Former tokophobia sufferer, mother of two fearless births, author of Betrayed By Your Biology and Fearless Birthing. Host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast (2m+ downloads). The person who named Reproductive Anxiety Disorder.
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 knowing it. And that meant it could be put down.
One of the most common things a woman says to me is “I don’t even know where this fear came from.” There was no traumatic birth, because she has never given birth. No single frightening event. Just a fear that seems to have arrived from nowhere and made itself at home.
But fear of birth does not come from nowhere. It gets in. Quietly, gradually, from outside, long before a woman ever has to make a single decision about pregnancy. Understanding how a fear of birth gets inside you is strangely freeing, because once you see how it arrived, you can start to see how it might leave.
In this post:
How fear of birth gets inside you: it is absorbed
Here is the heart of it. A fear of birth is not just a knowledge gap, and it is rarely created by one scary story. More often it is absorbed: soaked up over a lifetime from a culture that talks about birth as an emergency, an agony, a horror to be survived. From an early age, many girls quietly internalise fear-based messages about their bodies, their cycles and childbirth, long before any of it is relevant to them.
This is why two women can watch the same disturbing birth video and only one develops a fear. The video did not create the fear. It triggered, or topped up, something that had been accumulating for years. This absorbed quality is central to Reproductive Anxiety Disorder, and it is the most hopeful thing about it, for a reason I will come to.
The media: the uninvited midwife
The single biggest source of absorbed birth fear is the culture we swim in, and especially the media. From reality shows to hospital dramas, birth is almost always shown as painful, dangerous and medicalised: women screaming, machines beeping, something going wrong. Calm, ordinary, undramatic births do not make good television, so we almost never see them.
I call the media the uninvited midwife: it shapes what women expect of birth without consent and without any vetting, often before puberty. These repeated images lay down emotional imprints that quietly shape what a woman believes about her body and her risk, long before she needs to make a decision. I unpack exactly how this works, and why fear sells even though it does not serve, in my white paper Fear Sells.
Family stories and the family nervous system
The second great source is closer to home. The way your family talked about birth shaped you. A mother, aunt or grandmother who told her birth story as a war story. The hushed, dramatic retellings at family gatherings. The sense, picked up without a word being spoken, that birth is something women endure rather than something they can meet with confidence.
Children are exquisitely tuned to the nervous systems around them. A girl does not just hear that birth is frightening, she feels the fear in the bodies of the women telling her. That lands far deeper than any fact. So a fear of birth can be handed down a family line at the dinner table, in tone and tension, never named as fear at all.
Wondering how much of your fear is actually yours?
The assessment helps you see what you are carrying, so you can start to separate your own feelings from the fear you absorbed.
Take the free Tokophobia Assessment →
Fear that arrives before you do
Sometimes the fear gets in even earlier than the dinner table. Fear can travel down a family line and arrive before you do, through your own time in the womb and your own birth. A mother carrying her own unhealed fear can pass on not just stories but a nervous system primed to expect danger. I explore that earliest route in could your own birth be shaping your fears?
This is how reproductive fear becomes generational, looping quietly from one woman to the next until someone finally turns and meets it. I map that whole cycle, and crucially how to reverse it, in the RAD Spiral.
Why absorbed fear can be released
Here is the line that changes everything, and I want you to really take it in. If your fear was absorbed, then it was never truly yours to begin with. And what was absorbed can be released.
This is a completely different proposition from “you have a phobia and you are stuck with it.” It means the fear is not a fixed part of your personality. It is more like something you have been carrying, conditioned in over years, that can be cleared back out. That is exactly what the Head Trash Clearance method does: it works with the body and nervous system to release stored, absorbed fear, rather than trying to argue you out of it.
You did not choose to absorb this fear. But you can choose to put it down. And often, the moment a woman realises the fear was never really hers, something already begins to loosen.
Where to go deeper
If the idea of absorbed fear landed, here is where to take it next.
- Betrayed By Your Biology – my book, where I trace exactly how reproductive fear gets in, and how it comes out.
- Fear Sells – my white paper on how the media manufactures birth fear, the uninvited midwife in full.
- The free Tokophobia Assessment – a private read on what you are carrying, and where to start.
Frequently asked questions
Where does a fear of childbirth come from?
Most fear of childbirth is absorbed rather than born: soaked up over a lifetime from a culture that frames birth as dangerous and agonising, from family birth stories, and sometimes from your own birth or inherited fear. It is rarely caused by one scary event, which simply triggers fear that was already building.
Can you have a fear of birth without a bad experience?
Yes, and many women do. You do not need a traumatic birth, or any birth, to fear it. The fear can be entirely absorbed from media, family and culture, or carried from your own earliest experiences. This is why so many women cannot trace their fear to any single event.
What does it mean that fear is absorbed?
It means the fear was taken in from outside, from messages, images and the nervous systems around you, rather than generated by something that happened to you. This matters enormously, because fear that was absorbed was never truly yours, and what was absorbed can be released.
If my fear was absorbed, can it be cleared?
Yes. Because absorbed fear is learned and stored rather than fixed, it can be cleared at the level it lives, in the body and nervous system. Methods like Head Trash Clearance work by releasing this stored fear, rather than trying to reason it away at the level of conscious thought.
By Alexia Leachman, creator of the RAD framework and the Fearless Birthing method. Former tokophobia sufferer, author, host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast.
About the author: Alexia Leachman coined Reproductive Anxiety Disorder to name what she lived through, and what she kept seeing in other women: a fear of pregnancy and birth that runs far deeper than ordinary nerves. She built the RAD framework, the Fear Funnel and the RAD Spiral, and makes the case for taking it seriously in her book Betrayed By Your Biology and two white papers. More about Alexia →
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