Could your subconscious be preventing your own pregnancy?

When we first began treating infertility, we assumed that every woman who came to our office for infertility wanted to have a child. However, to my surprise this was far from the case. My discovery began after a conversation with Steve Gomberg, one of our practitioners who specializes in the connection between subconscious beliefs and physical illness. Steve agreed that most of the women consciously wanted to have children, but suggested that subconsciously, they may not.

So I began to check this in some of my patients using a technique that measures changes in the body that are mostly under subconscious control. Sure enough, Steve was right. Many of my patients who in my mind (and in their minds) wanted to have children, showed negative subconscious reactions to questioning. So in addition to the treatments I was already providing (acupuncture, nutrition, herbal medicine, etc.) I sent these people to see Steve and after several sessions with him, they no longer had incongruent reactions and many of them got pregnant.

This intrigued me so I began to look into the mechanism of how this works.

Who’s really in charge of your body?

Consider this: There is a whole other part of you that controls everything quietly in the background. It is this part of you that is making the ultimate decisions as to what happens in your body. This we call the “subconscious” and it is there for a very good reason.

Imagine having to think about telling your heart to beat every time you wanted to move blood through your blood vessels… 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At the same time you have to think about telling your lungs to breathe for every breath. Then you have to tell your body to secrete more estrogen, or testosterone, or progesterone and every other process that goes on in your body all at the same time. That would get pretty tiring and you certainly wouldn’t have the mental energy to think about anything else.

So in its infinite wisdom, the body separates these tasks out. Most of the mind controls things in the background and that frees up the conscious mind to go out in the world and do things. These two parts of the mind interface but the subconscious is generally much more powerful. If you doubt this, try not blinking for 5 minutes. Chances are you won’t be able to do it because the subconscious will override your conscious mind.

The subconscious takes in an imaginable number of variables both from inside our bodies and from our environment. It then has to make decisions on how to regulate our bodies in the background.

There has been a lot of research on subconscious conditioning going back at least as early as Pavlov’s dogs, who were conditioned to salivate when hearing a bell ring. This same type of conditioning can happen in humans, where subconscious responses happen to events or perceptions from the environment. Sometimes it is something we perceive consciously as a big event, such as being molested as a child, or watching your mother suffer, but sometimes it can be more subtle.

For example, we have a number of patients whose subconscious was not ok with becoming pregnant. There are many examples of this and many different reasons. Some of these have included:

So how do we go about finding these problems and how do we treat them?

Although this is applicable to any disease, Steve has developed a questioning algorithm specific to infertility that he uses to “ask your body” to see if your subconscious is ok with them. There are over 50 questions, some of them include:

·       I am ok being pregnant

·       I am ready, willing and able to be pregnant

·       I am ok being a mother

·       I am ready willing and able to be a mother

·       I can be a good mother

·       I am ok with giving birth

·       I am ready, willing and able to give birth

·       I can have a healthy pregnancy

·       I want to have children

·       I am ready, willing and able to have children

·       I have the time and energy to raise children

·       I have sufficient resources to raise children

·       I’m ok having children with my spouse

·       I’m ok with my spouse

There are over 50 of these types of questions in our fertility algorithm. Many infertile women have problems with one or more of these statements. You can see how the body’s beliefs about the types of issues we address could easily affect one’s ability to get pregnant.

For example, if subconsciously you don’t want to have children, the body has many ways to make sure you don’t. Many times we see the body produce antibodies against its own tissue or raise the natural killer cells which can prevent a pregnancy. The body can also disrupt hormonal balance and cause many other physiological problems. If you block the body’s response with drugs, the body just changes strategies so it can be very frustrating.

During a session if a problem is found, Steve will then ask the body why and then he has a technique for correcting it. By helping the body get rid of its subconscious reservations about pregnancy, profound physiological and emotional changes can occur not only affecting fertility but many aspects in life such as relationships with family, friends, and how one feels about oneself.

So how do we “ask the body”?

There has been much research done in the field of biofeedback. Many researchers have demonstrated with sophisticated equipment that when a person makes a statement that he or she is uncomfortable with, various reactions occur in the body that are not under conscious control (e.g., polygraph or lie detector tests). These reactions tend to occur if someone is lying, but also if someone is simply uncomfortable with the statement at any level, including the subconscious level.

The fact that this phenomenon occurs allowed the development of a simple, low-tech method whereby changes in muscle strength are measured by slightly stressing the muscle and comparing the strength before and after making a statement. If there is either a conscious or subconscious problem with a statement, the muscle that is being tested will get weaker. This happens because of subconscious changes in the muscle conduction of energy: the same phenomenon that occurs with a polygraph.

Of course this method is not 100% accurate since muscle strength has some conscious component, but an experienced tester can tell when a muscle is just getting tired and will frequently double check responses.

So a typical session will be as follows:

Patient holds out their arm and practitioner tests the strength of the muscle.

1. Patient makes a statement such as: “I’m ok being a mother”
2. Practitioner retests muscle. If it is weaker, then there is a problem with that statement and the practitioner will then use a sophisticated technique for quickly identifying where the problem is coming from (e.g., family, friends, childhood trauma, etc.)
3. Once the culprit is identified, the practitioner uses a special, non-invasive technique to help the subconscious release the event that was causing the problem and then retests the statement.

This method is not psychotherapy or hypnosis. The patient is fully conscious. This method is specifically for identifying and correcting areas where the subconscious is not congruent with what the patient consciously wants. In other words, it enables your conscious mind and your subconscious mind to have the same goals.

For more information on this technique, contact Steve Gomberg.

To schedule an appointment for this technique, please contact us.