Leila’s work is deeply rooted in Compassionate Inquiry, Relational Life Therapy, Positive Psychology and lived experience. Her trauma-informed, emotionally attuned approach is grounded in real-life integration. While infertility remains a big part of her work, Leila’s focus has expanded to supporting individuals and couples through emotional overwhelm, relational challenges, and the many questions that arise as we build, rebuild, or redefine family.
This post tracks Leila’s 6-year infertility journey through 11 rounds of IVF, and how surrender—not hope—became the turning point. Hear her full interview on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
What brought me to this work?
I spent my early years in institutional care, then returned to a home with an abusive father and a mother who couldn’t offer comfort. From the start, love was laced with fear, grief came with silence, and nothing felt predictable. Infertility didn’t begin the story. It simply brought all the unhealed parts to the surface. It pulled me back into the same old questions:
Am I wanted? Will I ever deserve anything? Why me again?
What brought me to this work wasn’t clarity. It was collapse. It was grief. And eventually, it was a deeper truth: that I could learn to hold the not-knowing and maybe even find meaning in it.
Infertility as a portal…
Six years. Eleven rounds of IVF. One miscarriage. One baby through egg donation. Infertility didn’t break me, it broke the illusion that I was ever in control. It didn’t just test my body. It tested my marriage, my mental health, my sense of identity. At one point, I had to face an uncomfortable truth: stay married, or keep chasing motherhood at any cost. Because this journey doesn’t just break your heart, it can break your relationship if you’re not walking it together.
During the hardest parts of my infertility journey…
I often found refuge by the sea. I live close to the beach, and in those very early mornings, I would just sit with the waves, sometimes meditating, sometimes crying, but mostly just listening. The rhythm of the ocean helped me regulate when I felt completely unmoored.
And alongside that, I began writing, composing letters in my mind to the soul of the child I longed for. Even when I wasn’t sure this child would ever come. I wrote to a presence I could feel. It was my way of staying connected to hope without demanding certainty. A way to love without condition. A quiet act of devotion; part imagination, part prayer, part survival.
Grief, timing…
And then came the strange, almost mythic timing: my father passed away. Nine months later, my daughter was born. As hard and sad as it is to admit, something in me softened after he died. Or maybe something was finally released.
Once again, I was holding grief and life in the same breath, an emotional posture I knew all too well. That ambivalence? It became part of the meaning I eventually made. It felt cosmic and brutal. Sacred and unfair.
Welcome to the human family, I eventually said to myself, where control was always an illusion.
The turning point: surrender.
The moment everything changed wasn’t a baby. It was giving up. I sat by the ocean one morning and finally said: “Maybe I’ll never be a mother. And somehow, I will still find joy again.” I didn’t feel peaceful. I felt wrecked.
But for the first time, I was telling the truth. That moment became a turning point. Not because I was okay with the outcome, but because I could finally imagine surviving it. There is also that eternal quiet strength of telling the truth, even when the truth is devastating.
I stopped clinging and the current finally moved. Decisions were made and we agreed we had come to our final round, no matter the outcome.
On that 11th and final round of IVF, I became pregnant. I found out a couple of weeks after my father passed. I was once again holding grief in one hand, life in the other.
Because that’s what this journey asks of us: to hold what breaks us and what builds us, at the same time.
Compassionate Inquiry saved me, not by fixing, but by letting me fall apart.
Compassionate Inquiry® met me where I actually was: angry, ashamed, numb. It didn’t ask me to stay positive. It let me be real.
That was the beginning of something deeper. It didn’t hand me meaning on a platter. But it gave me the tools to start digging. To ask: Am I replaying something here? Was this fertility journey echoing a much older something?
The part of me that wondered: Am I too much? Not enough? Worthy of love?
I began to see the repetition, not with shame, but with compassion. And that’s when meaning slowly started to form. Not in tidy sentences, but in softened edges.
And I realized something else: holding grief and hope at the same time, this impossible emotional balancing act…It wasn’t new to me.
I had trained for this as a child, when love and pain came packaged together, when safety and sorrow lived in the same room. So while infertility nearly broke me, it also revealed something steady inside: a capacity I had been cultivating all along. Except now I could learn to consciously hold it.
Acceptance didn’t arrive with clarity. It came through collapse.
Through finally saying: “I can’t fight anymore.” And in that collapse, something opened for me. That surrender created space I didn’t know I needed. And over time, the meaning started to reveal itself: if I had gotten pregnant six years earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready. I hadn’t done all the inner work.
I hadn’t asked myself: How do you treat yourself? Can you sit with your pain? Would you pass on what you haven’t healed?
This journey made me meet myself all over again, before I could meet my child. Infertility had bought me time to heal the parts of me which were better off not being passed along.
How I work now: I don’t sell hope, I hold truth.
Sometimes it doesn’t work out. And even then, you are still whole. Still worthy. Still lovable. Now I help others stay in the fire. I don’t offer silver linings. I offer presence. I hold people the way I wish someone had held me. Because that’s what ultimately happens: we hold ourselves the way we were held…
Infertility is a portal…
You don’t have to make it meaningful but it’s possible. If you stay with it, and I mean truly stay, it might still make you more honest, more tender, more alive. Not because it was all part of some grand plan. But because you keep showing up, for yourself, through the worst of it.
What I learned…
If I had to name one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this journey is about learning to live with things you never asked for.
Infertility forces you to sit in places no one prepares you for: the waiting, the shame, the silence after another failed cycle, the unraveling of who you thought you’d be by now. Somewhere in that wreckage, if you’re lucky, or broken enough like me, you stop trying to outsmart it. You stop bargaining with life.
That’s when something different begins. Not hope in the glossy sense. But something quieter. More grounded. More real. It’s not about finding silver linings. It’s about not abandoning yourself when there are none. It’s about learning to live with uncertainty AND staying human inside it. Maybe that’s the real work: not making it all okay, but still showing up in a way that says “I’m here. And I’m not leaving myself.”
My intention…
If anything I’ve shared helps someone feel a little less alone in the mess, then it’s worth saying out loud.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the interview, and if you like it, please subscribe and share.
