If you have never done this before.
This page is not about men being bad at feelings. It is about the practical questions people ask me on the phone before they will book anything.
A note on the heading
Rather more than half the people I see are men, largely because of the work I did before this and the things people come to me for. So it seems worth saying so.
It is not because men require a special sort of therapy, or because they are less able to talk. In my experience that is simply untrue: men talk perfectly well once it is clear what the thing is for. What is often true is that they have had less practice, fewer settings in which to do it, and a reasonable suspicion that therapy might involve being asked to perform an emotion on demand.
So this page answers the practical questions instead. Everything on it applies to anyone. The practice is open to anyone, and always has been.
Most people who come here have been thinking about it for somewhere between six months and nine years.
Common reasons, plainly put
- A death — often a father's — that was handled and never grieved.
- A marriage ending, or one that has become silent.
- Work: redundancy, a role you have outgrown, or the discovery that the thing you built your identity on can be taken away by email.
- Anger that has started arriving at the wrong size for the situation.
- Drinking a bit more than you would like anyone to know.
- Being a father, and not being sure whether you are doing it the way you meant to.
- Having far fewer people to talk to than you did at thirty, and not being sure when that happened.
- Nothing in particular. Just a flatness that has been there long enough to notice.
The questions people actually ask
Do I have to talk the whole time?
No. Silence is a normal part of a session and I am not uncomfortable in it. If you go quiet for five minutes because you are working something out, I will let you.
What if I have nothing to say?
Then we start from that, which is a real place to start. In practice people who say this usually have a great deal to say and no habit of saying it, and the first few sessions are largely about building the habit.
Will you make me talk about feelings?
I will not make you talk about anything. I also will not require you to use the word "feelings", which a lot of people find faintly ridiculous. You can describe what is going on in whatever language you actually use.
Is it going to be like the therapy you see on television?
No. There is no couch, no notepad, and nobody says "and how does that make you feel". It is two people in chairs having a serious conversation, which is a fairly ordinary thing that has been made to sound strange.
Will you tell my partner, my employer or my GP?
No. What you say here is confidential. The narrow exceptions — a serious risk to life, or a court order — are set out plainly on the privacy and confidentiality page, and I would tell you if any of them ever applied.
Can I try one session and stop?
Yes. There is no minimum commitment and no package to sign up to. Before that there is a free phone call, which is often enough for both of us to tell whether it is worth meeting.
Would it be easier to do this online?
For some people, yes — noticeably so. Talking is often easier when you are in your own house and not looking directly at anyone. Online sessions run Monday and Friday and are the same length and the same fee.
The lowest-commitment way in
Send two lines by email. They do not have to explain anything — "I'd like to know how this works" is a complete message and I have had hundreds of them.
I will reply within two working days and suggest a time for a phone call. The call is 20 minutes, free of charge, and its only purpose is for you to hear what I sound like and ask whatever you want. Plenty of people stop there, which is a perfectly good outcome.