But once you begin to peel back the layers and learn more, it becomes much easier to understand how Charlotte could have arrived at this point. If you’ve never experienced tokophobia or a similar debilitating fear, this may sound extreme. I thought about throwing myself down the stairs and I would wake up in the night dreaming that I was having an abortion or a C-section gone wrong.’ I had a lot of intrusive thoughts about abortion and miscarriage and I think that was the point I began to fear where those thoughts would go. I wasn’t prepared for how much pregnancy takes over your body. ‘Feeling my daughter move inside me felt horrific. 'Feeling my daughter move inside me felt horrific' ‘Approaching the abortion cut off stage was an extremely traumatic time for me, because although I didn’t want an abortion, I knew that there were only two ways that the baby was coming out of me. ‘As the pregnancy progressed I was relieved that I was still pregnant – but then my brain started panicking because I knew logically my chance of miscarriage was decreasing,’ she says. As the months trundled on, the reality that she was getting closer to giving birth loomed large, and the panic began to set in. It was then that her anxiety made a come back. What is it like to be pregnant with tokophobia? ‘The more we were struggling, the more I wanted a child, and the less fear I had around having one,’ she explains. In this time, her fear of giving birth began to subside. 'I imagined my life with a family and therefore pregnancy and babies were the next step.')Ĭonception, though, was not straightforward, with months ticking by without a tell-tale absent period. 'I had a belief that I would die in childbirth from a very young age'įor most of her life she had no intention of having children, but things shifted when she was in her late twenties and she changed her mind ('I think it was mainly hormones,' she says. ‘I didn’t make the connection to the trigger - the starting point of it - until I had therapy after having a baby.’ ‘I had a belief that I would die in childbirth from a very young age but I didn’t know that it was a phobia as such,’ she tells WH. Her fear of childbirth began after she watched a graphic video of a woman giving birth when she was in primary school, which at the time was part of the sex education curriculum. How does it feel to live with tokophobia?Ĭharlotte, 34, from Surrey, arrived at this conclusion 20 years after the traumatic experience that sparked her tokophobia. And it could take years, perhaps even decades, for somebody to identify the root cause of these feelings. There’s an important difference, however, between simply having a fear of something and trying to withstand the burden of a phobia that relentlessly threatens your peace of mind. What separates tokophobia and feeling scared about childbirth? Of course, those on-screen depictions don't help – and nor do the birthing horror stories, courtesy of friends, family and social media, that we've all been party to. In fact, it’s almost expected for a pregnant person, or somebody thinking about having children, to get a little jittery at the thought of actually bringing a baby into the world. This is by no means an earth-shattering figure, but it is high enough to expect a moderate degree of familiarity with the condition, at least among the female population.Īfter all, worries about childbirth are extremely common. The former occurs in women who’ve never experienced childbirth the latter is experienced by women who’ve previously given birth and have had a traumatic experience.Īccording to the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) these fears are ‘likely to be more common and intense in women who have never been pregnant or given birth.’ It’s estimated that 14% of women experience tokophobia worldwide. It can be experienced in two forms: primary and secondary. Tokophobia is an extreme fear of childbirth. For some people though, that fear evolves into a full-blown phobia – one that can lead to debilitating and painful consequences. If, like most of the nation, your first exposure to childbirth looked like watching a woman scream in agony while clad in a pale blue hospital gown during a scene of Casualty, you'll understand a fear of labour. Content warning: suicidal ideation while pregnant
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