Resources for Birth & Mental Health Professionals

Tokophobia, the extreme fear of pregnancy and birth that affects millions of women, yet it’s often misunderstood or overlooked.

These resources were written to help midwives, doulas, therapists, and birth professionals understand tokophobia, recognise its impact, and learn how to better support your clients.

Start exploring now and deepen your knowledge!

Primary vs Secondary Tokophobia: What’s the Difference?

One of the first things I help a woman work out is which kind of tokophobia she is dealing with. It is not just a labelling exercise. The two have different stories, and knowing which is yours changes where we look, and where the healing begins.

Why the Therapy Model Fails Fearful Women (Fast vs Slow)

I want to raise something uncomfortable, and I want to be clear from the outset that it is a critique of a model, not of the many skilled, caring practitioners working within it. Conventional therapy for fear of childbirth often fails the women who need it most, and one of the biggest reasons is pace.

7 Signs You Might Have Tokophobia

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…

Insight Doesn’t Heal Trauma

One of the most useful things I ever realised about this work is also one of the most uncomfortable for our profession to hear: insight does not heal trauma. Understanding why you feel the way you do is genuinely valuable, but it is a lower rung than being free of the feeling, and a great…

Tokophobia or Normal Birth Nerves? How to Tell

“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…

The Practitioner Burnout Problem: Why You Need a Tool for Yourself

Let us talk about something the profession does not talk about enough: what this work does to us. Birth worker burnout, and its quieter cousin among perinatal therapists and counsellors, is not a personal weakness or a failure of resilience. It is the predictable cost of doing beautiful, brutal work without a way to put…