Ten Years On: Why I Nearly Shut It All Down
Alexia healed her own tokophobia and developed the method she used to do it – and has helped women clear theirs for over 10 years.
A few years ago I nearly shut this whole thing down.
We had left the UK for France just before the pandemic, my kids were no longer little, and I was bored of the birth conversation. The emails coming in were about epidurals and I had covered epidurals. Meanwhile the fear clearance method I had built for my own tokophobia had grown up and was working on things that had nothing to do with birth, and my old business clients were coming back. That felt like safe territory. Birth had always felt like somewhere I was bumbling along as a bit of an imposter.
So I put it down. Or I tried to. What kept happening was that I would get an email from a woman saying she had listened to the episode on such and such, and I would go and check, and the episode was from 2017. Episodes I recorded years earlier were still turning up in women’s lives and changing them. It is like your kids leaving home. You do not kick them out at nine because you have had enough. You wait for it to run its course, and this had not run its course.
Then, while JJ Stenhouse was interviewing me for this episode, something happened that made me glad I had not.
I was explaining the thing I got most wrong in the early years. I said that some women who do not want children may not be making that decision the way they think they are. That it might be the fear making it, quietly, and they would not know.
And JJ said: “I was doing that. I was doing that too.”
She had tokophobia for most of her life and only found out what it was called after we met. So she knows. But hearing her say it out loud, in the middle of an interview about something else, is the clearest version of the point I have been trying to make for about a decade. It is also the answer to why I did not stop.
In this article:
It started with emails from women I had never met
In the days after my second daughter was born, the word got out somehow that I had gone from fearful to fearless in a very short space of time. I still do not know how those women got my details. Possibly a midwife mentioned it. What I know is that emails started arriving from women I had never heard of, asking me how I did it.
I wrote back properly. Long emails, because I had to explain the method, and before that I had to explain how I worked out what I was frightened of in the first place, which is not immediately obvious.
By about the third one I thought, this is ridiculous. And in my head I said: if I get another bloody email, I want to write a bloody book.
I had been planning a book anyway, for the business owners I was coaching, most of them men. My aunt told me I should write for women in birth instead and I told her that was crazy. Who is going to want to buy that. Then another email arrived and I thought, okay, aunt, you’re right, I’ll write the bloody book.
Two months later I had 108,000 words and no idea what to do with them. Getting a manuscript published looked like a huge unknown, and those women were still waiting. So I thought I would record some of it. One episode a week, forty weeks, the length of a pregnancy, and then I would go back to my clients.
It was a maternity leave project. I am breastfeeding in some of those first episodes, and if you listen closely you can hear her breathing near the mic. It is audio only because I looked like crap and there was no way I was videoing that.
There was no marketing plan. There was no plan whatsoever. And then it just went nuts.
What I got wrong about who I was talking to
I got a lot wrong. When I look back at what I thought I was doing versus what I was really doing, the gap is quite something.
I thought I was speaking to women who were pregnant and frightened. Partly because those were the women emailing me, and partly because of my own route in. I only realised I had tokophobia when I fell pregnant. I had been carrying it for fifteen, twenty, thirty years without knowing it was a thing.
What I know now, after ten years of this work, is that it is all women.
Because some women do not want to be pregnant, and that is a whole answer. But some women have made that decision without realising the decision was not truly theirs. It was made for them, years earlier, by something they never identified as fear. Nobody in that position thinks of herself as having a birth problem. She is not pregnant, so there is no appointment where anybody would think to ask her.
That is the bit JJ recognised in herself, live on the recording. I do not think she is unusual.
A full body no
There will always be a level of nerves around birth. Becoming a mother for the first time is a massive transition and of course there is fear around that. A lot of that fear comes down once the information goes up, which is why I started bringing midwives onto the show to talk about physiology and hormones and what actually happens with pain. When I was at school the only thing I can remember being taught was a fairly nasty video of a woman screaming on her back. JJ got the reproductive system of the rabbit.
Tokophobia does not work like that. It screeches in from nowhere. It comes without warning, and information does not soothe it, because the information is the trigger.
I had never read a baby book. The only one I owned gave me a panic attack when I saw a diagram in it, so I never opened it again. I never watched a video. When you have tokophobia, that whole world is a no-go zone. Even the NCT classes were a nightmare, because they brought it all up and I did not know what it was. I did not know why I was feeling that way. It was so confusing.
It is a full body no.
One of the things I watch for in the women I work with now is the moment that shifts. They start talking about getting the nursery ready, or a conversation with a consultant, and I think, right, now you are in the realms of regular birth stuff. The phobic level is different. That one you feel in your body.
Not sure which one you are dealing with?
The free Tokophobia Test takes about five minutes and gives you a picture of what you are facing. It works whether or not you are pregnant, and whether or not you intend to be.
Take the free Tokophobia Test › (Provided by our partner Fearless Birthing.)
Why I stopped calling it a phobia
When I train practitioners, the first thing I tell them is to forget the word phobia inside the word tokophobia. Treat it like an anxiety disorder and you will be able to sort it out. Treat it as a phobia and you will chase your tail forever.
I kept saying that on trainings, and eventually thought, hang on a minute.
There was one client who stuck in my mind. She came to me with a clinical anxiety disorder, OCD and tokophobia, and I was only working with her on the tokophobia. Five weeks later that had gone, which surprised her, and she told me her anxiety had gone too. I thought, well, isn’t that weird. And then I thought, that is because it is an anxiety.
So I decided to assume it was one and see how that changed the way I worked. It opened up a huge part of the work and I started getting results faster.
The other thing I noticed is that it does not sit neatly in the childbearing years. There is a thread that runs through the whole of a woman’s reproductive life. The root trauma was sometimes puberty, sometimes birth, but it was always reproductive in nature. Which is why I started calling it reproductive anxiety disorder. That is a name I have coined rather than a clinical diagnosis, and I am careful about the difference. But it does a job that tokophobia does not.
If a woman walks into a therapist’s office and says she thinks she has tokophobia, and the therapist has never heard of it, the therapist writes it down and has no idea. If she says she thinks she has reproductive anxiety disorder, a therapist who has never heard of that can still make a decent guess at what she is holding, and they are off to the races.
Ten years on I would like to tell you the picture has improved. It has not. Maternity systems are under more strain, midwives are burning out, and more women are describing their births as traumatic. So we need to start putting our big girl pants on and sort this out properly.
Questions I get asked about this
Can you be terrified of being pregnant when you are not pregnant?
Yes, and it is common. Fear of pregnancy and birth does not wait for a positive test. It often shows up years earlier and shapes decisions about relationships, contraception and whether to try at all, long before anybody would think to ask about it.
What is the difference between normal birth nerves and tokophobia?
Nerves tend to ease as you learn what actually happens in labour. Tokophobia does not respond to information that way. It arrives suddenly, you feel it in your body rather than think it, and content about pregnancy usually makes it worse.
Is tokophobia really a phobia?
It is classified as one. In Alexia’s practice it behaves far more like an anxiety disorder, with roots that often predate anything to do with birth, which is why she trains practitioners to work with it that way.
Can it be cleared if you have had it for decades?
How long you have carried it is not, in her experience, what decides whether it clears. Women who have had this since childhood do resolve it. What tends to matter more is working with the root rather than with the birth.
Where to go from here
If you read JJ’s line at the top of this and something went quiet in you, that is worth paying attention to.
Understanding what you are dealing with is the first step. The free Tokophobia Test takes about five minutes and tells you what you are facing – no pressure, no scare tactics.
When you are ready to stop carrying this on your own, the Tokophobia Support Circle is a small monthly membership where women who understand make sense of it together, with a live group call each month. For focused one-to-one help, there’s the Tokophobia Support Programme.
Both are run by our partner site Fearless Birthing – founded, like Fear Free Childbirth, by Alexia Leachman. You can also read Alexia’s books, Betrayed By Your Biology and Fearless Birthing.
About the author: Alexia Leachman overcame her own tokophobia – and in the process developed the Head Trash Clearance Method, the approach she now uses to help women clear their fear of pregnancy and birth. For over a decade she has worked with women around the world and trained perinatal professionals to do the same. She is the author of Betrayed By Your Biology, a book on tokophobia and reproductive anxiety, host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast, and is often described – by the women she works with and by the podcasts that invite her on – as a world expert on tokophobia. More about Alexia ›
Fear Free Childbirth is a publication and is not a substitute for medical or mental-health care. If you’re struggling to cope or in crisis, please contact your GP, midwife, or a qualified professional.
Read next:
- Tokophobia: everything you need to know
- 7 signs of a woman with tokophobia
- Who’s the Tokophobia Support Circle for?
Alexia supports families planning pregnancy and birth. She helps them to overcome their fears and feel calm and confident about birth and pregnancy.
Alexia also trains birth professionals in the Fearless Birthing, a unique approach to birth preparation that is ideal for those who have fears around birth.
- Fear Free Childbirth Is Growing Up: Why My Voice Isn’t Enough - 9th October 2026
- Ten Years On: Why I Nearly Shut It All Down - 9th October 2026
- Challenging the Maternity System: Collective Voices, Activism, and Building a Better Birth Experience, with Mars Lord - 9th October 2026