conception and tocophobia

[Foske123]

Hi all
I am an NHS psychotherapist working with a patient with primary tocophobia. She would love to have a baby but greatly fears the pregnancy and birth so won't allow herself to get pregnant. Just wondering if there is anyone out there who managed to get over their fear of conception and what was it that helped with this and allowed them to get pregnant.
Thanks
Foske

Erm.
Isn’t that your job?

Thank you for your reply, JustVent. I am mainly a cognitive behavioural therapist and one of the tools we use in this therapy is to gather evidence to help patients challenge negative and unhelpful thoughts they have. We usually do this by creating a survey for people to answer questions that will help with this. This post is my attempt at finding a group of people who may have something helpful to say about this subject. As you can imagine, it is not easy to find such a group of experts on this particular subject so I was hoping I might find some on Mumsnet.

I really don’t think asking on here is professionally appropriate. I’m a HCP in the NHS and would definitely get into trouble if found I had asked about a patient in this manner.

I was petrified of childbirth and had agrophobia; I was specifically scared about any situation where I felt ‘trapped’. So lying paralysed on an operating table would have been my idea of hell (epidurals, the pushing stage etc).
I went to a hypnobirthing course and it changed my life! I went into labour feeling confident and ended up with 1st child- general anaesthetic emergency c section and 2nd child- forceps and epidural. So both times I was ‘trapped’ and took it in my stride and managed to stay calm.
I highly recommend hypnobirthing; the meditations I was taught along with educating myself on childbirth helped so much.
I appreciate I allowed myself to get pregnant, so slightly different to your lady but I was really not looking forward to it!

Thank you, mogulfield. That is really helpful.

Yes. I left having a baby very late because I was scared of both pregnancy and birth.

When I was offered a C-section at 38 weeks because of a breech baby it was a complete sigh of relief for me. I had tried to request one earlier several times and was just ignored.

The procedure was excellent. 20 minutes a few complications but very good recovery. Compared to the poor women I heard in labour for hours, days screaming I feel I was incredibly lucky.

to gather evidence to help patients challenge negative and unhelpful thoughts they have.

First go and read the recent posts about birth injuries. The prolapses, the dozens of stitches, the psychological trauma, the faecal and urinary incontinence twenty years on and the frankly disgraceful and dismissive attitude of many HCPs.

Then understand that birth sometimes is crippling, life threatening and sometimes fatal. And yes, sometimes it’s great as well.

Then work with your patient to ACKNOWLEDGE her fears, rather than labelling them as false thinking or ‘unhelpful.’

CBT is largely bollocks anyway :) it has no greater long term success than placebo but it’s cheap to administer and doesn’t seem to require much training.

The best thing you can do for your patient is to refer her to an integrative type therapist, who will listen to and work through her fears, giving her tools to deal with them and exploring her birth options, which should include elcs on request and if it doesn’t you’re failing her

Do you acknowledge that her fears are not groundless?

Because if you don’t, then there’s really no point, you’re just another layer of the healthcare machine denying women the choice of birth method they want, stripping them of dignity and autonomy

Give her an elcs if she wants one.

Can I just ask a potentially silly question - what is 'agrophobia'? I see it all the time on MN but the only thing I can think even close to it is agoraphobia?!

Surely is just a typo?

Is there a specialist maternity counsellor in her area? I saw one due to my tokophobia and was able to schedule an ELCS as a result (although needed an emcs)

Thank you for your concern. I have checked with my service lead and he is okay with it.

Thanks for that, TammySwansonTwo. I have referred her to the perinatal mental health service and hopefully they will be able to help also.

My sister has tocophobia and had 18 months of seeing a psychologist to prove she actually had t before they would allow her an elective c-section. But that was what she wanted. She hated the idea of being pregnant but excepted that to have a family that was the only way but certainly wouldn’t go through a natural labour.
If they had denied her a c-section then she wouldn’t have had children, it was that bad.
When she actually fell pregnant, she loved it. Couldn’t believe it herself. Before, the idea of something wriggling inside of her made her feel sick but it totally changed when she realised the unconditional love she had for her unborn child.
And the c-section was booked in and all went smoothly.