Are you struggling with fear or anxiety around pregnancy or birth?

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…