Meagan: 0:28

Today I am here with Nicole. I'm so excited for our talk today. We're gonna be focusing on fertility issues and talking a lot about the mental health influence. Nicole, I wanna welcome you to her time to talk and invite you to introduce yourself to our listeners.

Nicole: 0:42

Thank you for having me, Megan. I'm so excited to be here. My name's Nicole Lang. I have done fertility through the lens of Chinese medicine and education focused work since 2006, and I have a specific lens on trauma-informed and evidence-based ways that we can bump into those specific things. So Chinese medicine, fertility. Trauma and science. I put'em all together and it's such a joy and such an amazing moment to be practicing all these things because it's this tried and true medicine with increasing amounts of evidence and then putting the mental health back into the mainstream scientific medicine, and it just better serves whole complex human.

Meagan: 1:29

Oh yeah, absolutely. We can't just go with one methodology anymore. We really do need the intersection and the wisdom from all of those areas. That is so insightful that you've merged those in particular.

Nicole: 1:41

Yeah, I heard a, MD talking about trying to reintegrate or integrate actually for the first time. Modern medicine has never had the mind in the scientific training of the siloed body piece kind of training. And so he's trying to advocate for putting it into that training for the first time ever since the 15 hundreds. And he said at this point, there's so much evidence that shows how much the mental health and the physical body are interconnected, that if you're doing one without the other, you're not actually practicing evidence-based medicine. That is a mic draw moment. I love it.

Meagan: 2:14

Absolutely mic drop. Indeed. And on one hand, how sad is it that it took this long to recognize that and yet better late than never. I'm so glad to hear that it's going that way on a really large scale. it's long overdue.

Nicole: 2:27

Better late than never.

Meagan: 2:28

Yeah. So, to start us off, you are one of those practitioners called to this work because of your own lived experience and personal journey. I would love to start there and, invite you to tell our listeners about, your personal journey into this Fertility struggle work, and the overlap of trauma and Chinese medicine

Nicole: 2:46

It was the trauma piece for me. I benefited tremendously when it came to my fertility journey, but I didn't know that when I started doing this work. for me, I had, childhood ACEs and a lot of intensity in my nervous. System already. And then at 17 I experienced a sexual assault and attempted suicide and ended up in the intensive care unit of the hospital then the regular hospital and then psychiatric ward. it was just this horrible upheaval of everything that I thought. I knew where my life was going. I thought I knew who I was. I thought I knew a lot of things as 17 year olds do. And all of a sudden that was all topsy-turvy and totally unknown. Western mainstream medicine absolutely saved my life. I thought I was going to practice some form of mainstream medicine prior to all of this. But it just got me as far as it could take me and stabilize me, but couldn't connect the dots. And there was so much that was mental health and trauma in my. Body my digestion my menstrual cycle my sleep, and my way of being in the world. so I came to Chinese medicine looking for those things for myself. And because I'm a firstborn, overachiever kiddo with a lot of ACEs, I was like, I'm gonna get my master's in this. not just gonna go for some appointments. I showed up totally clueless about anything really traditional. I knew that there was gonna be some western medicine in the training and that was really, appealing to me. then I learned all the ways that Chinese medicine really does two things that I think are really important now in hindsight. It never took out the mind from the mind body. And so now here we are. Trying to put it into mainstream science for the first time. But Chinese as in Ayurveda medicine like this, never separated them. And it's always been multi-systemic. you're not ever just doing this siloed, oh, you have this period problem, that's this, and you have this sleep problem. That's this. like I was so used to Western medicine doing so. I worked on myself. I ended up connecting all the dots and doing the mental, physical at the same time, and I benefited tremendously. So by the time I decided to start a private practice when I was graduating, I really wanted to do trauma work. And one of my professors is like, you know, maybe since you're not a therapist, think about what that bumps into. so I said, okay, let's do women's health with an emphasis on emotional health. And within six months from starting my practice, I had a wait list that was predominantly fertility work because of the way I practiced. I was explaining a lot of things taking time and being very nervous system focused, and that appealed to people going through fertility. And I didn't know at the time until I tried to have my own kiddos, but I, it turns out I had PCO and endometriosis and all the things I was doing for all the other things showed up in my own fertility journey too. So that's a long answer, but it's kind of a everything informs everything else story.

Meagan: 5:59

Oh yeah, absolutely. We are not simple beings, right? Right. We have experiences that build on each other and really impact a lot of, who we are and what we do. So I think it all makes a lot of sense. And for those of you who, are not sure what ACEs is, it's an assessment that we tend to give a lot in the mental health field. takes into account the childhood traumas that you've been through growing up like, divorce neglect, childhood sexual assault, things like that will give you a higher ACE score. And those that tend to have a higher ACE score are the ones that are more likely to have PTSD qualifying symptoms and other comorbid mental health conditions. and the lower on the ACE. Score you are doesn't necessarily save you from those things. You can still struggle with anxiety and depression, but it's not quite as likely. So just wanted give our listeners the Yeah. That little background there. But

Nicole: 6:49

I love when you give the context your narcissism breakdown in, in one of the person I listen to, I was like, beautiful. Yes. And we know You are exponentially more likely to have autoimmune disorders if you have higher ACEs scores, cardiovascular disease, which makes sense because again, mind, body are one and the same, and when your nervous system gets wired to be on high alert. Without rest, it tends to make our blood pressure higher. It tends to make our immune system do dysregulated things because we can't always be on the alert for a tiger. Our immune system doesn't do well in that place. So it's not just the anxiety and the risk for mental health, but it goes with that physiology too.

Meagan: 7:32

Absolutely. And unfortunately your story here is not really unique. especially in the clients that we treat at her time, we see this over and over of women in particular going to the traditional medical field asking for help They get some help To the extent that they can. but they do feel left out and let down a lot of times if we look at the history women were not required to be in medical studies until 1993. So it is not surprising that in 2025 we're still feeling really. Misunderstood and let down by the siloed traditional medical model. in a big way people are turning to therapy and non-traditional, medicine fields for the gaps to be filled in it's just so prevalent right now, I'm really glad that you are living proof that there's hope for women in that spot Yeah. That are feeling let down and that healing can happen.

Nicole: 8:26

we're at this perfect moment. As you doing EMDR and a RT and these somatic mind body things that we do from a mental health perspective that involve, our eyes moving or feeling buzzing acupuncture turns out to be very similar in a lot of ways. Like it's tapping into the nervous system and its processing so it can do things that talking alone and medicine alone Don't touch. it's just a really fantastic time to be having conversations like this, and it's easier and easier to find these kinds of modalities and know the evidence behind them even placebo we know is good medicine. Now we can do open label placebo where we're telling people placebo is powerful because it's neurochemicals, it's electrical signals, it's your body healing itself, and we don't have to trick anybody. It makes good medicine even better when there's those layers.

Meagan: 9:18

Yeah. So let's dive a little bit deeper into the trauma aspect because, you gave us this very vulnerable, summary of your childhood rife with some very traumatic moments. I'm wondering if from a personal, and scientific perspective, you can kind of walk us through how does trauma impact, women in terms of their fertility journey? Where's the connection between those pieces?

Nicole: 9:40

Yeah, it is just so nebulous and multi-systemic, which is something that, again, I think. More mind body modalities are really good at. all the things that I already alluded to, the immune system changes. There's immunity involved in implantation and a pregnancy, thriving or not thriving, the uterine lining implantation and building of a placenta. This relates to the, Circulatory system and whether the blood is being shunted away from the rest, digest, and reproduce organs or towards them based on our nervous system. There's every single system you could go through, your endocrine system, your hormonal system, when our body is flooded with never ending on relenting, cortisol and stress cycles that we either can't turn off because our nervous system is primed because of things like PTSD or we're in a culture. One of the layers that I'm really passionate about is how. Fertility treatment and culture activate our nervous systems and our fight or flight. Some of us have PTSD, some of us have ACEs, so we're already more prone to activate stronger, faster. when you put all this together, one of the things we can see from a hormonal perspective is the cortisol that surges out, that's made out of the same building blocks as your reproductive hormones. there's this robbing effect from one kind of hormone to the other. even if we're doing outside treatments, which I work with a lot of people that are doing both western and eastern medicine. So say we're taking these outside hormones and we're adding them in the form of medications and shots and patches, which is fabulous, that we can do these things. But the receptors, because the building blocks are the same, the receptors can get jammed up with some of the stress hormones. So when we're doing the system of medicine, that's like, well, you can, put your life on hold for now, and when you have a baby, you can take it off and deal with your mental health that is so old fashioned. That is not understanding this current science in real ways that influence our fertility and not just our fertility, like pregnancy rates, but how healthy is that pregnancy? How healthy is that placenta? How high risk is that? And. all that influences the mental health and the confidence of the person who's carrying that pregnancy and how they're going into becoming a parent. I say all the time, if the bare minimum is just get you pregnant, even if it's traumatic, and the best case scenario is somebody then hands you a newborn. That's a terrible setup on so many levels. Versus we could serve women, we could serve people as they go through fertility struggles. We could make it less traumatic, less activating in so many different ways. We can offset the ways that it has to be triggering because it is a legitimate medical condition, Have more tools and more skills and bigger buffers, so that going into having a newborn is that much more informed by all sorts of wonderful things.

Meagan: 12:34

There's just so much to that and I think a lot of women that maybe want to have children, are finding that that's not as simple as they thought it would be. They are intimidated by this whole world of, IVF is a very kind of common treatment that is widespread, in terms of, we know the name of it, but we don't really know what it's like to experience that or whatever the alternatives are. for someone Thinking about that, but that really hasn't gone through it and doesn't know what that's like. Can you describe what is the typical medical model of that experience is like versus maybe what should it be like in your opinion?

Nicole: 13:09

The typical way is through reproductive sex education. you just show up, have things prescribed, and you take'em and they either work or they don't work. So if I had to distill it down to a nutshell, that's how we've historically treated, whether it's endometriosis, pain, and. Thrown people in birth control pills or PCOS where people don't ovulate regularly because of insulin resistance and hormonal imbalances, and so we just try to make'em ovulate. these are things that can be effective treatments, but when they're done in that void of any context or education or confidence, again, we're missing out all those layers. We're causing unnecessary harm. We're activating nervous systems. We're hurting the outcomes by making it less robust reproductive function than it could, we're hurting mental health. ideally what I would like is to see us stripped down, what is required medical treatment, and then what can we add to enhance it versus what can we tolerate to just get through it. So that's a very high level, and I'm passionate about explaining the reductionistic pieces. Say your example. Somebody's thinking about doing I-V-F-I-V-F has, I would say at this point, at most clinics, three main protocols for, stimulating the ovaries to grow as many eggs as possible at once. So they can be retrieved and fertilized in the lab, then they can either put an embryo into the uterus immediately on the heels of that. Egg stimulation, retrieval, cycle, or freeze those embryos. Do testing and then do, one of three main protocols to get the uterine lining ready for implantation. So kind of three basic protocols for the egg stimulation retrieval. Three basic protocols for the lining preparation and implantation process. But within that, so many opportunities for people to feel educated and confident and follow along and get nuanced and all the things that feel really empowering. And again, even when I started 20 years ago, it's like, oh, that will make you stress less. And now 20 years in, it's like, this actually makes your outcomes so much better. Here's all the science of how we know why.

Meagan: 15:18

And when you lay it out that way, it seems very scientific. It's just a handful of steps. We just take this medication and then here we go. But in reality not.

Nicole: 15:28

And it bumps up into everything, like people are like, oh, well it's whether you have a baby or not. But it's comparing where you thought your life would be. Your sense of purpose as a person. It's your relationship to your body. It's your spirituality. it can rock people's faith. It's this inequitable distribution of treatment burden and mental load. You talk a lot about these things. This applies infertility treatment. It's, falling out of alignment with your peers and your cohort with your life. I have A fertility program, an IVF program where I explain, the timelines, here's the different medications, here's how to troubleshoot, here's what the evidence says, because that is a big piece for mental health and for outcomes and physiology. But then at the same time, how do you hold the unknown? How do you advocate for healthy boundaries? How do you tell your partner when you're on a different page with them, what you would need to feel more supported and get on the same page so you can be experiencing it with the person that's your nearest ally in this, even though they're experience is really different. And so. Yeah it's simple and incredibly complex nuanced and personal, and I love that because again, that makes it incredibly nuanced and elegant and beautiful to be able to enter in and see what will give somebody the biggest bang for buck or what is in service to each individual person, it's never a supplement, never a let's, just magically change your diet in this way. It's always way more whole person and person centric.

Meagan: 16:59

I wanna take a moment here to read a quote from your website that I pulled and wrote down.'cause I think it ties in really well here. on your page, you said, trying to conceive for two plus years leaves women with as high or even higher levels of anxiety and depression as having cancer. Yet if you had cancer, others would know what to say. They would bring meals and flowers, but with fertility, not so much. I think that quote encapsulates what you're talking about here this journey can ultimately be very traumatic and grief ridden and people don't even see it happening. And that can compound that problem and make it that much worse.

Nicole: 17:36

That's a unique layer to fertility that we treat it as other than other. Legitimate medical conditions like cancer. When I started listening to your podcast, there were a couple episodes that jumped out because they were talking about, unhealthy relationships and abusive signs and things like that. And I was like, oh my goodness. Not doctors as individuals, not nurses, individuals, not acupuncturists as individuals, but as a culture. Fertility culture has a lot of the same qualities as abusive relationships. There's all this weird shame and blame and gaslighting and isolation and messed up power dynamics and, exploitation. All different kinds of icky things that we do not see in oncology, or cardiovascular medicine. And it is so strange that it is, every bit is legitimate of a medical condition, is any of these other things. But this is not how this field of medicine is not how patients dealing with this form of medical need have to operate within a system that doesn't. operate like it should. those are the parts that are unnecessarily harmful. Those are the parts that I was wanting to challenge and talk about in every single podcast I do because we could demand better. We could say, okay, this is legitimate medical condition. Yeah, we deserve X, Y, z.

Meagan: 18:57

Absolutely we do deserve better. And women, I think a big part of this is helping women learn how to advocate in these medical spaces for what they deserve and what they need so that this abusive relationship nature of it doesn't perpetuate, So it's like we're a victim of the system while we're having to fix it. Yes. And that feels like a uniquely female problem that we have to rebuild the society while being harmed by it. And that's endlessly frustrating and a true women's mental health issue at the core.

Nicole: 19:28

True. and as you said, we haven't paid to study this. The beginning of that quote that you just shared, that's from a woman named Alice Do Mar's work in the nineties where she was piloting a 10 week mind body program for people going through fertility. they actually cut off the study early because they considered unethical to withhold the treatment because the success rates were so much higher in people doing mind body support while going through fertility struggles. this was in the nineties and it's still not built in. It seems like if you're lucky enough to be able to afford it, or if you stumble on the right information on the right podcast or a friend of a friend, or you have a more cutting edge re who's gonna refer you to somebody like me? But it should be like an oncology. I think in oncology there's so many more holistic mind body supports that are built into that. Because it's understood that it's trajectory of life and lack of control and all of the mental health layers.

Meagan: 20:23

And cancer patients, for example, are not blamed for their situation. there can be moments where it's like, if you smoked and you had lung cancer, there can be that I told you so elements, but it's not outwardly stated. in fertility culture, it's kind of like the woman's fault.

Nicole: 20:40

you didn't find a partner in time, or you should have known, or come off the pill sooner. I talk about this in my 90 day, where I go from the round up, even in the financial structure of it, it's like there's nowhere else in medicine that's like, well, if. Poor enough prognosis, we're gonna say, no, we're not gonna treat you we'll offer you these other treatments, but not the treatment that you wanna do because it might not work and we don't wanna mess our statistics up. That is common practice in reproductive medicine. And that just takes away any sense of control. You know, even if you had a, really significant metastatic cancer, there's these heroic measures, trials, things that, if that's what a person feels they need to do to make peace with things, that is an option. Mainstream fertility culture. That's not how it worked. There's also pay upfront. There's not many places in legitimate medicine where it's like, Nope, you can't do this thing today until you pay us$3,000 at the front desk. Happens all the time in fertility. You're lucky if you get fertility benefits to insurance in many places in the United States. That doesn't happen in most areas of our health. And also there's these interesting payment plans called share risk payment plans where. You pay for like three IVFs, and if the first one works, you lose the extra money. But if none of them work, you get your money back. Not to judge because I'm so risk averse. I think that would probably help my mental health to do something like that. But imagine, okay, we're gonna give you three stents for your heart disease, and if you still die of a heart attack, we'll give your family some of the money back. If you never need a second stent, we're just gonna keep the money. It's, such an interesting, unnecessary culture of harms.

Meagan: 22:22

even the financial dynamic around this is completely different than any other area of medicine. Why do you think that is?

Nicole: 22:28

I think it's because we have assumed that it's a personal failure and not a medical condition. it's like the wild west of treatments it's a lot of private owned clinics. a lot of, for profit clinics, It's so new, it doesn't have a lot of research. Some of the reasons why insurance historically have said they're not interested in paying for fertility treatments is because it does tend to increase the burden of, the finances on the insurance company. historically a lot of fertility treatments would end up with. Not singleton pregnancies. It would be twins or higher level multiples, which cost insurance companies a lot of money. So things like, oral medications and just insemination or at home times intercourse, for example, or early IVF protocols would end up with multiples. And these pregnancies are exorbitantly costly compared to in higher risk. And so insurance companies could say, no, we're not gonna do that because there's not a cost benefit for us as an insurance company to cover this industry. there's a large push for single embryo transfers and more access to IVF where you can control and decrease the risk of, multiples in ways that. Insemination cannot. There's so many ways. so many conditions that feed into it. And I think one of the biggest things is some of these things we have control over and we can make changes unfairly on our own, right or wrong. That's where they're gonna come from to start. And then some of them are just awareness and calling for advocacy. signing petitions. Writing to our lawmakers and doing things like that That are outta our control. But combining them does feel empowering. Does feel proactive in a way that just being at the whim of the industry will never feel good.

Meagan: 24:13

Yeah. And to do some of these action steps that are within our control, like advocating to our representatives We also need to name what's happening And become more aware of it and have discussions like this where we're calling out the double standards this area that is very centrally women's health Is. Treated completely different. Let's look at that. There's probably some discrimination and some issues happening there that are vastly unethical.

Nicole: 24:38

And we can start by even just. Pushing back on our clinics, I trained staff and physicians and tried to teach from all different angles to change this culture. I was once teaching a group of IVF nurses and one of the nurses was like, I noticed all your patients always want all their numbers and measurements and how many eggs they're growing in their IVF. Like, why it's not gonna change what they get. And I was like, imagine an oncology patient coming in for a scan of their tumor and you thinking It's strange that they want to know if it's shrinking stable or growing. It's not gonna change what the chemo's doing. They're still in the process of doing the treatment, but of course. They would wanna know, and this is the same. Mm-hmm. The trajectory of the life is hanging in the balance and not knowing is cognitively brutal. I always say, if I could tell you you're gonna have five terrible twists and turns, but ultimately you end up with a sun, you'd be like, okay. Versus. I don't know. I don't know when this ends. I don't know how this ends. That's so much worse. any information that we can demand or expect as part of good treatment is In service to this shift and this change that we're need.

Meagan: 25:48

absolutely. that piece speaks a lot to the grief that is inherently wrapped up in this kind of journey. Fertility struggles, has a lot of invisible loss or what we would call in the mental health field, disenfranchised grief that is not widely viewed or understood or supported. I'm wondering from your perspective personally and professionally, how you navigated that.'Cause there is so much grief of the, I hope this happens, but there's no guarantee that's a real loss.

Nicole: 26:17

It is a real loss and every single month it's a series of ups and, a rally for ovulation or this cycle looks like it's going well as far as the treatment protocol and then getting your hopes up and then trying to be guarded to protect yourself. And then finding out that there's attrition and IVF where you lose numbers every step of the way and start out with 20 eggs could end up with one embryo and a 50 50 shot at pregnancy. So there's just these miniature losses and miniature griefs and this rollercoaster, and We expect people to continue to lead meetings at work, continue to show up, continue to go to the family thing, where five people are announcing they're pregnant in the course of a year, There's double standards that we can call out and that we can challenge in this way too, because it is, and I think this first step is just acknowledging and talking about it. And again, right or wrong, we have to advocate and ask for it. a big part of my work is grief work. So when you walk into my clinic, there's an altar with Statues that I make of Jizo Jizo is a, deity in Japanese culture that is thought to help the spirits of unborn babies go between realms of existence. And in Japan, they put. In their yards and in their parks and along the roadside to honor miscarriage stillbirth and infancy loss. I want people to come in and see that even if they're pregnant and excited, getting the nursery ready. But it came after three years of trying IVs and a pregnancy loss. It's like this is a part of your journey and that pregnancy or those losses feel like in your heart, there's no right or wrong way to do it. But there's a space to light candles, to leave notes, to take a moment and reflect, in the space because it never goes away.

Meagan: 28:01

I love that alter idea so much, and even just the education that you're giving about this deity and this cultural aspect that they can choose to lean into with their grief or not. That actually gives a funnel, an outlet to release that grief and those emotions and have it be externalized and seen instead. Buried inside and kept in this place where it only grows and festers. So that's one beautiful example of the way that you're helping clients work through the grief of this. And I can see how that would ultimately be critical to building resiliency to keep going. Yeah. And try, again, the next time.

Nicole: 28:39

So many of your shows, talk about what we control is primarily internal, there's definitely advocacy, things that we're gonna try to do on the outside, but ultimately it lands in what is our framework for the expectation What this level of grief can, or should, or is in us, what are our expectations for Our capacity to understand what's being done to our bodies and be proactive and be nuanced and be an advocate for ourselves. when something is intolerable, the way to make it more tolerable is to have a purpose, to have meaning, to have a reframe, I do is those things with really fantastic nervous system resets with acupuncture, but the acupuncture without those resets and those reframes are, yeah, what you could do acupuncture three times a week for the rest of your life. I would much rather a person have the nervous system regulation and the skillset and the tools and the framework to get back there and build up their buffers.

Meagan: 29:37

For women going through this journey who are struggling with the trauma of it, the anxiety, the grief, the identity struggles of, am I gonna be a mom or not? What would you say is. The ideal team that you would like to see each of these women build around themselves? Is it clearly from your work, the acupuncture element is a really big one. Mental health therapy and having therapists on their side could be another, but describe to me what is that ideal kind of integrative team that. If we could design the perfect world, the dream team team, I'm working on it. The dream team, I'm working on it,

Nicole: 30:09

I huge fan of, of trauma informed therapy, so, A-R-T-E-M-D-R-I-F-S therapies. anything that has good evidence for, trauma informed, and again, whether you had prior trauma or your in. Years of fertility that will induce trauma. A really important statistic is 46% of people that go through fertility struggles have PTSD, usually complex PTSD, whether or not they have a baby. So the assumption is if I'm planning on having a baby. this has to end with a baby. you can tolerate things by having that, but not everybody does. And even when they do, it's still traumatic. So the dream team is mental health trauma-informed mental health and somatic therapy. So whether that is, yoga practice, whether that is an acupuncture practice, whether that is, whatever. Dance movement. I love Bessel VanDerKolk's like list of singing dancing roller skating and all the things that can help our bodies and our nervous system. Basically it's doing things that we would only do if we're safe, and then that tells our nervous system, Hey, if we're dancing or we're singing, or we're roller skating, we're safe, acupuncture is unique in that it mimics in brain scans and brain activity. What really good meditators can do in their brains without having to be a really good meditator. if you're really good at meditating and you're doing a really deep meditation, safe and regulated. But if you haven't cultivated that, acupuncture can actually create that state in a brain and nervous system. So that's pretty unique and pretty magical. for people that have access and, that's appealing. But again, I can do that and they can walk out the door and undo it by more trauma and more weird cultural things that they're not aware of. So yeah, I would do some sort of somatic therapy body kind of work, some sort of trauma informed mental health, and then 25% of. What I do in my programs is really dialing in on the reproductive reductionistic pieces. Also as big picture as you need to be, you have to know if you're an ovulatory, like what's going on with your hormones and how to start ovulating. You have to know if you have massive inflammation from endometriosis and things like that, untreated. Bacterial vaginosis, you have to be able to troubleshoot that. So finding good clinicians that will listen and will actually try to get to the root. Because what happens for a lot of clinicians is just like, yeah, just hop on the conveyor belt. Doesn't matter if you have inflammation, we're just gonna get a good embryo and get your lining and. Put it in there for 20 grand and it's like, oh, that's not as likely to work. It's more likely to have complications. Let's actually get to the root. And then you might still need IVF, if you don't have, open fallopian tubes or you're dealing with, age and you need donor eggs or things like that is totally legit. No shame, no blame, no extra suffering needed for that. But if you do it within the context of the person being regulated and getting their hormone started out first, so much better. Hmm. If you're gonna do an IVF clinic, it needs to be really good reductionistic people with a really good IVF lab, because that's the thing that people just are like, it's my fault I'm broken. More of that cultural ick. they just think, I'm lucky if I can find an IVF clinic that can help me have a baby, versus this is a top tier treatment and the clinic, whether their lab is set up, whether they're doing, really evidence-based proactive stuff can influence. I teach people how to look at things like, Statistics in the United States. That's a society of assisted reproductive therapies. and can tell if they're comparing different clinics, like, what's a good clinic? How can you tell, all of that. So again, long answer, it's a lot of pieces.

Meagan: 33:58

Ultimately the answer here is your individual dream team is going to look different for every person. and it should include these elements. And the more support the better. But you may need to search around a little bit to figure out, would you benefit more from EMDR therapy or IFS or do you need a CBT therapist on your side along with an acupuncturist? maybe the message here is to give women some encouragement to shop around. To do consultations, ask questions, and build your own dream team that feels right and trusting your own nervous system in that.

Nicole: 34:31

check out a website, have a conversation with somebody. If somebody says that they're somatic, and they're evidence-based and they're trauma informed, and then you start talking to'em and they're like, I want you to go gluten free and sugar free and dairy free and no caffeine, and I'm gonna test every single part of your body. I'm gonna test your hair, I'm gonna test your stool. I'm gonna test your saliva. That is incredibly activating and there may be pieces in that that might be in service, but within that context of total overwhelm it's one step forward and five steps back. So we have to be able to say everything that we're considering has to be done and again, there are things that are gonna be triggering in a legitimate medical. You can't go through cancer treatment without having things feel threatening. You can't go through fertility treatment without things being threatening, There's 15 layers that don't need to be that often are, and then there's the two that inherently must be, and you're gonna tolerate those two and deal with them a lot better and come through a lot more safe and regulated if you know what's what,

Meagan: 35:35

It really seems like the key of what you offer is of course the acupuncture treatment itself, but more so the education on these are the two that are gonna be hard no matter what. And these are great areas to bring in the mental health support to help you cope through those and make it as, tolerable as possible and get through it. But ultimately, yeah, it's about let's reduce the suffering where it can be reduced because it doesn't need to be across the board.

Nicole: 36:00

Exactly, and that's a huge part of what I do, half of my hours per week are in clinic with patients, and then the other half is generating content because I never wanna be the bottleneck. I want people to be able to go to my YouTube and my newsletter and my courses and my, blog and get information so that if they can't afford it or they don't have access to somebody who feels right for their nervous system, or it's just a way to start. More information as a springboard. That is something that I really feel like I hope by the time I retire, I've chipped away at this culture and the patriarchy and the doctor ness of it all, and we're really serving women and families and babies a lot better.

Meagan: 36:46

Absolutely, and you are already chipping away at that goal just with the amount of free resources you have on your website and that you give out is really, helping women in the lens of accessibility as well. something we haven't touched on too deeply here is, the financial aspect of this in general, but on top of that, women of color have an even weak. Gender pay gap, and that makes the possibility of doing something like IVF with this very, exploitative pay structure much farther out of reach and more damaging to their mental health. So you're helping. That end of things as well.

Nicole: 37:22

And full circle, the generational trauma that comes with intersectionality like coming from a family that has dealt with enslaved trauma and immigrant trauma. actually. Increases rates of fertility struggles. So infertility is higher in women of color and in certain patient populations, which is not surprising through the lens. We're full circle back where we started from. If the body doesn't feel safe, if it isn't able to go into rest, digest, and reproduce. We're gonna have more of those immune and circulatory and metabolic things that bump into our fertility and our pregnancies and our family.

Meagan: 37:59

To think from a potential client standpoint, if I was a woman of color, which I'm not, so I'm gonna honor that, and my privilege in that space. But if I was, I would be wondering, this$20,000 IVF treatment is so far. Outside my scope, but I'm struggling in this area. Could I rely on extra treatment like acupuncture and therapy and the combination of these maybe a little bit more accessible treatments to Make an impact on whether or not I could have a baby? have you seen that alone without these kind of medical model interventions coming in, being enough to make a huge difference?

Nicole: 38:36

Yeah. For some people. Absolutely. And the trick is knowing. Which camp you're in. there's a model of health called Salu Agenesis that I'm a real big fan of. And Salu Agenesis is just this idea that when it comes to any sort of health outcome, about 25% is from troubleshooting pathology. And for some people that 25 has big, glaring, overt things that need intervention. I alluded to if you don't have. open fallopian tubes, your partner isn't ejaculating any sperm if you, have zero egg quality because of age, there are things that are absolutely going to be served by troubleshooting at 25%, way beyond going after the other 75%, but the other 75% is creation of wellness and creation of fertility, making your body feel safe. Regulating your nervous system, regulating your immune system, regulating your circulatory system, regulating your metabolic function. absolutely. I've seen many people over the 20 years where it's like, let's start with, I don't know that I can afford or that I want to from my worldview, Ethically, whatever. Do these treatments. So let's start and. Again, 25% of what I do is trying to explain like, this is what your cycle is telling you. I have people all the time they like, they can go in and say, I think I have this hormonal imbalance. I had a doctor call me once, he's like, are you doing ultrasounds of people and blood work? And I'm like, no, I'm not. He's like, but you're a doctor first and then an acupuncturist, right? And I'm like, no, I'm an acupuncturist. And an acupuncturist. Yeah. And he's like, well then how everybody that you refer to our clinic knows what they have already. And I'm like, yeah, if you listen to people's bodies. And symptoms. There's thousands of years of Chinese medicine saying when you have these five things, you probably have this issue. so I'm pretty good at helping people understand if they have the 25% that they really need to chop, chop, get to a treatment, and then they can process. and make peace with that, which is a part of the process. on many people, it's something more subtle that has ripples in the 25%, but it's mainly the regulation and the resource ness of the body in other ways. And before we froze a lot of embryos earlier in my career, I saw a lot of people that would start seeing me because they were starting or in the thick of IVF, a ton of them had babies afterwards, naturally, holistically. Now I think a lot of people that I work with, already have frozen embryos. They don't even try, they just are like next embryo transfer, which is also lovely. But I know for a fact many people that are like, assume that they could only get pregnant by IVF because they've gotten pregnant prior with IVF. So many of them get pregnant, especially when they're paying attention to the big picture stuff.

Meagan: 41:20

That's really interesting. I love how it all just boils down to whatever you've gotta do to feel safe. And to regulate your nervous system, feel safe in your body. And I mean, we could get into this all day, but this speaks to that larger national conversation around birth rates and things like that, that so many women are not feeling safe to make that choice even if they want to. That's a huge systemic problem that's. Trickling down through all these different layers.

Nicole: 41:47

Yeah. And we see the outcomes reflect that, it's, unacceptable. Yes. we know it. And so. every single layer, whether it's education for people that are just starting to menstruate quality of life with hormones and menstrual cycles trying to conceive pregnancy and maternal care postpartum care through perimenopause, which I'm bumping into in my own life. every single layer, everything that we've talked about in the context of fertility here, there are versions to every single one of those aspects of our experiences.

Meagan: 42:19

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we have lots of further conversations to have on hopefully future podcast episodes'cause I think we just scratched the surface here. But I wanna thank you so much for your time, for coming in and sharing your wisdom with us. And, just wanna give you an invitation here to, share anything that we maybe haven't touched on yet, or if there's anything interesting and great coming up in your world that you'd like to offer.

Nicole: 42:41

I'm just always chipping away, so I would love people to go to The Hub where you can find everything. my website Life Healing Life as opposed to Doctor Fixing Patient life? Healing life.com? If you go, there's a tab that says online education. If you're in the Twin Cities, there's ways to work with me in person, but online education has links to every single thing that I do, including a conversations tab where all the. Perinatal mental health. I have ones about lactation and mental health trauma and acupuncture and perimenopause and things like that. So people are wanting other conversations besides fertility rooted in this. There's lots there and I'm excited to add this episode and your work to my world. So thank you for having.

Meagan: 43:23

Thank you so much Nicole, and we look forward to future conversations and working together. maybe part of the future Women's Dream Team.

43:32

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