Hypnosis for Fertility

You know your cycle length by heart, the window, the date of the test. You know at what point in the day you will run out of patience and do it anyway. And you know exactly what you feel when you see the result, because you have felt it before.

Around you, life carries on as though nothing were happening. Pregnancy announcements arrive out of nowhere, in a group, at a family meal, and you have to have the right face on immediately. People ask whether it is for soon. They advise you to think about something else, to go on holiday, to relax.

At home, what used to be intimacy has become a calendar. And there is the other person opposite you, no longer knowing what to say and saying nothing, which you sometimes take for indifference.

One thing deserves to be said straight away, because it comes up in almost every consultation: it is not your mind that is stopping your body. We devote a whole section to it further down.

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A thoughtful woman holding a pen, her gaze turned to one side

Read this first. Hypnosis does not improve your chances of conceiving. No data supports that claim, and we will not make it. What support can aim at is the way you go through this period: the waiting, the tests, the disorganised intimacy, the couple, and the emotions of a road that is often long. The first step, for both partners, is a medical assessment. A delay without pregnancy needs looking into, and the sooner it is, the more options stay open. Hypnosis replaces no stage of that journey and must never delay one. Already in treatment? If you are undergoing stimulation, insemination or in vitro fertilisation, the page for you is Hypnosis during Fertility Treatment.

What is Infertility?

Infertility is when a pregnancy does not occur after a prolonged period of regular intercourse without contraception. The usual marker is around a year, but it shortens with age and history: past thirty-five, or where there is a gynaecological or andrological history, it is better to consult without waiting out that delay.

Infertility is not sterility. The vast majority of situations are a difficulty in conceiving, not an impossibility.

It concerns both partners. Among couples engaged in assisted reproduction, the causes are as often male in origin as female, and very often present in both. An assessment covering only the woman is an incomplete assessment.

Unexplained infertility describes a situation in which the assessment found no cause. Unexplained does not mean psychological: it means the available tests did not identify the mechanism at work. It is a decisive distinction, and it is regularly misunderstood, including by those around you.

Some factors genuinely do act, and they are neither mysterious nor unconscious: age, smoking in both partners, alcohol, a weight far from the usual range, certain occupational exposures, and the conditions identified during the assessment.

Where assisted reproduction begins

Medically assisted reproduction brings together ovulation stimulation, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilisation and the use of donation. It is a regulated medical pathway, with its stages and its waiting times, and it is open in France as in Quebec to couples formed of a man and a woman, to female couples and to single women.

If you are engaged in it, or about to be, the dedicated page is Hypnosis during Fertility Treatment (IVF, Insemination). It covers what this page does not: the injections, the retrievals, the wait after a transfer, and what to do with a negative cycle. And if a pregnancy comes, what follows is prepared on Hypnosis for Birth Preparation.

Consult without waiting out the usual delay in case of advanced age, absent or very irregular cycles, a history of pelvic surgery, known or suspected endometriosis, disabling period pain, a history of repeated miscarriage, or a known abnormality on a semen analysis. These deserve to be assessed by a doctor, and the assessment concerns both partners. Every decision about your treatment belongs exclusively to the medical team looking after you. If any practitioner offers you a product, a supplement or a diet meant to improve your chances, talk to your doctor first.

The impact of waiting for a pregnancy on daily life

A pregnancy test held in one hand above a pink knitted blanket

This period has a feature that few other ordeals share: it starts again. Every cycle reopens hope, every cycle can close it, and it can go on for years. It is that repetition, more than any single disappointment, that wears you down. Time itself changes nature: life is planned in fortnights, and projects, holidays, sometimes career decisions are settled according to a calendar that does not depend on you. You end up committing to nothing more than two weeks ahead, which shrinks life well beyond the subject itself.

Intimacy turns into an obligation. It is one of the most consistent and least mentioned effects, and it appears well before any medical protocol. What belonged to desire becomes a dated performance, and pleasure withdraws from a place where it was at home. Our page on hypnosis for female sexuality covers that side.

The couple is tested by different emotional rhythms. The one who is not at the centre of the tests often feels useless, stays quiet so as not to add weight, and that silence is received as distance.

Your relationship to other people gets complicated. The pregnancies around you, the birth cards, the well-meant questions, and the double blow of being sincerely happy for someone and devastated at the same time, then blaming yourself for it.

And the body becomes suspect. Many women describe a kind of resentment towards a body they see as having failed, even though nothing has been found.

The recognised approaches outside Hypnosis

The point of entry is your doctor or gynaecologist, for both partners. It is the only step that acts on the causes, and the only one that can say where you actually are.

  • Psychotherapy, particularly when this waiting reawakens a bereavement, a miscarriage or an older story.
  • Patient associations, whose main contribution is to break the isolation and to put words to what nobody else understands. They also welcome people who are not yet in medical treatment.
  • Couple support. Some practitioners in the network offer couple coaching centred on communication and on the shared parental project, useful when the two partners are not going through the same thing at the same pace. See also Hypnosis for Love Life and Relationships.
  • Stopping smoking, one of the rare non-medical levers whose effect on fertility is established, for both partners: Hypnosis to Quit Smoking.
  • A sex therapist, when intimacy has settled lastingly around the calendar.
  • And if you enter medical treatment, the psychologist at the fertility clinic, whose consultation is built into the journey and largely under-used.

Hypnosis places itself alongside these approaches, on the side of emotional experience.

Video available in French

Hypnose et Fertilité : accompagner le désir d’enfant
Video transcript

Are you going through a fertility journey in which you are facing challenges? Or perhaps you are starting to plan to conceive a baby and would like to prepare? Or you are right in the middle of trying to conceive and would like to know more? Either way, this video is for you. I'll explain how hypnosis can support you through your fertility journey. What is really important to understand is that, as a first step, if you are facing challenges in conceiving, it is important to start by seeing your doctor, to check how your body and your reproductive system are working physiologically.

Hypnosis, for its part, can help with the psychological side of your fertility journey; that is the sphere it addresses. You can also come for hypnosis right from the start of your fertility journey, to really update yourself and prepare as well as possible for this plan to conceive. So, from a psychological point of view, what will we look at first? Which areas of life will we address, so that we can then transform them with hypnosis,

on the way towards your plan to conceive? First, in an intake interview, we would look at the transgenerational dimension: what your mother and your grandmother carry in relation to motherhood, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and the experience of motherhood afterwards; what they went through in those processes, and what baggage you may have inherited through their own experience.

Then, within what we have observed, we bring in additional resources for your mother and your grandmother, in case the situations they went through were ones in which they did not have access to all their inner resources. We will also look at the transgenerational dimension in your partner. Next, we will look at the conditions in which you experienced the pregnancy when you were in your mother's womb.

What was your mother going through at that time that you may have inherited? What were the conditions of your conception, and of the moment you were delivered and came into the world? It is also really important to note, and to be able to mention, any particular traumas you may have had in your life. So that is a first, transgenerational and personal dimension, linked to the history we carry around fertility.

Second, we will also look at the balance of our feminine and masculine polarities. To define these polarities a little more, I'll talk about the feminine archetype and the masculine archetype. An archetype, a notion Jung used a great deal, is a symbol that has been used for years and years, for several centuries, and onto which particular energies have been projected.

For example, the masculine archetype carries the energy of setting limits, providing a framework and a structure, while the feminine polarity, the feminine archetype, is more about receptivity, listening and care. So how do you carry these two polarities inside you? What matters is that they are balanced. Each of us, man or woman, carries these two inner polarities, and the balanced beings we are also depend on the balance of these polarities within us.

Often in our society, what has been highly valued is physical strength, action, work, perhaps also a lot of thinking, how we reason, intellectuals being idolised, and so on. Studying for longer and longer means our mind is very active and our will to take action is very active, and sometimes, especially as women, we have lost our connection to what we carry in our feminine side: receptivity, intuition, connection, and the whole emotional realm.

Sometimes we may even fail to listen to our own emotions, in a drive to keep moving forward and keep acting. So for women, it may be, and I often notice this in the support I provide, that the feminine polarity needs to be reconnected. These are things we always have within us, but we haven't been used to letting them take their place, or to being in touch with them. So it's simply a matter of plugging the cable back in for those capacities of receptivity. And this is really interesting, because we will also look at it in relation to sexuality, since sexuality is the place of procreation and of the creation of life.

We will look at your relationship with sexuality. Are you comfortable in your sexuality? In sexuality, there are two postures: the giving posture, when I offer caresses and care to the other person, and the receiving posture, how I allow myself to receive the care and love the other person gives me. So, in much the same way as the feminine polarity, which is about receiving, it is sometimes necessary to relearn how to receive in sexuality as well.

We could imagine that the masculine and feminine archetypes within us are rather energetic, invisible, imaginal, symbolic dimensions. To me, all of these mean the same thing, and we will also look at how these inner dimensions take concrete form in the physical world. So we will look at how things work in your relationship: what is at play between you and your partner, and how these two polarities relate to each other.

As a woman, do you carry more of the feminine polarity and your partner more of the masculine, or the other way round, or a mix? We will look at these dimensions. This can be worked on individually, if you are the one consulting, because with a systemic approach we realise that if you change your inner energetic and psychological position in relation to your capacities, it already influences your partner's energetic and psychological position.

So by changing your behaviour, because this inner evolution takes concrete form as a change in behaviour, you also allow your partner to change their behaviour. We can also address this dimension in a couples session. I also offer support through the Imago relationship approach, an incredible approach that helps rebuild the connection between partners and, from there, address the various issues they are going through.

When the heart is open, when there is acceptance, which is what rebuilding the connection means, it becomes all the easier to address, with care, kindness and compassion, the various issues each person is living through in the relationship. So, within support related to fertility, there may be one or two sessions with your partner to look at these dimensions and rebalance them if needed. We will also look at the kind of fertility you experience in your life: through your hobbies, your work, your family, your relationship, and also your spirituality. Do you feel connected to meaning? Does what you are living make sense to you? Are you taking action towards what is meaningful for you?

All these dimensions of spirituality can also involve a connection to something greater. Because what is really important to see is that, in order to carry fertility, to be able to create life, we need to offer ourselves this process of fertility and creativity in our own lives. And creativity is not only the artistic realm. Creativity is also, for example: when you cook, do you listen to your intuitions about which ingredients to use, and cook from that creative process that comes from you? When you are at work, do you listen to your intuitions and your ideas, and put them into action?

That is creativity too. So in every area of our life, including our relationship with our partner, we can allow ourselves to be creative, even relying on our intuition, receiving and trusting that part of us that knows and that allows us to enter into dialogue with our partner. That is creativity as well: creating from who we are, from our intuitions and from what we perceive.

So much for the different areas of life. What is important to understand is that, in this kind of support, as hypnotherapists we do not promise the creation of a new life at the end of the process. That is outside our field of competence, as you can imagine. What we offer, and what I offer in any case through my support, is a bringing into the world of you, the person who comes to consult.

As if you could discover yourself, discover the gifts hidden behind the challenges of the fertility journey, to bring yourself into the world and, from there, to be able to bring a life, a baby, into the world. So I am available to support you. You can also contact me by phone, all my details are below, for more information. And I look forward to working together in the process of creating life!

Hypnotherapy is a complementary form of support and does not replace medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns about your health, please consult a physician first.

Hypnosis for Fertility: aims and benefits

Let us start with what hypnosis does not do, and this list is the most important part of the page.

It does not improve your chances of conceiving. It acts neither on ovulation, nor on the quality of eggs or sperm, nor on implantation. It lifts no unconscious block preventing you from being pregnant, because that block does not exist in the terms in which it is usually presented. It replaces no stage of the medical pathway and must never delay one.

What support aims at

  • Getting through the cycle. Waiting for the test, the day your period arrives, and the few days afterwards when you have to start again. These are precise moments, and they can be prepared for.
  • Putting desire back where there is a calendar, and giving intimacy a place that is not entirely colonised by the project.
  • Supporting the couple in a period where each absorbs it differently and where the subject becomes hard to raise without it going wrong.
  • Accompanying the relationship to the body, often damaged by a sense of betrayal or failure.
  • Getting through other people's announcements, the family meals and the questions, without leaving all your energy there.
  • Approaching the assessment's tests more calmly, particularly where there is an apprehension about blood draws or gynaecological examinations.
  • And accompanying grief, where there has been a miscarriage. See Hypnosis for Grief and Sadness.

The more general anxiety that settles in during these periods is covered on Hypnosis for Stress and Anxiety.

No, your stress is not the cause

This is the sentence you have heard most, in its various forms: relax, think about something else, go on holiday, it will come when you stop thinking about it. Some sites, including the previous version of this page, offer a more learned version: unconscious fears or past experiences that would inhibit fertility.

The data do not support that idea. A meta-analysis of fourteen prospective studies covering 3,583 women, published in the BMJ in 2011 by the fertility research group at Cardiff University, asked the question directly: does emotional distress measured before the start of treatment predict achieving a pregnancy? The answer is no. Neither anxiety nor depression measured before treatment was associated with the outcome, and the authors explicitly conclude that women can be reassured on this point.

The link does exist, but in the other direction. Distress is overwhelmingly the consequence of infertility, not its cause. Confusing the two does a precise damage: it adds guilt to grief, it gives those around you a line to repeat, and it can divert from a medical assessment which does act on the real causes.

An honest nuance, because it exists: extreme and prolonged stress, particularly when it comes with significant food restriction or intensive physical exercise, can disturb cycles. That is a specific situation, medically identifiable, and it has nothing to do with being worried because you have been trying for two years.

The same misconception exists in a "treatment" version: my stress is making my IVF fail. It is dismantled, with its own sources, on Hypnosis during Fertility Treatment.

So why consult in hypnosis? Because distress deserves to be accompanied for its own sake. Not as a means of obtaining a pregnancy: as real suffering, in a long period, that does not have to be gone through alone.

What the research says

On the link between distress and outcome, the BMJ meta-analysis cited above finds no association between distress before treatment and achieving a pregnancy. A second meta-analysis, in 2018, over twenty studies and 4,308 women, reaches the same conclusion.

On hypnosis itself, we should be clear: nothing supports the claim that it improves the chances of pregnancy. A 2006 case-control study on hypnosis during embryo transfer is regularly cited by commercial sites as a demonstration; it is not one, and we explain why on the page Hypnosis during Fertility Treatment. The only randomised trial published in this field, in 2013, found no difference in pregnancy or birth rates. What is documented, on the other hand, is the use of hypnosis in supporting medical procedures and the discomfort they cause.

When the road stops

This is the part almost no site covers, and yet it is a frequent outcome. A project can stop because the medical options are exhausted, or because you decide to stop. That second decision is legitimate and it is hard, because it feels like giving up when it is often about taking your life back into your own hands.

What follows is a genuine bereavement: for a child who did not exist, for a projection, for a part of yourself. It is poorly recognised socially, which makes it lonelier. Support has every place at that moment, alongside a psychologist, and it certainly does not consist in turning that loss into a new chapter of life.

An example of support

An illustrative example. The name is changed and the path described belongs only to the person who lived it.

Two people sitting side by side on a rock, head against shoulder, facing the mountains

Élise had been trying to conceive for several years. The tests had identified no cause, which she experienced as an implicit accusation: if everything works, then she must be putting something in the way. She avoided the subject with her partner, took refuge in work, and told herself that if she were more relaxed it would already have happened. That was the state she arrived in at the first appointment, convinced she had something inside her to repair.

The first conversation mostly served to undo that idea. What we could accompany was not her fertility, it was the state in which she was going through this period. The work bore on the days following the arrival of her period, on an old miscarriage she had never spoken about, and on her capacity to raise the subject with her partner without it ending in an argument.

"The most useful thing was being told that it was not my fault. For four years people have been gently suggesting the opposite."

Élise, name changed

She then resumed her medical follow-up, with a new assessment for both partners. We do not know what became of her project, and that is not what this support was measuring. Every situation is different, and Élise's path says nothing about what you will experience.

How a Hypnosis session on this subject unfolds

The conversation. Where you are, for how long, what care you are receiving and who is supporting you. What weighs most, and what you are hoping for from us. If you have not yet had an assessment, or if it covered only one of the two partners, we will point you to your doctor: that is where the causes are settled, and we will not take the place of that step.

The aim, framed together, and always about the experience, never about the outcome. For example: getting through the days after a negative test differently, finding an intimacy that is not dated, or being able to go to a christening.

The induction. A natural state of attention you already know without naming it. You stay conscious, you hear everything, you can speak and you can stop whenever you wish. The general shape of a session is described on the page what to expect in a hypnosis session.

The work. On this subject it most often bears on the waiting, on the relationship to the body, on the couple, on dreaded social situations, and sometimes on a grief that was never given room. We offer no visualisation of conception or pregnancy: what does not depend on you must not rest on your shoulders.

The return and the exercise. A conversation about what you experienced, and a self-hypnosis exercise to take away, often recorded so that you can listen to it again on your own.

The number of sessions is settled at the first conversation, and it takes account of the schedule of your medical care, which comes before ours.

Book an appointment

Two armchairs facing each other in a bright Solutions Hypnose consulting room

Sessions work in person as well as by video, and that detail matters particularly here, since medical appointments already take up a great many journeys and a great many half-days booked off. Video consultation asks for nothing more than a quiet room and a connection, and it makes one thing easier that matters in this particular subject: you do not have to sit in a waiting room among other people. We see people this way from Europe, North America, Africa and well beyond. Here is how it works.

In person, the practitioners who cover perinatal care and couple support in English see clients in Quebec, in Montreal and Sherbrooke. You can come alone or as a couple: the first conversation is there precisely to determine whether hypnosis is the right resource at this point in your journey.

A question before you decide? Write to us. If someone else seems better suited (your doctor, a psychologist, the psychologist at your clinic), we will tell you.

Where would you like to consult?

Bas-Saint-LaurentCapitale-NationaleAbitibi-TémiscamingueOutaouaisChaudière-AppalachesGaspésie–Îles-de-la-MadeleineCôte-NordLavalCentre-du-QuébecEstrieLanaudièreLaurentidesMontérégieMauricieNord-du-QuébecSaguenay–Lac-Saint-JeanMontréalOttawaFleuve Saint-Laurent

All areas

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Frequently asked questions about Hypnosis for Fertility

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Sources and references

Definitions and markers

The legal framework

On stress and conception

  • Boivin, J., Griffiths, E., & Venetis, C. A. (2011). Emotional distress in infertile women and failure of assisted reproductive technologies: meta-analysis of prospective psychosocial studies. BMJ, 342, d223: 14 studies, 3,583 women. Full text
  • Nicoloro-SantaBarbara, J., Busso, C., Moyer, A., & Lobel, M. (2018). Just relax and you'll get pregnant? Social Science & Medicine, 213, 54-62: 20 studies, 4,308 women.

On complementary approaches

  • Catoire, P. et al. (2013). Hypnosis versus diazepam for embryo transfer: a randomized controlled study. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 55(4), 378-386. The only randomised trial of hypnosis in assisted reproduction: no difference in pregnancy or birth rates.
  • Psychological and educational interventions for subfertile men and women. Cochrane review, 2016.

If you are going through a dark period. Quebec: Info-Social 811 option 2 · 1 866 APPELLE (277-3553). France: 3114, free and around the clock. And if you are in medical treatment, the psychologist at your clinic, whose consultation is part of the journey.

Hypnosis as practised by the members of Solutions Hypnose is a complementary support approach. It is neither a medical act, nor a diagnosis, nor psychotherapy in the regulatory sense, and it in no way replaces a consultation, follow-up or treatment prescribed by a health professional.

Our practitioners do not assess and do not treat mental disorders or illnesses. They never ask for an ongoing treatment to be stopped or changed: that decision rests exclusively with your doctor.

No result can be guaranteed. The testimonials and examples presented on this page describe individual experiences and do not predict what you will experience.

In case of significant distress, unexplained physical symptoms or suicidal thoughts, contact a doctor, emergency services or a helpline without delay.

Nassim Zafar

Page written by Nassim Zafar
hypnotherapist and NLP coach
partner at Solutions Hypnose.
English version reviewed by David Veilleux
Updated .

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