Reproductive Trauma: Psychotherapy with Clients Experiencing Infertility and Pregnancy Loss

This second edition gives mental health professionals the tools they need to treat patients who suffer from infertility or pregnancy loss, as well as new guidance for processing their own reproductive traumas.

Prospective parents who experience infertility or pregnancy loss deal with a host of physical and psychological consequences. For many individuals and couples experiencing reproductive trauma, their ideal future has fallen apart, leaving them bereft and hopeless. Author Janet Jaffe demonstrates how helping professionals can work with patients’ reproductive stories to help them grieve, cope, and heal while underscoring how clinicians’ own reproductive stories impact their lives and their therapeutic work.

With updates in research and new, more diverse case examples, this edition has been expanded to offer a more holistic understanding of reproductive trauma, including coverage of LGBTQ] parents and their unique needs and experiences. It also reviews advances in reproductive technology and their ethical implications--including cryopreservation, third-party reproduction, and genetic testing--as well as how social and cultural factors influence parents’ reproductive stories.

Janet Jaffe, PhD, has a private practice in San Diego and is interested in issues of loss and bereavement related to miscarriage, infertility, and other reproductive trauma and its impact on individuals and couples. Dr. Jaffe is a co-founder and director of the Center for Reproductive Psychology in San Diego and is co-author of Unsung Lullabies, Understanding and Coping with Infertility. She has presented at conferences across the country on the psychology of the reproductive process, both to professional organizations and to the general public, and is an adjunct faculty member of the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University.