intuitive, and they're game changing. The only way you can access this is if you actually personally message me.
31:13
You can do it on your favorite platform, IG, TikTok, or at my personal email, monica at findingfertility.co, not .com because they wanted $3,000 for the M with just one word. And that word is dreams, obviously D-R-E-A-M-S. And I'll make sure you get that link right away. Remember, this transformation happens when you stay committed to yourself.
31:42
Trust your body, follow your intuition, make it possible. The links that you need are down below. And if you are still here and you absolutely love this podcast, please take some time and leave me a review and help other women like you find this podcast to get the support they need. Help a sister out. Leave a review today.
