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When my tokophobia was at its worst, I was also wrestling with anxiety and depression, and I treated them as separate problems. They were not. Once I cleared the reproductive fear at the root, a surprising amount of the rest came with it. That experience, repeated again and again in my clients, completely changed how…

People sometimes assume I do this work from the outside, as an expert who studied the fear. I did not. I do it because I lived it. This is my tokophobia story: where it began, the years I spent not understanding it, the shock that forced me to face it, and how I came out…

For most of my life I would have told you, quite firmly, that I just was not maternal. I believed it. It was only later that I understood my fear had been quietly speaking for me the whole time. So I hold this question gently, because I know how convincing the “I don’t want kids”…

When I look back at my own quiet years of avoidance, I can see how far my tokophobia reached without my ever connecting the dots. It touched my relationships, my sense of myself, even moments that had nothing obviously to do with birth. Unhealed, this fear does not stay politely in one corner of your…

I am quietly insistent on this point, because getting it wrong has real consequences. When we call tokophobia “just a phobia,” we treat it as small and fixable with a few mindset tips. When we recognise it as an anxiety disorder, we finally start treating it like the serious, deep-rooted thing it actually is. The…

“Isn’t everyone a bit scared of birth?” I get asked this constantly, and it is a fair question. Some fear of birth is completely normal and even sensible. The trouble is that this very normality is used to wave away fear that is anything but ordinary. So let us draw the line clearly, because it…

For years, I had every one of these signs and did not recognise a single one of them as tokophobia. I just thought I was a bit odd about the whole baby thing. So if you read this list and feel a jolt of recognition, please be gentle with yourself. Seeing it clearly is not…

This is the question I am asked more than any other, usually with a held breath behind it. And it is the one I most love to answer, because the answer is a big, clear yes. I know that for certain, not just because I overcame my own tokophobia, but because I have watched hundreds…