How to Listen to the Podcast

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...

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...

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,...

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 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...

If you’d told me years ago that fear of pregnancy would become the defining thread running through my work, my conversations, and — if I’m honest — my healing, I wouldn’t have believed you. For so long, I didn’t even know tokophobia had a name. It was just this...