3 Things to Navigate When Considering Known Donor Conception
One of the areas I help people navigate through is the known donation process. There are three areas I focus on as I help my clients, first relationships, then expectations, and finally disclosure.
Relationship
As I'm facilitating many meetings with both parties, intended parents, and known donors, one area that we focus on is their relationship.
What truly brings people together in this way is that they have a beautiful loving, connected relationship. My job is not to figure out whether that's true or not, it is to figure out if there are any areas in their relationships that haven't been uncovered that may be important to look at before going through the known donation process.
Expectations
The next area I talk about is regarding expectations. We can't predict the future, but what we try to do is we can anticipate what expectations they all might have for the present and the future. As you can imagine, one quick example is just involvement in communication with each other and the potential child.
Disclosure
And last but not least is disclosure. The question of who is going to know about this known donation? This doesn’t include the child, those of us who work in this space, in the mental health space feel really strongly that children and all children, even at a young age should know who their donors are.
However, in this space, we are talking about everybody else in the world. In the years of helping navigate this, I have had some intended parents and known donors who are great with everybody knowing about their known donation journey, as well as others who are more comfortable with just their inner circle knowing, even some that don’t want anyone to know. When it comes to disclosure, it's so important to talk about those boundaries, and also touch on the fact that they might shift as well as how to facilitate a conversation if those boundaries might shift.
These are the three areas that help navigate to help them during this process to feel more prepared from a psychosocial perspective.If you yourself have questions about no donation-directed donor and you have more mental health questions, comment below. I'd love to answer them.