Explore the Blog
Hidden Pregnancy and Birth Trauma
The most common thing women say to me about their trauma is not “that was terrible.” It is “but it wasn’t that bad, was it?” Hidden trauma rarely announces itself. It hides behind that exact question, behind a shrug, behind years of getting on with things while something underneath quietly waits to be seen.
What Is Birth Trauma? (And Why It’s More Common Than You Think)
Some of the women I work with spent years insisting their birth “wasn’t that bad,” because the baby was healthy and nothing went medically catastrophic. And yet they could not talk about it without their whole body tensing. That gap, between what the world counts as trauma and what the body knows, is where so…
Reproductive Trauma: The Wounds We Don’t Talk About – A Complete Guide
In over a decade of this work, the wounds I have seen women carry most quietly are reproductive ones. Not because they are rare, but because we have never given women permission, or language, to speak about them. So much of what looked like anxiety, or “just not coping,” turned out to be unnamed trauma,…
Fear-Driven Abortion Through the Lens of RAD
Over the years, women have told me things they had never told anyone. Among the most quietly painful are the decisions made not from clarity, but from a fear so big it left them feeling there was no other way. I share this not to alarm anyone, but because naming it gently is how the…
Could Your Own Birth Be Shaping Your Fears?
When I was healing my own tokophobia, I had no idea what my own birth had been like. My mother had passed away, so I could not ask her. I decided to work on it anyway, just trusting my gut. What followed was half an hour of the deepest, most primal crying of my life,…
How a Fear of Birth Gets Inside You
When I finally examined my own fear, I had a strange realisation: almost none of it was actually mine. It was a lifetime of absorbed messages about birth, soaked up from television, from overheard horror stories, from the way everyone around me talked about it. I had been collecting other people’s fear for years without…
The 4 True Causes of Fear of Birth and Pregnancy
When a woman tells me she is afraid of birth, the first thing I ask is: what is it about birth that scares you? Almost every time, once we follow the thread, we find the fear was never really about birth at all. Birth is just the thing that drags older, deeper fears into the…
Do You Have a Fear of Uncertainty?
For a long time I thought I just liked being organised. Lists, plans, contingencies. It took me a while to see the truth underneath it: a lot of my “organisation” was actually a fear of not knowing. And pregnancy and birth are the one thing you genuinely cannot plan your way around. No wonder it…
Gen Z and the Rise of Reproductive Anxiety
I hear from younger and younger women now, often before they are anywhere near thinking about babies, already carrying a heavy dread about the whole idea of it. When I started this work, the fear tended to surface in pregnancy. Now I am watching it take root in women who are barely out of their…