When Becoming a ParentTakes a Different Path

Third-party reproduction can make it possible to build the family you have hoped for, while also bringing emotions that can be difficult to acknowledge—even when you feel deeply grateful for the path you have found. Using donor eggs, donor sperm, embryos, or a gestational carrier can involve grief, uncertainty, anger, jealousy, envy, shame, or a painful sense of failure. These feelings do not mean that you are not grateful, that you do not want your baby, or that you have made the wrong decision. They are often part of trying to emotionally understand a path to parenthood that is very different from the one you imagined.

For some intended parents, the experience touches something deeper than the practical challenges of fertility treatment. It can raise difficult questions about biology, pregnancy, motherhood or fatherhood, identity, the body, genetic connection, and what it means to become a family. There may be grief for the pregnancy, child, or family experience you imagined having, alongside love and hope for the child you are working so hard to bring into your life. These conflicting emotions can be especially painful when there seems to be no place to talk honestly about them.

Psychotherapy can provide a space to explore these experiences without judgment or pressure to feel a particular way. From an attachment-focused, relational, and psychodynamic perspective, we can look beneath the immediate emotions to understand what this process means to you and how it may be affecting your sense of self and your relationships. The goal is not simply to help you get through the logistics of third-party reproduction, but to help you make emotional sense of your experience and move toward parenthood with greater self-understanding, integration, and connection.

My approach is attachment-focused, relational, and psychodynamic. Rather than focusing only on coping strategies or the logistics of fertility treatment, we explore the deeper emotional experience of becoming a parent through third-party reproduction. Together, we may explore grief and loss, attachment, identity, self-esteem, relationships, and the meanings you have attached to fertility, pregnancy, biology, and parenthood. We can make room for feelings that may seem contradictory—gratitude alongside grief, love alongside anger, hope alongside fear, or excitement alongside envy and uncertainty. The therapeutic relationship itself can become an important place to understand experiences that may be difficult to put into words elsewhere. My goal is to help you develop a deeper understanding of your emotional experience so that you can move through this process with greater self-compassion, authenticity, and connection to yourself and the family you are creating.