I wrote a guest blog post for health and wellbeing website, Nurse Mummy. Emilie Masi, a Clinical Nurse Consultant, runs this educational and inspiring website. The post is titled “The Essential Steps to Healing from Tokophobia”.
It focusses on a deep anxiety of pregnancy and childbirth. The following is a short excerpt from this article.
“For some women, there is a more severe fear of childbirth. Tokophobia. It is a pathological fear of childbirth. A woman will display avoidant behaviours, have sleep disturbances, nightmares, panic attacks. This phobia of pregnancy and childbirth is so intense, some women will avoid pregnancy.
Women with tokophobia (tokos means childbirth) are more likely to request a caesarian to avoid vaginal birth. There are multiple reasons for a woman to experience fear of pregnancy and childbirth. For a woman who has experienced sexual abuse, it is traumatic for her to have doctors and midwives examining her.
Her fear is heightened when considering a vaginal birth. Witnessing others’ fearful responses to pregnancy and childbirth or watching a video on childbirth can trigger a negative response.”
Tokophobia is a little-known topic that I felt women could be more aware of. Helping women with anxiety, emotional triggers and major life events such as pregnancy and childbirth are areas I am passionate about. The article includes suggestions on how to reduce the anxiety of tokophobia. Click here to read the full article on Emilie’s website.
Janice Williams is a professional Counsellor and specialises in mother-daughter relationship counselling.
Janice offers in-person counselling, as well as online and phone counselling across Australia. Online counselling is available worldwide.