More about the team
Alexia Leachman
Co-Founder and LOG Developer
Alexia Leachman is a globally recognised specialist in anxiety, phobias and trauma recovery, and one of the world’s leading experts on tokophobia – the extreme fear of pregnancy and birth. Her work has helped thousands of people around the world break free from anxiety, intrusive thoughts, OCD patterns and long-standing fears that have shaped their lives for years.
As both a practitioner and someone who has healed her own tokophobia, OCD and severe anxiety, Alexia brings a rare combination of clinical insight, lived experience and methodological rigour. Her perspective reframes tokophobia not as a niche fear, but as an apex anxiety disorder characterised by intrusive thinking, panic, medical anxiety and a deep need for control and certainty. This understanding underpins the approach she has become known for: clearing fear at its root, rather than managing symptoms over time.
Alexia is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method™, a pioneering process used worldwide to resolve deep-rooted fears, emotional conflicts and anxiety patterns. She trains therapists, mental health practitioners and birth professionals globally in this method, supporting them to deliver faster, deeper and more sustainable outcomes for their clients.
She is the author of a series of influential books, including Clear Your Anxiety for Good, Betrayed by Your Biology – The Hidden Fear Controlling Women’s Lives, Fearless Birthing, Clear Your Head Trash, and Childbirth, Midwifery and the Media, collectively shaping modern understanding of fear, birth trauma and emotional wellbeing.
Alexia also hosts several major podcasts, including Tik-Tokophobia with co-host JJ Stenhouse, the Fear Free Childbirth Podcast – with more than 1.7 million downloads – and the Head Trash & Healing Show, each of which opens important conversations about women’s mental health, anxiety, trauma and recovery.
Within Ladder of Growth, Alexia brings deep expertise in emotional patterning, anxiety resolution and the mechanics of fear. Her work helps individuals and practitioners identify what sits beneath anxiety, clear the internal conflicts that hold them back, and create the internal spaciousness needed for genuine growth.
Her mission is clear: To change how the world understands fear by giving it language, legitimacy and a pathway to healing.
JJ Stenhouse brings decades of experience in human development, communication, and leadership to her work at Ladder of Growth. She is passionate about removing the distortion – the unhelpful patterns, assumptions, inherited roles and borrowed ideas – that quietly interfere with people’s clear perception, clean responsibility and effective action.
Before moving into human development, JJ built an influential career in mainstream media, where clarity is less a philosophy and more a professional necessity. She worked as an anchor and correspondent for ITN, NBC, and SABC, and wrote and edited for major newspapers, magazines, and digital platforms. She also earned a global reputation as a media trainer and communications strategist, working with national and multinational organisations, NGOs, government bodies, and advocacy groups.
That background trained her to listen for what doesn’t land – those hidden assumptions, mixed signals, and unnecessary complexities that dilute meaning and create confusion. It still shapes her work today.
JJ is a medical intuitive who, for the past 30 years, has trained extensively across wellbeing, communication, leadership, and personal development, including NLP, behavioural profiling, communication psychology, and transformational modalities. That breadth matters less to her now than the discernment it produced and what it enables her to see in individuals, teams, and organisations.
As an experienced broadcaster, she has most recently hosted and co-hosted programmes including a five-year run on UK Health Radio with her Alchemy 1.01 show, Hurt Less, Live More with the late American psychiatrist and executive coach Dr Mark Goulston and the Tik-Tokophobia podcast with Alexia Leachman – all exploring human behaviour, psychology, wellbeing and personal development without dogma or dependency.
JJ is a contributing author to Voices of the 21st Century: Conscious, Caring Women Who Make a Difference, New Makers of Modern Culture, and The New Millennium Tales: Baby Boomer Marketing Stories.
JJ Stenhouse
Co-Founder