When I miscarried my first pregnancy, my first feeling was relief.
I need you to sit with that for a bit, because I know how that sounds.
The moment I saw the positive test, I fell into a dark pit of terror so total that losing the pregnancy felt like an escape hatch. I finally got to stop being terrified.
That’s a very typical case of tokophobia (a severe anxiety disorder that manifests as the pathological fear of pregnancy and birth). It’s not “a bit nervous about birth.” It’s: I can see pregnancy on the other side of a river and there is no bridge. There is no crossing. There is only a chasm that goes straight to the bottom of the earth.
That was the first pregnancy.
A year later – after some serious inner work – I got pregnant again. Same situation. Same test. And I didn’t fall into the pit.
I want to be precise about what I mean, because “feeling better” is where this piece starts to get interesting. I wasn’t fine. I was still scared. But when I looked across that river, there was a bridge. Rickety as hell – the kind you’d cross holding your breath while praying the planks hold – but it was there. And I thought: okay. I can do this. What do I need to do?
That is a significant shift. From there is no possible way to there is a possible way, and I’m going to find it. Different person. Different relationship to the same situation.
But I could never have articulated that difference in any meaningful way to you at the time. All I knew was that I felt different. But I had no way to show it was real.
The question that won’t go away
For over ten years, I’ve worked with women who have tokophobia. And something I hear again and again, once the work is done and the fear has shifted, goes like this:
“But what if it comes back?”
Not: I’m scared it might feel difficult. More like: What if I get pregnant and the panic attacks return and I want to terminate and I haven’t told my husband and I don’t know what I’ll do.
These women cannot risk having sex with their partners in case they get pregnant. Some have had multiple abortions they’ve never disclosed, because they’ve been caught in exactly that situation – and the fear came back – and they couldn’t face it.
So when the work has been done, and they’re sitting there feeling different, and I ask them how they’re doing – they say: better. And then they say: but what if it comes back?
They don’t trust it.
And I understand why. Because feeling better is not evidence. Mood fluctuates. Context changes. A good week is not the same as a cleared pattern. And when the stakes are this high – when we’re talking about whether you can be a mother, or whether you’ll spend the rest of your fertile years too frightened to try – feeling better is not enough.
You need to know.
The data point I didn’t expect
Here’s where it clicked for me in a different way.
I worked with a client – senior professional, main breadwinner, young family in London – who’d been signed off work for three weeks with burnout. His doctor gave him the time. He knew, without saying it out loud, that if he went back the same as he left, he was probably done. Companies at that level don’t tend to keep people who’ve cracked. They manage them out.
So the pressure wasn’t just: feel better. It was: actually change. Demonstrably. Fast.
I used the Ladder of Growth framework to measure him at three points: before we started, after four weeks of intensive clearing work, and then two months after he’d gone back into the role.
The middle measurement – after our work together, before he returned – is the interesting one. When I asked him to rate how he thought he’d cope with specific situations back at work, he rated himself lower than he actually performed. His imagined post-clearing self was more cautious, more doubtful, than the person who actually showed up.
The two-month data told the real story.
By then, he was going for interviews he couldn’t have considered two months earlier – when he literally couldn’t complete a sentence. He was back in the room, confident, directing. He still wasn’t sure it was real until he was tested by the situation he was most afraid of: redundancy, at Christmas, main breadwinner. He found it didn’t touch him the way it once would have. He knew he could get another job, and simply got on with the task of finding one.
His MD – who he didn’t report to directly, in a company of several hundred people – pulled him aside on his last day and said: when you came back, you were better than ever. I noticed. I was impressed.
The MD noticed. Before the data landed, he hadn’t fully trusted it himself.
That’s what I mean when I say feeling better isn’t enough. He’d done the work. He’d genuinely shifted. And he still wasn’t full integrating it.
That took months of real life to confirm what the data already knew.
What measurement actually does
This is the thing I wish I’d understood earlier, and that I think the whole personal development industry has conveniently decided to ignore.
When you can see the change in data – not just feel it – something different happens. You can integrate it. You can lean on it. You stop waiting for life to test you before you trust yourself.
Think about what that means for the women I work with. What if it comes back? is a question born from having no anchor. From knowing that feelings shift. From having been terrified before and not being able to trust that this time is different.
But what if you had data? What if you could see, reflected back at you by something that isn’t you – isn’t your therapist, isn’t the person with a commercial interest in telling you the work is working – that yes, objectively, by your own responses to a structured framework, this has changed?
You don’t have to wait for the pregnancy to prove it. You don’t have to get on a plane with your flying phobia to find out if it’s gone. You don’t have to face redundancy at Christmas and discover, slightly surprised, that you’re fine.
You can know sooner. And that accelerates integration. Not replaces it – integration is still part of the process – but you’re not spending months in tentative maybe I’m different now limbo. You have something to hold onto.
Why the wellness industry doesn’t want to do this
I’ll be honest about something that took me a while to say out loud.
The billion-dollar wellness industry – the apps, the programmes, the platforms, the teachers – almost none of it measures whether the work is working. And I don’t think that’s an oversight.
Measurement would reveal things people don’t want revealed. That some approaches simply don’t move the needle. That slow isn’t deep – it’s often just slow. That years in therapy isn’t the same as years of progress. That feeling like something is working is not the same as something working.
There’s too much money at stake to find that out rigorously.
I started measuring because I couldn’t not. It was my own pregnancy, my own terror, my own shift that I couldn’t explain. And then it was my clients. The women who felt better and couldn’t trust it. I needed a way to show them, and me, that the change was real.
The Ladder of Growth framework is what I built to do that – fifteen years of tracking client progress, coded into an assessment that any person can take themselves, with no practitioner in the room telling them what the results mean. Their own answers, reflected back at them.
Not because data is everything. But because feeling better isn’t enough – and everyone who’s done serious inner work knows it.
The Ladder of Growth allows you to understand where you on a number of growth journeys. You can choose which lens you want explore including Anxiety, ADHD and Burnout Risk. Professional lenses include the Business Owner and Therapist profiles. Find out more at ladderofgrowth.io.
The Clearance Club has the Ladder of Growth built in. It’s the place where the work in my book, Clear Your Anxiety. For Good, becomes a practice – with before and after data so you can see, not just feel, what’s moved.