Reproductive Mental Health, Intersectionality, and Systemic Barriers: An interview with Dr. Loree Johnson
Curt and Katie chat with Dr. Loree Johnson about the intersections of reproductive mental health, race, and systemic injustice. Dr. Johnson shared powerful insights about the shame, grief, and medical trauma that many clients face, especially Black women and other folks from historically marginalized communities. We dive into how therapists can hold safer, more informed spaces for clients experiencing infertility and pregnancy loss, and how systemic racism and historical harm continue to shape reproductive healthcare today.
Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.Transcript
(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)
An Interview with Dr. Loree Johnson
Dr. Loree Johnson is a licensed therapist who specializes in reproductive mental health, trauma recovery, and grief. As an advocate and thought leader, she has authored numerous chapters and publications on culturally responsive care. Her clinical interests are deeply rooted in the concept of “weathering”—a groundbreaking framework that examines how cumulative stress uniquely impacts Black individuals and other marginalized groups. This perspective shapes her contributions to the field through her publications and trainings, where she inspires providers to deliver inclusive, affirming care while addressing systemic inequities.
For the past 25 years as a clinician, educator, and clinical supervisor, Dr. Johnson has dedicated her career to helping individuals, couples, and families navigate complex emotional landscapes with empathy, resilience, and cultural attunement. Her personal journey through an 8-year struggle with repeated pregnancy loss profoundly shaped her life and career. Surviving deep grief became a transformative experience that not only informed her therapeutic approach but also deepened her compassion for those longing to feel seen and supported when their personal stories did not unfold as expected. This lived experience drives her mission to empower clients as they cope with adversity, reclaim their strength, and discover peace.
Dr. Johnson’s clinical practice serves as a safe haven for those navigating infertility, loss, and identity-shaping transitions. She is deeply committed to fostering growth, resilience, and meaningful connections, empowering her clients to face life’s challenges with courage, hope, and strength.
In this podcast episode, we talk about reproductive trauma, systemic barriers to care, and the need for cultural humility in therapy
We were honored to sit down with Dr. Loree Johnson, LMFT, PhD—an expert in reproductive mental health who brings both clinical expertise and lived experience to the conversation. We explore how therapists can better support clients navigating infertility, pregnancy loss, and trauma, especially clients from marginalized communities.
What do therapists often get wrong about reproductive mental health?
- Avoiding the conversation about infertility and pregnancy loss because therapists feel undertrained or uncomfortable
- Therapists overlook the impact of race, history, and oppression in reproductive trauma
- Assuming fertility issues affect only straight, cisgender couples
- Minimizing or misunderstanding the grief associated with pregnancy loss and infertility
What is the role of systemic racism and historical trauma for Black women seeking reproductive care?
“Even though Black women are twice as likely to experience infertility, they are 50% less likely to access care.” – Dr. Loree Johnson, LMFT
- Mistrust of the medical system due to real, generational harm (e.g., J. Marion Sims, Henrietta Lacks, Tuskegee)
- Myths of hyper-fertility in Black women and the erasure of infertility struggles in communities of color
- Disenfranchised grief and cultural stigma around fertility challenges
- Weathering: the cumulative impact of chronic stress and racism on physical and reproductive health
How can therapists show up better for clients who are experiencing infertility and pregnancy loss?
“The work around honoring biases means not necessarily just developing a sense of cultural competence, but also maybe a sense of cultural humility and also cultural intimacy.” – Dr. Loree Johnson, LMFT
- Learn the terminology and processes around fertility treatments and pregnancy loss
- Create space for conversations around sex, reproduction, and grief—even if it’s uncomfortable
- Practice cultural humility and intimacy: be willing to be wrong, to sit with pain, and to build trust
- Acknowledge your own limitations and biases while staying curious and committed to learning
- Be prepared for these conversations—even if you don’t specialize in reproductive mental health
Resources for Modern Therapists mentioned in this Podcast Episode:
We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below may be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!
Dr. Loree Johnson’s website and social media:
Website: drloreejohnson.com
Instagram: @drloreejohnson, Facebook @drloreejohnson, LinkedIn @drloreejohnson, TikTok @drloreejohnson
American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM): https://www.asrm.org/
Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast:
Infertility and Pregnancy Loss, An Interview with Tracy Gilmour-Nimoy, LMFT
Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: An Interview with Dr. Barbara Stroud
Antiracist Practices in the Room: An Interview with Dr. Allen Lipscomb
Black Mental Health, An interview with Patrice Douglas, LMFT
Who we are:
Curt Widhalm, LMFT
Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com
Katie Vernoy, LMFT
Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com
A Quick Note:
Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.
Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.
Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:
Consultation services with Curt Widhalm or Katie Vernoy:
Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:
Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group
Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/
Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):
Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements).
… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement )
Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.
Curt Widhalm 0:12
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our world, the things that happen with us, the things that happen with our clients. And Katie and I, we like to explore a lot of the ways that intersectionality happens with many of the things that happen with our clients. And I will remind everyone that Katie and I are incredibly CIS, het, white people who don’t have a lot of lived experience. And some of the topics that we bring up, and that’s when we invite our friends and people who know much more about these things than us, and really diving in today to the crossover, the intersectionality between marginalized and oppressed individuals, and specifically where it comes with facing infertility and infant loss. And we are joined today by Dr. Loree Johnson, LMFT to help us with this conversation. So thank you very much for joining us.
Dr. Loree Johnson 1:14
Thank you for having me. I’m really honored to be here today.
Katie Vernoy 1:20
We’re excited for this conversation. Yeah, it hits it hit home. Just as a throwback, we do have a couple of episodes on both pregnancy as well as infertility and child loss, and so this is actually deepening our conversation. So we’re really excited to continue that conversation from before. We’ll include the links to the other episodes in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. But before I get started, I wanted to ask the question that we ask all of our guests, which is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?
Dr. Loree Johnson 1:51
Well, my name is Dr Lorie Johnson, as Curt said, and I am an practicing Marriage and Family Therapist in California, and I specialize in reproductive mental health, particularly in the areas of infertility, infertility trauma and pregnancy loss. And what I put out into the world is deeply informed by my lived experience. I am a mom of one living child. I am also a bereaved parent. I’ve experienced four pregnancy losses over the course of an eight year journey, reproductive journey, one of which was a termination for medical reasons. So I went through a very arduous trajectory to have my son, and I always told myself, once I got to the other side of my grief, that I wanted to give back, and so here I am today, really honored to hold space for individuals along their reproductive journeys and also to support my colleagues in having some difficult conversations around, you know, helping clients that look like me, and for people who can’t see me, I’m also I’m also very cis and het at the same time, but I identify as black, and that identity and that experience has altered, or definitely altered, how I approached and navigated my my reproductive journey. So I’m here to share that that knowledge.
Curt Widhalm 1:51
A lot of times, when we start episodes, we start with a question around what a therapist normally get wrong with the topic at hand in whatever episode. We do it from a place of learning, other people have made mistakes. Well, let’s help other people not make those same mistakes. It’s not a shaming question. But a lot of times, especially when we have kind of these intersectionality episodes, what becomes very evident at the beginning is how even a lot of the models that therapy is based upon don’t necessarily meet all of the needs when it comes to some of the intersectional things that come. So all of that background comes to the question, what do therapists normally get wrong when it comes to marginalized and oppressed individuals who are facing infertility and infant loss.
Dr. Loree Johnson 4:09
Well, first of all, we don’t get a lot of support with having difficult conversations, or these conversations around intersectionality that lead us to feeling comfortable, and we know that just even the term, kind of marginalized and oppressed is such a diverse term, and it doesn’t always kind of account for the fact that there’s racial diversity, ethnic diversity, sexual identity diversity, or gender diversity, that I think that we as much as we think about context, we still might not feel as comfortable with exploring the context around these individuals as it impacts how we navigate holding space for them emotionally, or how you know these our clients are accessing or attempting to access help emotionally or for their reproductive health.
Katie Vernoy 4:53
I think a lot of assumptions can be made around what someone’s experience is, and I know we have a lot of episodes around working with folks who are different than you, and so we’ll link to those in the show notes as well. But I, I wanted to speak to your expertise in some of the factors that you’ve seen come up with the clients that you hold space for. Let’s talk about health disparities and lack of access.
Dr. Loree Johnson 5:17
Yes, so it’s, it’s hard not to talk about that without honoring that, you know, there’s so many systemic and structural issues and discrimination and racism that is at play because it deeply impacts individuals ability to access care. There’s a perpetuation of stigma that occurs that exacerbates these emotional and physical challenges in some pretty significant ways. And we don’t like to talk about the fact that healthcare, unfortunately, is tied to social justice and also, you know, senses of opportunity and quality of life. So when we think about just access to care and being able to talk to an individual about what’s going on for you reproductively, that’s a privilege. And it’s not always. It should be all right, but it’s a privilege. And we, and particularly black and marginalized groups, and the LGBTQ community as well, there’s just this limited access, because, due to, sometimes it’s geography, when you start to deal in, you know, deal with the fertility world, you know, being able to, if you look at them, even the maps of where some of these offices are located, they’re not even look always located in areas that are serving the people that need to be seen. There are financial barriers in these services aren’t always covered by insurance, even though I know we’re, there’s a lot of advocacy efforts that are happening to make sure that insurance is covering this, but also, there’s a piece around bias, and you know, thinking and/or being mindful of when you go to seek help, will you see somebody who is sees you for the whole person, who sees you for not just how you appear, but really appreciating the context behind that. So, you know, and I understand that just my experience as a black woman and navigating, you know, the fertility world and also the loss world where, you know, I kind of went into this very naively and didn’t realize, you know, going in that, you know, even though we all might experience loss and struggles with infertility, you know, we don’t always experience, the groups don’t always experience them equally. And so, you know, there is this appreciation for some of the messages that your clients are walking around with that they’ve internalized about their experience, about their fertility experience, or their loss experience, that that really colors their ability to seek care. So and then that leads into another kind of disparity, because there’s the piece around bias and the providers that you’re seeking out, again just might not look like you or appreciate your you know your your story, and so you might not be fully seen in ways that you might need to be.
Curt Widhalm 5:37
Could you dive into more of that? Because I know that there’s a lot of historical trauma and mistrust around just medical systems in general that can play out here. Can you describe what that role is here?
Dr. Loree Johnson 8:10
So, I think the historical trauma and mistrust of the medical system is deeply rooted in, you know, our history around racism and discrimination, and if you think about just even the field of gynecology, and it might give a little bit of a history lesson. But, you know, J. Marion Sims is considered the father of gynecology, and at the time, he performed a lot of procedures on enslaved black women. And that was a very, because of the idea at that time during slavery was that, you know, black individuals did not feel pain, and so we came, we became these grounds for experimentation, became the basis of this relationship with the medical system that we have to interface with, and their studies over, you know, just time over time. So you have this person who, you know, was this medical doctor that perpetuate this idea of objectification and dehumanization. And that really continued in the in the research, because it when it led to studies like the Tuskegee experiment that people can look up where you know, black individuals, black males were were not given treatment for syphilis, to kind of observe how it advanced, and to kind of learn more about the disease, but they didn’t really tell people what was going on in that. And then also with Henrietta Lacks, who, again, some of you all can kind of look her up, but for people who don’t know, she passed away due to cervical cancer, what they found when they looked at her cells is that there is this regenerative effect that was pretty fascinating, and they actually are still living to this day, but they took her cells without consent. And so there were these interactions with the medical community over the years that just became part of the narrative that black people weren’t allowed to kind of have consent over their their bodies. They weren’t given full information to have consent or to make these decisions. And when you have that narrative that is being passed down and that you internalize and knowing that this is how the medical community views you as objects to be studied and not necessarily to be revered and to be respected. That is something that you kind of carry around with you, and along with, I think, other stereotypes that end up getting, I think, internalized around fertility and loss or how this happens. I think that’s just how it how that kind of plays out.
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Katie Vernoy 10:31
I’m hearing so much about this mistrust and the historical reasons why this has occurred. I know that there’s other communities that have experienced that, and even in, you know, on our conversations, you know, and I’ll link to other ones in the show notes about termination for medical reasons, those kinds of things, there’s been a lot of mistrust that has been escalating due to policies the federal level, those types of things. And so to me, it feels like there’s, there’s a lot that’s coming into the room, and there’s a lot that would be really overwhelming for clinicians who aren’t in this space. And so if you can talk a bit more on how stigma or or even disenfranchised grief, I think there’s, there’s something about the bias that we’re as a society, just putting in place that I’m sure is is not allowing for the full experience of the folks that you’re talking about coming into the room.
Dr. Loree Johnson 11:25
When we think about stigma, we also need to think about maybe the sense of shame and where the stigma is coming from. Because I think being, you know, trying to access resources for reproductive care, I think, is challenging, obviously, because of just the biases that, you know, we’ve talked about, but, but also the biases are attached to this myth of, you know, fertility, and how that’s perceived in this sense of hyper fertility. And I think that’s created this sense of insecurity, because we live in a pro natalist society, and oftentimes being, you know, we equate our personhood with being able to become a parent, and when your reproductive story doesn’t unfold the way that you expect it to, there’s a lot of shame around that, or can be a lot of shame around that. I know there have been narratives around, you know, this myth of hyper fertility for for black individuals and and also for other people of color. So it creates the sense of this insecurity, like, why isn’t this happening for me? But also, there’s not the sense of being able to talk freely about it or to seek medical help about it. And when there’s been this mistrust of the medical community, you also tend to rely on, you know, when you do reach out for help, you might rely on those within your community. And when you’re doing that, and they’re not necessarily that well informed or might be also perpetuating misinformation, you know, that becomes a really difficult kind of recipe for, you know, just for more heartache and disenfranchisement. Now the disenfranchised grief, you know, just when we think about grief that doesn’t necessarily get acknowledged or losses that don’t get acknowledged in general. And I think the infertility experience is a disenfranchised, a type of disenfranchised grief, in addition to pregnancy losses being part of that grief as well. And and so when you’re more likely to experience loss, but that’s incurred in a system of isolation and validation by by those around you, it does, I think, make it more difficult to to navigate healthcare, you know, issues and concerns and reaching out when you might need to.
Curt Widhalm 13:34
How does that look?
Dr. Loree Johnson 13:35
Yeah, I think it looks like not seeking help. There’s a delay black women are even though Black women are twice as likely to experience infertility, they are 50% less likely to access care. And that’s just the data that we have. And we know that infertility exists in the Latino community and the Asian community and the Native American community, we just don’t have the robust data to really, you know, kind of do that comparison. So I apologize. I’m talking about this strictly from a black kind of perspective. But it looks like this delay in care and accessing care which leads to a delay in diagnosis, which also leads to a delay in treatment, and just with what’s happening with how even losses might get managed, which unfortunately, loss is a sad part of one’s reproductive journey. And if someone is experiencing a miscarriage, it might mean that they might not be able to, you know, they might not feel comfortable in reaching out to their doctor, or the doctor might be kind of feeling these constraints of what’s happening legally in terms of being able to provide the, you know, appropriate care and intervention, you know, medication intervention, or whatever intervention might be determined that’s necessary at that point. So, so it’s access to care, it’s how one can feel.
Curt Widhalm 14:49
You talk about weathering. What do you mean by that, and how does that impact our clients?
Dr. Loree Johnson 14:56
So weathering is a very interesting concept, because it. Is basically the cumulative impact of stress on individuals that are living in marginalized communities. And those individuals who are experiencing physical and psychological effects of prolonged exposure to discrimination from a racial standpoint due to their ethnicity or religious or socio economic status. However, it can also be applied to somebody who has kind of a disenfranchised identity along the lines of gender or sexual identity as well. But it’s, it’s, it’s kind of understanding this hardship and how it’s been for people to cope under these existing layers of of cultural oppression, to put it frankly. And I should also say it’s the acknowledgement of what happens to the human body, like right down to the cellular level. So it’s this belief that, you know, enduring, you know, prolonged racism, exposure to racism and discrimination actually ages the body.
Katie Vernoy 15:58
That’s really interesting. I hadn’t heard that the aging the body part. It seems like I’m just, you know, as you’re talking, I’m overlaying my own infertility experience and thinking about the added piece of the weathering, because I know that there’s elements when you are trying to conceive and you’re not getting pregnant, and everyone around you is having baby showers. And there’s, there’s that element of weathering, to a certain extent, that happens there as well. And I think overlaying the additional pieces, it seems like it would be, I mean, the word that comes to mind is exhausting, but it seems like it would be, it would make it even harder to be able to go through the process, and to go through the process with your mental health intact.
Dr. Loree Johnson 16:48
Definitely, and you know, and just kind of reference my own experience. I remember early on in my journey, I remember talking to a colleague of mine, and I think at that point I’d only experienced one loss, and I just was having trouble getting pregnant again. And I reached out to her, and I just said, and I was, I remember distinctly how I was dealing with a few different kind of racial microaggressions at the same time that I just found incredibly exhausting. And I was so consumed by that. And I just remember thinking, and I said to her, I was like, I feel like this is impacting my ability to get pregnant again. And she’s like, You’re not wrong for believing that. But it was so different to the narrative that we’d been taught, or that I’d been taught. So yeah, that there is this experience of this exhaustion, and the sense of, you know, how our bodies handle stress and the cumulative effect of stress over time. And so we know that there are kind of higher rates of kind of heart disease and high blood pressure and other medical diseases within communities of color, particularly the black community. Also premature, you know, just maternal mortality rates are, you know, are, are higher, and then you know the higher instances of infertility in the community, which is counter to the stereotype that we’ve been told that, you know, it’s actually less prevalent. So but, yeah, it’s a very exhausting and confusing kind of experience, but that’s, that’s a sense of and I’m glad that we’re talking a little bit more about the weathering aspect of health, and as we understand the impact of racism and discrimination on health in general.
Katie Vernoy 18:22
Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking about with all that’s there. There are realities. My hope is that we can help at least the clinicians who listen to this show to stop any of their, you know, kind of biases being at least unexamined around some of these things. But the medical system, I’ve I’ve not a lot of hope that the medical system will change in my lifetime. And I also know that the journey, the fertility, the infertility and the pregnancy loss journeys are horrible and oftentimes all consuming. And so I guess I’m asking, what, how do we support our clients with these realities? Because these things are, they just are. And so, you know, obviously acknowledging them, letting them know, yes, I see you. This is real. I think that sounds like that was what, was what your colleague was able to say to you, that you’re not wrong. Definitely this is this is a reality. But I think as a clinician, I’d love some more tools to support my clients who are coming in with this, this, these particular challenges.
Dr. Loree Johnson 19:33
Think that what that starts to look like for our clients, or sitting with our clients and appreciating, you know, the context, and I like to call it maybe weatherproofing our practice is, like you said, owning our biases. But when I think about what it means to do that and the power behind that and and bridging that cultural gap, really speaks to what needs to happen within the relationship, and also not just the relationship, but within the therapist, ourselves. And and so I think there’s a lot of the work around honoring biases, means not necessarily just developing a sense of cultural competence, but also maybe a sense of cultural humility and also cultural intimacy. Because we it’s hard to talk, it’s hard to connect with communities that we are not a part of. I think it’s hard enough to do that in general, but, you know, and we can study them, but there’s a difference between studying how to do that and actually doing it. And and so I think asking ourselves the question of, you know how, like, I’m sitting in the room with somebody, and yes, I’m sitting with them in this experience that I don’t know a lot about. But in what ways do I kind of honor the that disconnect, or kind of thinking about the ways in which, you know, my I might have privilege in this area, or how do I use that privilege? And I think the piece that I wanted to make sure to communicate was around weatherproofing, you know, our practice and leaning into difficult conversations around or just different moments of difficult moments of self reflection as a therapist, because we are our biggest tool in the room. And, you know, and I know that we give a lot of attention to biases.
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Katie Vernoy 21:25
I think for me, when I hear biases and specific to our conversation, I think about the biases that come up for me around the stereotypes that you were talking about, about the hyper fertility, those types of things. I hadn’t even really thought consciously about them until you started saying them. I think it’s important that as clinicians, that we own those things, that we look at them. Obviously, we don’t want to do that work with our clients, because I think that would be a burden on them. But I think being able to to look at where we sit with that and to square off with it, because until we got your your proposal to come on the podcast. I hadn’t really thought about the differences. I think if I would have thought about it, I would have, I would have recognized, of course, there are differences, but I hadn’t really gone into the idea of, what is this, what does this mean? And and so I’m really appreciating this conversation, because it’s opening up some, even some smaller pockets of of where I need to be paying attention when I have a client who’s different from me, who’s having a different experience of infertility than I am, to be able to understand that. You also talk about kind of the culturally competent care, that cultural humility, as well as the cultural intimacy. I was really interested about the cultural intimacy and how that could play a role here.
Dr. Loree Johnson 22:39
Yeah, I think the cultural intimacy is a pivotal part of developing not just competence, or moving from competence to humility, because it’s not a fixed kind of process. So we never stop learning how to to relate to each other as people. And so I think building trust in relationship. Cultural intimacy involves a sense of of trust, a sense of closeness. It involves a sense of, you know, really seeing the person. And that might mean, you know, acknowledging these past injustices and but it also means, you know, just kind of engaging in ways that we might not, you know, engage and when we are aware of our positions of privilege and power and how we’ve used them, and also maybe thinking about how that intersects with our, you know, ways in which we felt disempowered. It’s like that gives us a point of connection, and really searching for what that point of connection is going to look like. But I think that intimacy requires engagement, and how do we continue to stay engaged in communities that we don’t fully understand, so that we make sure that our blind, our blind spots, don’t continue to, you know, don’t continue to be hurtful and or harmful in perpetuating these stereotypes or things that we, you know, just things that might not be helpful.
Curt Widhalm 23:57
At least from my experience, my practice doesn’t typically start out working with clients like yours. The and what I mean by that is clients that are coming in, facing infertility, pregnancy loss, kinds of things. That oftentimes where I find that these kinds of issues come up is clients that I’m already seeing run into these newfound issues, and we have this relationship. And I’m wondering if you can speak to clinicians like myself where it’s okay it’s easy to put a conversation like this to the side. I’m never going to see that in my practice until one day you do. And on this, on this point that you’re talking about, as far as having intimacy and not wanting to just put all of this work on to clients to say, you know, hey, I realize I’m coming at this from a privileged place. I’m coming at this from an outside place. How do you recommend that clinicians in my position, end up navigating this as it arises, as it might not be something that we’re fully there in our knowledge base, but we do have that intimate relationship with the clients.
Dr. Loree Johnson 25:15
What might be helpful, I think, what might be helpful, right, because you’re not going to stop seeing the client, or a long term client, who all of a sudden might develop some fertility related issues, and then it’s like, Whoa, sorry. Here, let’s go see someone else. What that might mean is a little bit more education on on the therapist’s part, where you know, you might hear what the client starts to bring up. So if they start to introduce terminology that feels unfamiliar, it might be making a note of that, and then going to do some research and consultation around around some of the kind of major terminology that they’re kind of going through, or getting a little bit more information about what their specific experience is. So for people who are going through some kind of type of fertility treatment, that might be helpful, you know, just for your own benefits, you have some working knowledge of terminology so that the client doesn’t have to do the teaching of what does an IUI process look like, or, you know, interuterine insemination process look like. And you have some information about, you know, just going for consultations and procedure, the diagnostic procedures, and then the actual insemination procedure. So there might be a piece around education. And, you know, through the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, I know that they have some there’s actually one free kind of module that can help kind of therapists learn a little bit more about the this information.
Katie Vernoy 26:38
Think it’s also important to make sure that the space is open to be able to talk about things, because even though this is whether it’s pregnancy loss or infertility, it still seems very related to sex and sexuality, and a lot of folks are not as comfortable as clinicians to bring those things up. How have you found is helpful to open a safe space to talk about some of these more challenging topics?
Dr. Loree Johnson 27:06
I think what you mentioned about, like, we didn’t get a lot of education, and I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get any education in my graduate program around reproductive health in general. And so I think, you know, it does make trying to open up these conversations challenging and, you know, wanting to make sure that you have an open and kind of inviting space for clients to talk about this is important. And I think that you demonstrate a level of comfort through through practice and acknowledging that you might not get it right, like you said, you know, like you mentioned very early on in our conversation, it’s like we’re imperfect beings coming to this. And I think acknowledging to clients that you know you are interested, but you know this is this might be a little outside your wheelhouse, and you’re doing everything that you can to to learn so that they’re not put in the position of being the teacher, but that you’re still, you know, you’re still wanting to provide a space for them to feel held. And I think that goes a long way to ensuring clients that, you know, they they’re not necessarily expecting perfection from us. They’re, you know, they really appreciate our humaneness and and then I think demonstrating that, and in a way, I think improves the relationship, and that ability to, you know, to create that space, to to have a difficult conversation. You’re really modeling it for them.
Curt Widhalm 28:25
Where can people find out more about you and the work that you’re doing, and being able to spread more of these ideas?
Dr. Loree Johnson 28:33
So people can find me on my website, at drloreejohnson.com, or I’m also on Instagram at DrLoreeJohnson, and on LinkedIn, DrLoreeJohnson.
Curt Widhalm 28:46
And we will include links to those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. Follow us on our social media, join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, to continue on with these conversations and more. And until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Dr. Loree Johnson.
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