Tokophobia and Relationships
Most people don’t talk about what fear of pregnancy does to your relationships. Not the safe, surface-level worries (“What if we’re not ready?”), but the deep, gnawing anxiety that shapes every conversation, every argument, every silence. For me, tokophobia was the...I Thought I Was Just Anxious — Until I Learned What Tokophobia Was
For most of my life, I lived with a deep, unspoken dread I couldn’t quite put words to. Pregnancy and birth weren’t just a distant “not for me” thought — they were loaded, tangled knots of fear buried so deep that even I didn’t recognise what was really going on. To...I Thought I Could Ignore My Tokophobia… Until I Had to Make a Choice
If you’re reading this, chances are you know that feeling — the gnawing fear that creeps in whenever pregnancy or childbirth comes up. Maybe you’ve always known you were scared of birth, or maybe it’s only just now showing itself, as you watch friends start families,...What if your fear doesn’t have a name? The power of finally putting words to what you feel
I spent years struggling with a fear that nobody seemed to talk about. You know the kind – the thing you barely dare to admit, even to yourself, because it feels too strange, too intense, too lonely. For me, that fear was of pregnancy and childbirth. Tokophobia....I Never Had the Right Words for My Fear… Until Now
For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with a gnawing, wordless sense of dread around anything to do with pregnancy, birth, or even just the idea of becoming a mother. And yet, for years, I had no idea what to call it. I just knew that every time someone mentioned...The Root of Toko: What If the Fear Didn’t Start With You?
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...JJ’s Tokophobia and Its Hidden Impact on Creativity and Relationships
“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 —...I Thought I Was Just “Anxious” — Then I Found the Real Root
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...My Tokophobia Story – the birth of all this!
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...