I used to believe I just wasn’t “the maternal type”. That something in me was hard-wired wrong — why else would the idea of pregnancy or birth send shockwaves of fear through my body? But what if the real story started long before I was ever old enough to know the...
“I never expected a conversation about tokophobia to shatter what I thought I knew… about myself, JJ, and just how far-reaching this fear really is.” When I first met JJ Stenhouse, she was a fellow presenter on UK Health Radio, a fellow truth-teller, and — like me —...
For most of my adult life, I thought I just had shaky mental health. Constant anxiety, bouts of depression, even a good dose of OCD at times — all of it seemed to come and go without warning, sitting underneath everything I did. But no matter how “together” I looked...
I didn’t know I was living with tokophobia — until my body and mind made it impossible to ignore. If you’d asked me in my thirties whether I was afraid of pregnancy, I’d have told you I was far too busy building my career to think about babies. I wouldn’t have called...
For years, I thought I was just “bad at life.” I felt anxious.Disconnected.Like something was always a bit off.And yet… I couldn’t quite explain why. I wasn’t broken. But I was barely coping. And then I saw two pink lines on a pregnancy test. What happened next felt...
When people talk about birth trauma, they’re usually referring to the trauma a mother experiences while giving birth. But there’s another kind of birth trauma that almost no one talks about — the trauma of being born. This experience — what happens to us in the womb...