Tokophobia, the fear of pregnancy and giving birth, affects up to 10% of women. Hypnotherapy could help you.
If you’re suffering from tokophobia then you’re far from alone. I’ve used hypnotherapy for tokophobia in Reading, Oxford, Wallingford, London and Thame to help a good many women overcome their fear or disgust at the idea of being pregnant and giving birth.
It’s not particularly difficult to develop fear or disgust at the thought of such things. Everybody knows somebody who had a difficult time of it. Magazines, TV programs and the internet are full of such stories. Relatives and friends will almost compete to give the most lurid account of their own experience of giving birth. Perhaps your own mother regaled you with a story of how difficult it was to give birth to you. These stories sink in over time and the fear develops that childbirth and pregnancy simply have to be difficult and dangerous.
Whatever the origins of your tokophobia, hypnotherapy and psychotherapy could help you to let it go and to move towards your dream of building a family.
I also offer hypnotherapy online for tokophobia, using vsee, zoom or whatsap. Please get in touch for more details as to how this works.
So many possible causes…
Some people have relatives, sisters perhaps, who have experienced difficult births and who are sometimes left with issues regarding continence or suchlike. Perhaps you’re thinking of a second child and had a difficult or life-threatening time of things with the first.
Perhaps you developed post-natal depression and simply fear a repeat experience. There are a good many reasons why people fear the concept of being pregnant or giving birth. You needn’t, however, let it hold you back any longer.
Perhaps, sadly, you experienced sexual abuse as a younger person and the thought of midwives and doctors – strangers of any kind – fiddling around with your nether regions threatens to reawaken memories you’ve spent a lifetime trying to bury and avoid.
Others had a torrid time as children, thanks to their parents, and fear that they’ll repeat the same mistakes with their own children.
Others have a difficult relationship with their body and fear losing control over their body as the baby grows and changes begin to take place. Figures will change and there’s no stopping it happening. Perhaps previous issues with weight leave you fearing that you’ll never be able to lose your baby-weight.
Others are simply just happy as they are and worry that life will never be the same again, once children come into their world. In a sense they’re right, of course. Nothing will be the same. It needn’t, however, be worse. It could be a whole new and beautiful chapter to your life. Hypnotherapy, in the hands of a skilled therapist, can help you to deal with any or all of these fears.
Whatever the cause, you can learn to let it go
Some women develop tokophobia because of a fear of the changes which having children may bring. Some have worked hard to build careers, love their lives with their husbands or partners and fear that having children would ruin things.
Perhaps their bodies will be ‘ruined’. Perhaps their husbands won’t find them attractive anymore. They may want children but simply worry that having them will leave them unable to enjoy life in the way they used to.
Difficulties with family history can cause tokophobia too
Of course, some women worry that they will be unable to love their future children as they deserve to be loved. Perhaps these women have had difficult childhoods themselves. Perhaps they are experiencing difficulties with their present relationships too.
You needn’t fret, those who are aware of the dangers of their own pasts echoing through the generations rarely go on to make it happen.
In any case, a part of our work may well involve helping you to put this past and its the consequent anxiety, depression and anger behind you. When this is buried the fear of giving birth will be easily resolved into the bargain.
Sometimes tokophobia is an unconscious means of avoiding pregnancy altogether. Being tied into a difficult relationship by a child would be disastrous and so the brain finds a way of ensuring that it doesn’t happen. I have seen several women for whom tokophobia proved an effective contraceptive.
Stress is one of the most effective contraceptives known to man. Stress is interpreted by the body as meaning that the word is a dangerous place. In previous epochs this may have meant war or famine. Who would want to bring a new being into such a world? Somehow the body knows and prevents conception occurring. Stress produces cortisol and in order to create cortisol you need to cannibalise progesterone. Progesterone, as perhaps you know already, is vital to conception and pregnancy.
So, stressing about pregnancy and birth makes it less likely to begin with.
Can tokophobia affect fertility? Yes!
Others, however, will want to get pregnant very badly, they’ll want to be mothers badly too, but they find that it’s proving rather difficult.
Tokophobia can sometimes be the cause, since the mind will conspire to help women to avoid the very thing they fear – childbirth. Stress, as they say, is the very best contraceptive, since the production of the stress hormone cortisol requires the breaking down of progesterone, the hormone particularly necessary to conception
If you fear that your changes of conception are being endangered due to your being afraid of giving birth or being pregnant then have no fear. I’m a qualified fertility practitioner and have plenty of experience of working with women in order to maximise their chances.
Hypnotherapy can release the fear of having babies and increase the chance of your falling pregnant.
If you’d like to talk to me regarding how I could help you to let go of your fear, call me on 07786123736 or email me at paul@resolvedhypnotherapy.co.uk. I’ll be more than glad to talk with you.
It’s amazing but it’s true
Yes, the stress of getting pregnant and giving birth could very easily be preventing you from doing just that.You needn’t even be aware of this. The unconscious mind works in the shadows and without our knowing consciously what it’s up to.
How could hypnotherapy help you?
Hypnotherapy can help by making the unconscious conscious. There are many possible reasons why a woman develops this phobia. Hypnotherapy could help you to find out what’s going on.
Perhaps you worry that you don’t really want children at all. Hypnotherapy could help you to be sure, either way. Let’s meet and discuss what’s going on.
Hypnotherapy could also help to resolve the root causes of the phobia. It could help you to let go of the fear. After all, for every terrible story we hear about a difficult pregnancy or birth there are many more which take place perfectly normally.
You can let it go!
Those stories make the papers, they stick in the memory precisely because they’re so uncommon. I could help you to let go of that fear, to put it in perspective, to resolve problems with relationships and to see that although life changes after we have children, it needn’t be seen as a negative transition. Butterflies, after all, don’t look back and wish they were caterpillars again.
You’ve dealt with challenging times before.
You’ve been through different transitions before and although they may have been scary, they turned out fine. You turned out fine. You turned out to be good enough to rise to the challenge and to make a good life for yourself. If, of course, you feel as if there are other changes which you’d like to make to your life then we can get to work on those too.
Tokophobia can be a symptom of pre-natal depression and commonly arises in women who have a history of anxiety. If this proves to be true of you, we could work together to resolve it. There are plenty of women in Reading, Wallingford, Oxford, London and Thame who have left tokophobia behind them.
You could be next. It’s certainly worth the price of a ‘phone call to find out. Isn’t it?
Best wishes
