I’ve sat with a lot of couples where one partner’s anger doesn’t fit the moment. The row is about something small: dishes left in the sink, a plan changed at the last minute, and the reaction is enormous. The partner on the receiving end genuinely can’t work out what just happened. Often, neither can the person doing the shouting.
I’ve come to recognise this as one of the clearest signs of compliance trauma showing up in adult life.
What compliance trauma actually is
Compliance trauma comes from growing up having to fall in line, not because you agreed, but because the alternative was worse. Maybe that was outright punishment. Maybe it was a parent going cold and withdrawn until you fell back into line, or a household where the mood could tip without warning and the only safe move was to comply before it did.
It doesn’t need to look dramatic from the outside. Plenty of people carrying this grew up in homes that looked perfectly ordinary. What made it compliance trauma wasn’t the severity of any one incident, it was that saying no, or even just having a visible reaction, was never really an option.
Where the explosiveness comes from
A child in that position doesn’t stop having a reaction. They just stop being able to show it. The anger, the protest, the “this isn’t fair” doesn’t go anywhere; it gets swallowed because expressing it was too costly.
What gets swallowed in childhood doesn’t stay swallowed forever. It tends to surface later, in adulthood, often with the people who feel safest, which is usually a partner or close family. That’s why the shouting can look wildly out of proportion to the dishes in the sink. The dishes aren’t really what it’s about. The nervous system has been carrying an old, unresolved protest, and something small has finally tipped it over the edge.
What it’s like on the other side of it
If you’re the one living with this, it can be genuinely disorientating. You raise something minor and get a reaction that feels like it belongs to a different, much bigger argument. Over time you start managing around it: choosing your moments, softening how you say things, sometimes staying quiet altogether rather than risk it.
That’s a form of compliance also. Two people can end up in the same pattern from opposite directions: one complying as a child and exploding as an adult, the other complying now, in the relationship, to keep the peace.
This isn’t about blame
I want to be clear that understanding where the anger comes from isn’t the same as excusing its impact. Both things are true at once. The explosive reaction has a history and a logic to it, and it still lands on the person in the room, who didn’t cause it and doesn’t deserve to carry it.
Relational therapy holds both of those at the same time. It doesn’t ask you to forgive the anger before you’ve named what it’s actually costing you, and it doesn’t ask the person doing the exploding to just try harder without understanding what’s actually happening.
Where change actually happens
The work isn’t about learning to suppress the anger better, that’s just compliance again, dressed up as progress. It’s about building the capacity to notice the reaction as it’s rising, understand what it’s really protecting, and find a way to have the protest, the no, the disagreement, without it needing to detonate.
For the partner or family member on the other side, the work is often about recognising where they’ve been complying too, quietly, out of habit, and finding their own way to say what actually needs saying.
On neuroscience, neurosexism, circular arguments, and what actually helps in a therapy room.
It was around 2018. I was sitting in a module on my counselling training course, watching a tutor walk us through exercises built on the idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain do fundamentally different things. I was uncomfortable. I knew this had been debunked years earlier. When we broke into small groups, I said so.
The response I got was something like: “It’s just a metaphor.”
I didn’t find that acceptable then, and I don’t now. A metaphor that borrows the authority of neuroscience to push a particular way of working isn’t a metaphor. It’s a marketing claim dressed up in designer clothes.
I already knew what a brain binary viewpoint cost
By the time I sat in that training room, I’d had fifty years to think about what happens when you sort people into categories and tell them their biology explains it.
At Grammar school in the 1960s, the binary was explicit. Boys studied sciences and woodwork. Girls studied arts and home economics. I was a boy who spent every hour I could playing guitar, writing songs and poetry, drawing and painting. The school’s message was consistent. I should be heading towards sciences, engineering, towards something suitably male.
I didn’t cooperate. I followed their agenda and failed fast. I left school with almost no qualifications and spent the next decade teaching myself the things I’d actually wanted to learn. The further I got from the state system, the more accessible real education became.
That was social pressure enforcing a binary. Nobody was talking about brain science then.
The circular argument hiding in plain sight
Here’s the problem at the centre of the male/female brain industry. It has become a circular argument.
The research finds minor statistical differences in brains that have already spent decades being shaped by social conditioning. Girls steered towards language and relationships. Boys steered towards spatial reasoning and independence. Generations of different experience, different expectation, different permission. And then researchers scan those brains, find some small average differences, and present those differences as the explanation for the social conditions that produced them.
That’s a circular argument. The conditioning comes first. The differences, such as they are, come after. Nobody can tell you what brains would look like without the conditioning, because no brain has ever developed without it. And nobody can tell you what those differences might look like in fifty years, as expectations shift and more people are permitted to be more fully themselves.
Cordelia Fine, who coined the term neurosexism, spent two books systematically dismantling these claims. Researchers like Daphna Joel have since shown that when you look at actual individual brains rather than group averages, you find a mosaic: each brain is a unique combination of features, and the overlap between males and females on almost every measure is enormous. The variation within any gender category dwarfs the average difference between categories. Knowing someone’s gender tells you almost nothing reliable about how their brain works.
The binary is a social category being laundered through neuroscience.
The story of brain binaries
This isn’t new. For decades, the wellness and self-help industry has been built, at least partly, on the idea that brains divide neatly into camps. Left brain versus right brain. Male brain versus female brain. The model changes; the logic stays the same. Take a real but complicated picture, flatten it into two categories, and sell people a route from one to the other.
The left-brain/right-brain model had a long run. By the time it was being taught on my counselling course, the neuroscience community had largely moved on. The actual research shows that almost everything we do cognitively involves both hemispheres working together. The division was always a simplification; it became mythology.
The male/female brain version is following the same arc, just more slowly. And when you look at who’s producing this content, it’s worth spending thirty seconds on what’s attached to it. Often there’s a workshop programme, a supplement range, or both. The bold claim about your brain type is the unique selling point. It’s what makes the product feel necessary.
What I see when it arrives in my therapy room
This material circulates heavily in relationship spaces. Couples come in having absorbed it. And when they do, it tends to function as a way out of a harder conversation.
Rather than sitting with a particular behaviour as something specific and personal, rooted in someone’s history, their upbringing, their culture, the ways they learned to survive, it gets explained away as “that’s just how men are” or “it’s my female brain.” The behaviour becomes fixed, inevitable, outside the reach of curiosity or change. I’ve noticed how often that move relieves anxiety in the short term and shuts down real work in the longer term.
I’ve also sat with clients who’ve spent time and money following these threads. They’ve done the programmes, bought the products, and ended up in a therapy room saying none of it worked. The question they usually arrive with is: “What’s wrong with me?”
Nothing is wrong with them. Something is wrong with the premise they were sold.
What actually helps
The wellness industry’s version of this problem and the neuroscience industry’s version share the same shape. Both offer you a category to belong to, a framework that explains you, and then a product or a programme to help you work within it. Both require sustained effort: researching, optimising, tracking, striving. The category does the work of making the striving feel necessary.
What I notice in the therapy room runs in the opposite direction entirely. The moments that matter tend to involve people becoming less busy, not more. Less convinced that the right framework will finally unlock them. More able to simply be present to what’s actually there.
Nervous system regulation isn’t a metaphor or a supplement. When someone feels genuinely safe, something opens that no brain category can open for them. That’s the ground on which real change happens, and it can’t be reached through effort. It can only be reached by reducing the pressure, relaxing into life rather than powering headfirst into it.
Your brain isn’t male or female. It’s uniquely yours, shaped by everything that’s happened to you, still capable of change. That’s a considerably more demanding thing to sit with than a binary. It’s also the only place the real work starts.
John Walter | NCPS Accredited Counsellor & Psychotherapist | johnwaltercounsellor.com
Feeling safe in therapy is the cornerstone of successful practice. I knew that long before I could explain it, from fifteen years working with drums, rhythm, voice and connection. Now the neuroscience is catching up.
There’s a moment I’ve never quite been able to explain away.
I’m leading a singing workshop with a group of ten-year-olds. An Ofsted inspector walks in, clipboard ready, pen moving. Standard inspection posture: detached, evaluative, looking for the evidence. At some point I glance across and she’s put the clipboard down. By the end of the session she’s close to tears. She catches my eye on the way out and offers me a single word.
“Wonderful.”
She wasn’t watching a performance. Something in the room had got to her.
For fifteen years I ran facilitated drum circles and rhythm-based group work, trained by Arthur Hull in Hawaii, whose influence runs through schools, hospitals, and organisations worldwide. I’ve seen a lot of rooms. I’ve seen a lot of moments like the one with the inspector. What I didn’t have then was the understanding to say why it works. Now I do. And it’s changed how I think about everything I do in the therapy room.
The girl who picked up the drum
A primary school, somewhere in England. A child sits at the edge of the circle, arms folded, watching. She hasn’t joined in with a group activity since arriving at the school several weeks earlier. The teacher knows. The SENCO knows. Everyone in the room is quietly aware of it, which is part of the problem.
The circle has been running for fifteen minutes. The room has found its pulse. Something shifts in the quality of the sound, less self-conscious, more collective. And then, without announcement, without anyone noticing until it’s already happened, the girl picks up her drum.
Her teacher tells me afterwards she’s never done anything like this before.
What I witnessed wasn’t a child making a decision. It was a body recognising that it was safe.
This is the thing about withdrawal: it’s almost never a choice. The nervous system has assessed the environment and found it unsafe, or not safe enough, and it’s pulled back to protect itself. That stillness, that folded-arms distance, is a biological response. And you can’t talk someone out of a biological response. Reassurance, encouragement, instruction: none of it reaches the part of the nervous system that made the decision to withdraw. That decision wasn’t made consciously, and it won’t be reversed consciously.
What can shift it is a change in what the body is actually experiencing in the room.
A different door
Hull’s approach to facilitation was built around a principle he called GOOW: get out of their way. The facilitator’s job isn’t to produce the outcome but to remove the obstacles to something that wants to happen naturally.
What the research now tells us is why this works. When a group finds a shared pulse, something measurable happens between the people in the room: nervous systems start to synchronise. Not metaphorically. The shared rhythm creates shared ground, and on that ground something like connection becomes possible, not because anyone decided to connect, but because the body found its way there first.
Slow, regular rhythm is one of the most direct signals of safety the nervous system knows. It communicates beneath the level of thought. It doesn’t ask the mind to do anything.
That’s the key. Most of what we offer people, in schools, in therapy rooms, in relationships, makes demands on the thinking mind: follow this, evaluate that, explain yourself, demonstrate that you’ve understood. For someone whose nervous system is running a protection response, those demands aren’t just difficult. They’re genuinely out of reach. The thinking mind is among the first things to go offline when the body feels unsafe.
A drum circle, properly held, asks none of that. You don’t need to know how to drum. You don’t need to perform or evaluate yourself or prove anything. You need only to feel the pulse and let your body move with it. That’s not a lowered standard. It’s a different door entirely.
The training director
A drum circle for 250 people in a corporate setting. In one part of the room I notice a man surrounded by four women. He’s demonstrating to them, showing them what to do, leaning in, gesturing at their hands. They’re watching him, not the group. Their attention is turned inward, towards him, towards their own performance, away from the collective pulse. The energy in that section is flat.
I signal that section to stop while the rest of the group continues. They lower their drums. Suddenly they’re listeners rather than performers. There’s nothing to get wrong, nothing to prove. The only thing available to them is the sound of 245 other people finding a groove. I watch their faces change. The self-consciousness drops. The heads come up.
I count them back in. All five are now with the group.
The man was the company’s head of training. His professional identity was so thoroughly organised around the role of teacher that it kicked in automatically the moment he held an instrument and had people around him. He couldn’t stop teaching long enough to join in. And his teaching, well-intentioned as it was, was the precise obstacle to the connection the exercise was designed to create.
What I did wasn’t correct him. I changed the conditions so that the mode he’d defaulted to became, briefly, impossible. And in that gap, something else could happen.
I think about this a lot in the therapy room. Not with training directors, but with couples who arrive locked in a loop they’ve been running for years: the same argument, the same positions, the same outcome. Both of them, in their own way, are doing what the training director was doing: performing a well-rehearsed role so automatically that the actual person in front of them can’t get in. The loop isn’t stupidity or stubbornness. It’s a survival pattern, usually learned long before this relationship existed, running on automatic because the nervous system hasn’t yet found reason to do anything different.
You can’t argue a couple out of that loop any more than you could have argued the girl into picking up her drum. The work, before anything else, is creating conditions in which the loop has less to grip onto.
What the inspector was picking up
Back to the woman with the clipboard.
What she was responding to wasn’t the children’s musical ability. It was the quality of the room. A group of ten-year-olds who had genuinely settled into something together, genuinely absorbed and at ease, were producing something that her nervous system could feel. Safety is contagious in that way. When people are truly present with each other, it extends beyond the group. It reaches the observer.
Her tears weren’t a sentimental response to a nice lesson. They were her body’s recognition of something real.
And that field had a source. It doesn’t arise from nowhere. It arises from a regulated adult holding the conditions carefully enough that the people in the room can find their way into it. That’s as true in a therapy room as it was in that school hall. Whatever I’m offering, my own nervous system is always part of what’s on offer. If I’m not settled, the room won’t be either.
Feeling safe in therapy: before the work, the ground
The girl who picked up the drum didn’t do it because someone had set joining in as a goal. She did it because something in the room had shifted enough that her body no longer needed to stay defended. Belonging followed safety. It didn’t precede it.
That sequence matters, and it applies well beyond children. An adult who’s spent decades managing relationships from behind a carefully constructed persona needs the same thing first: a room where the nervous system can gradually find it doesn’t need to be quite so vigilant. A couple who’ve been hurting each other with the same argument for years can’t access the tenderness that’s usually still there somewhere until the bodies in the room feel safe enough to put the armour down.
This is what I understood in those drum circles, and what I’ve carried into every room I’ve sat in since. Before narrative, before insight, before any of the work that requires a settled and thinking mind, the question is always the same: what is this room actually like for the nervous system of the person sitting in it?
Everything else follows from that.
If you’re wondering what it might feel like to work with me, you can read more about my approach here or get in touch for a free introductory call.
What boys are actually given, and what men are left holding
After several sessions with a man I’ve been working with, I found myself thinking it’s like talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.
That thought has stayed with me. Because it’s not just him. I see that boy in almost every man I work with.
They come in presenting as failures. Failing in their relationships, with their children, in their work. And what I actually see is something quite different. I see men who are trying their best with the equipment they were given. Men who are lost not because they’re broken, but because the map they were handed was unreadable.
The handbook no one mentions
Every boy receives a handbook on how to be a man. Nobody passes it over formally. It arrives through a thousand small moments, in what gets praised and what gets shamed, in who cries and who doesn’t, what fathers do with their anger, what they do with their tenderness.
The trouble is that the handbook is garbled. Pages are missing. Others are coffee-stained and half-legible. Some are in the wrong order entirely.
I once heard a man in a group describe his father with genuine love. The fishing trips. The football matches. The sense of being chosen, being included, being seen. And then, in the same breath, the unpredictable rage. The physical violence that arrived without warning.
He couldn’t reject that father. There was too much love in him for that. But he couldn’t follow him either, because the model didn’t hold together. So, he was left, as so many men are left, holding a document that couldn’t be read straight through, trying to assemble something coherent from contradictory instructions.
That’s not absence of love. It’s the presence of love alongside something that makes the love impossible to build on.
What the handbook actually says
The pages that are legible tend to say the same things. Don’t show weakness. Produce. Perform. Be useful. There’s a consistency to that message across most of the male role models boys encounter, whatever else might vary.
The cruel twist is that most of the role models boys actually witness are men failing to meet that standard. Because the standard is unachievable. So what boys learn, in practice, is not how to be the thing the handbook describes. They learn what it looks like when men fall short of it. They learn the shame that follows.
The missing pages, or those obscured by coffee stains, are the ones about vulnerability, emotional expression and tenderness. The instructions on how to be warm without it being reframed as weakness or something worse. They’re difficult to find, written in the margins.
When the instinct itself gets pathologised
It isn’t only that boys aren’t taught how to handle warmth and closeness. It’s that the instinct itself gets taught out of them.
I remember being a boy, perhaps seven or eight, with female cousins I adored, a decade or so older than me, who lived next door. I loved being around them. I was physically affectionate, naturally so, because that’s how I was with people I felt close to.
One day I overheard a conversation between one of my cousins and my mother. The way I was with my hands was being discussed. Not with cruelty, exactly, but with a kind of discomfort, a suggestion that it was too much, that it crossed a line into something that needed reining in. The implication was faintly sexual, though I had no framework for that at the time. I just felt the shame of it.
What I’d lost wasn’t knowledge I’d never had. It was trust in something I’d already known how to do. That feeling, of not knowing how to be around women whose company I enjoyed, of second-guessing warmth, of keeping my hands to myself in ways that felt like self-betrayal, followed me for years. It took a long time in therapy to find my way back to it.
That’s what the garbling does. It doesn’t just leave gaps. It plants doubt in the places where you were most naturally yourself.
The boy is still in the room
The men I work with are carrying that boy with them. The one who wanted to do his best and couldn’t work out how. The one who felt the love and couldn’t make sense of it alongside everything else. The one whose natural expressiveness got redirected or shamed before he had the language to defend it.
By the time they reach a therapy room, these men often experience themselves as failures. In their relationships, with their children, at work. What I see instead is someone still trying to follow instructions that were never coherent to begin with, still measuring themselves against a standard that was always going to be out of reach.
The shame sits right at the centre of it. Not the shame of having done something specific, but the ambient shame of not knowing how to be. Of sensing, somewhere deep down, that everyone else received a readable copy and yours was the damaged one.
On crisis lines and culture change
There’s a lot of conversation at the moment about men’s mental health, about male suicide rates, about what the NHS should be doing. The funding question is real. But even fully funded crisis intervention addresses the problem at the wrong end.
What produces a man in crisis at forty is usually something that began at seven. An education system that pointed boys towards compliance, performance, and emotional suppression rather than curiosity, creativity, and genuine self-expression didn’t help. A culture that handed boys an unachievable model of manhood and then expressed disappointment when they couldn’t meet it did real damage.
What might actually help is something much slower and less measurable: men who’ve done their own work being honest about it, in front of boys. Not performing vulnerability as a technique, but actually modelling what it looks like when a man doesn’t know something and says so. When he gets it wrong and acknowledges it. When he’s moved by something and doesn’t cover it over.
What the work actually is
When I’m working with a man who’s carrying that seven-year-old, I’m not trying to teach him what the handbook should have said. I’m trying to help him locate what he already knew before the handbook arrived and started doing its damage.
That’s usually still in there. The warmth. The expressiveness. The instinct towards closeness. It got covered over or redirected, but it didn’t disappear.
If you recognise the boy in yourself or the garbled handbook you’ve been trying to follow, that recognition is usually the beginning of something. Not a fix. Not a solution. Just the start of being able to read what’s actually there, rather than what you were told should be.
I work with a lot of men, both individually and in couples. It’s not unusual, often several weeks in, for a man to describe either a suicide attempt, a threat he’s made to take his own life, or a period of days, weeks or months when suicidal thoughts have been running around in his head. Often, he’s never shared this with anyone else before sharing it with me. It’s as if there’s nowhere for these thoughts to go. And even coming to therapy wasn’t specifically about suicide. It was much more about relationships, about how to be a man, about how to fit into the world that Western society has created for men.
In the UK, men account for around three-quarters of all suicide deaths. Middle-aged men are consistently the highest risk group. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK. Around 15 men die every day, taking their own lives. Those numbers are shocking, but they don’t tell you what it actually feels like to be that man. This piece is about that.
What the culture teaches men
In white Western culture, men are discouraged from emotional language, particularly in connection with themselves. They’re permitted emotional expression around football, or in the currency of male banter, but the deeper register is closed off early. This does not mean they have no capacity for emotional language, just that they have not been encouraged to use it.
I turned eighteen, and my father invited me to the pub. Before we went in, he said: No sex, religion or politics. He went to the pub most nights and rarely talked about anything emotional. He’d raise his glass and say, ” Don’t let the bastards get you down”. It seemed he didn’t begin to have an emotional life he could actually talk about until he was retired, tending his garden, and several years sober. That was his generation, but I don’t think it’s as different now as we’d like to believe.
What that cultural shaping produces is something I see clearly in the men who sit across from me. It no longer surprises me that when a man begins talking about his relationships, the patterns, the reason he’s turned to alcohol or something else to numb the pain, we quickly arrive somewhere unexpected.
It’s like I’m talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. Without good guidance, he made some poor decisions, and those decisions are now making his life miserable. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.
When the performance becomes unsustainable
Male friendships and networks often function only while everyone’s performing a version of okayness. The pub, the workplace, the football: all of it is conditional on not needing anything real from each other. The moment genuine vulnerability appears, the network has nowhere to put it.
This became unsustainable for me in my twenties. I was drinking too much, driving cars too fast, writing one off, making poor choices in relationships, feeling like life was driving me somewhere I didn’t want to go, rather than me being in the driving seat. By great good fortune, I met my lifelong partner and moved away from the city. But it’s noticeable that I retained no friendships, no connections from that time. No one checked in on me once I’d moved away. Not one person.
That’s not unusual. It’s the ordinary texture of male isolation.
What happens in the body
When a man has spent decades learning it’s not safe to be seen as he really is, the people around him feel they don’t know him. They can’t predict his reactions. They sense a coldness or distance, even if they can’t name it.
I spent many years with what I can only describe as a limiter: something that stopped me from being fully seen. What that meant in practice was staying in jobs where I wasn’t fulfilled, resenting what I was doing, rather than speaking out and moving on to something better suited to me. I see versions of this constantly: men who can’t make decisions, men who feel like a disappointment to everyone, men who carry a secret conviction that something is broken about them that nobody must discover, or they’ll use it against them.
In the body, this shows up as tightness and reactivity. When those feelings become overwhelming, some survival action is taken: withdrawing, disappearing, or self-medicating. Sometimes something more final.
Why men don’t come to therapy
The cultural script says that need equals weakness. Asking for help is a confession of failure.
Many men arrive in therapy only when crisis forces them: a relationship ending, a breakdown, a moment that couldn’t be hidden any longer.
Some arrive earlier, if the framing feels right. What tends to work is an approach that’s practical and non-pathologising, that’s curious about experience rather than focused on diagnosis, that doesn’t require a man to already have the language for what he’s feeling before he walks through the door.
Therapy isn’t another set of rules or requirements to stick to. It’s a space where a man can begin to recognise his actual wants and desires, how to regulate his own emotions, and how to choose connection rather than push the people around him away. That connection begins with connecting with yourself. And in my experience, that’s what gives life its purpose and meaning.
If you’re reading this
If you’ve been holding something alone for a long time, it’s worth a conversation. You don’t need to know what to say or how to say it. You can make contact, and we can take it from there.
If you’re struggling right now, you don’t have to manage it alone.
In the UK, you can contact the Samaritans any time, day or night, on 116 123 — calls are free.
CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) runs a helpline for men at 0800 58 58 58, open 5pm to midnight every day, and also offers a webchat if calling feels like too much.
A personal account of what personal therapy makes possible in the consulting room
Eight years ago, my daughter died by suicide. That fact sits in the room with me every time I work with a client. Most of my long-term clients know it. It’s not something I hide, and it’s not something I’ve resolved. It’s something I carry, and part of my job is to know, at any given moment, how I’m carrying it.
This article is about one session where that carrying became difficult, what happened next, and why I believe the answer to the question “Do I really need personal therapy?” is, for most therapists, yes.
Something in the room
A client I have worked with for some time was talking about the circumstances around her partner’s suicide. She knows about my daughter. That’s part of how we work; I use disclosure as a relational tool, and she had found it useful to know that I had some personal proximity to the kind of loss she was carrying.
As the session progressed, I became aware of growing anxiety in my body. Not thought-level anxiety, the kind you can reason with, but something lower and more physical. I realised she was building towards telling me the specific details of how her partner was found.
I asked her to stop, just for a moment. I needed to regulate. I sat with what was happening in my nervous system, and then I was honest with her: I asked whether we could skirt around those particular details, at least for now. She understood immediately. She was not distressed by the request. Because we had a relational contract, because she knew something of my history, and because I had named what was happening rather than trying to manage it covertly, we could make a joint decision about how to proceed. That’s how I work.
But the session left something unfinished in me.
The next morning
I had a fortnightly appointment with my personal therapist the following morning. I’ve been seeing her for five years. I didn’t know what I was going to bring; I rarely do. What was most alive when I woke was a dream.
In the dream I was in a war zone. There was chaos around me. I was carrying a large assault rifle and being pursued. I took shelter in a cafe. A few minutes later one of my pursuers came in and sat down, ordered coffee, appeared to settle. I was standing in the corner, my rifle propped beside me, and I had to remain still and upright in order to keep it concealed.
My therapist asked me how I had felt on waking from the dream. I told her: calm. Not relieved, not shaken, calm. In the dream I had known what I needed to do and I had been doing it. She asked whether there was any present-day connection. I went straight back to the session the day before.
What the body was holding
We began to look at my nervous system response in that session: the anxiety, the physical signal, the decision to stop. The obvious thread led to my daughter’s death. And as we followed it, I realised something I had not consciously registered before: I had never told anyone the specific details of how she was found. Not my own therapist, not my supervisor, not anyone.
I’m not going to tell you those details here. But I want to tell you what happened when I told her.
I asked my therapist if it was all right to go through it. She held the space. With a great deal of shaking and trembling, I told her everything. As the account came out of me, something began to shift in my body. By the time I had finished, it was as though something in my nervous system had dissolved, or at least loosened its grip. The weight of those specific images, held silently for eight years, had been witnessed.
My supervisor cannot do that work with me. Supervision holds the work; it is where I bring clinical material, ethical questions, and relational dynamics I cannot see clearly. But when something is lodged not in my thinking but in my body, supervision is not the right container. My supervisor has said to me on more than one occasion: “You should take that to personal therapy.” She is right to say it.
What this makes possible
After that session with my therapist, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to offer my client the quality of listening I had withheld. Not because I had been wrong to stop, I had been right to stop, but because I now had more capacity than I had before. Something had been processed that had been blocking me. Next time we meet, I’ll share something of that process with her. We will decide together, as we always do, how to proceed.
This is what personal therapy makes possible. Not the absence of response, therapists are human beings, and we respond, but the ability to stay present with what is difficult rather than being pulled under by it. The difference between a nervous system that can be with a client’s account and one that cannot is not intelligence or training. It is the degree to which our own unprocessed material has been worked with.
If you’re carrying something and you haven’t given it a proper place to land, it will find one in the room. It will show up in what you cannot hear, what you deflect, what you subtly redirect. Your clients will feel it even when they cannot name it.
A professional necessity, not a personal indulgence
There are therapists who treat personal therapy as a requirement to be fulfilled during training and then quietly set aside. I understand the logic: time is limited, fees accumulate, and once you’re qualified the external pressure disappears. But the argument for continuing is not about compliance. It’s about what you’re actually offering in the room.
I have been in practice for a number of years. I still carry material that surfaces unexpectedly. I still dream things that turn out to be directly connected to my clinical work. I still need a space where I’m the client and someone else is holding the frame. That’s not a sign of inadequacy; it’s a sign of ongoing engagement with the work.
I don’t go to therapy purely for my own benefit. I go to be in a position to serve my clients better.
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I read Iron John when it came out in 1990. I was 36, working as a performing storyteller, and it made immediate sense. Robert Bly’s book sold millions and launched what became known as the mythopoetic men’s movement: a widespread cultural moment in which men gathered in groups, retreated into nature, beat drums, and tried to reclaim what modern industrial life had supposedly stripped from them.
Bly reached into Norse and European mythology and said: something has been lost, and it matters. Around the same time, I was going to men’s groups, sitting in sweat lodges borrowed from Native American tradition, doing vision quests, exploring tantric sex. As a young man who had recently become a father, making compromises and sacrifices I hadn’t anticipated, I found something genuinely useful in all of it.
But something was missing, and it took me a while to name it.
Those groups weren’t only men. Women were there too, and we were all seeking the same thing: the inner warrior, the deep fierce purposeful self. At the time that felt inclusive. Looking back, what I notice is that a particular version of masculinity, Western, traditional, warrior-shaped, was being held up as the template for human wholeness. Not just for men. For everyone. And nobody was questioning the template itself.
A Body That Didn’t Fit
I grew up with five brothers, most of them emphatically on the masculine side of things physically. One was covered in hair at sixteen. I was in my thirties when I grew my first chest hair. It took real effort to grow a moustache. Even in my sixties, the beard comes in patchy. So doing those masculine things in my thirties was genuinely affirmative. I’m not dismissing that. But what I was actually doing, though I couldn’t have said it then, was finding a version of masculinity that could include me, not becoming the template.
Because the template never quite fits. And I don’t think it fits most people, if we’re honest.
Recently I watched a woman describe her experience of being intersex. Her body developed testes but couldn’t assimilate testosterone, and so developed externally as female. A coherent biological variation, one of many that occur naturally across the human population. The medical profession, confronted with something that didn’t fit the category, removed the testes without her consent when she was a teenager. The anomaly had to go. The category had to be preserved.
That’s not medicine responding to a problem. That’s a template being enforced on a body that didn’t conform to it.
What’s Already There
I’m a psychotherapist now, working relationally, in what is an almost entirely female profession. I’m not uncomfortable with that. My feminine qualities sit alongside my masculine ones, and always have. I think that’s true for most people. Western culture has pushed those qualities apart, named them opposites, and planted people at one end of the spectrum yearning for what’s at the other end, without recognising that what they’re looking for is already in them. It’s somewhere between the two. It doesn’t need to be created. It needs to be uncovered.
The Handbooks Arrive
Which brings me to a pattern I’ve been noticing on social media: a steady stream of book promotions, one after another, all circling the same territory. The books have titles like Ideal Man: Reviving Masculinity and The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health. They are promoted as landmark, ground-breaking, comprehensive. Some of them do important work: male suicide rates are real, help-seeking barriers are real, the way Western psychotherapy has historically ignored or pathologised male distress is real. These are legitimate concerns and they deserve serious attention.
But the subject of these books, the man whose psychology is being mapped and whose masculinity is being revived, is quietly assumed rather than examined. He is straight, cisgender, and Western.
Gay men, bisexual men, trans men, and men from cultures that have always held gender more fluidly appear occasionally in a subordinate clause about intersectionality, then disappear. The template is back. Just wearing a research methodology.
The WEIRD Problem
This isn’t new. It’s the same move that Western psychology has always made, constructing a baseline from a narrow demographic slice and then universalising it. Researchers have a name for it: the WEIRD problem, shorthand for the tendency to build psychological models almost entirely on Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic populations, and then treat the results as universal human truths.
The male psychology movement hasn’t escaped this. In some ways, it has doubled down on it because its political energy depends on “men” being a coherent, legible category with shared interests and a recoverable identity.
The Binary Was Imposed
The colonial parallel is worth exploring. Many indigenous cultures around the world recognised more than two genders long before European contact. Two-Spirit identities in numerous Native American traditions, Hijra in South Asia, Fa’afafine in Samoa: these are not modern inventions or Western imports. They are ways of holding human variation that existed for centuries.
Colonisation actively suppressed them, through missionary activity, through legal systems that criminalised gender nonconformity, through the imposition of European binary categories onto bodies and communities that had never organised themselves that way. The binary wasn’t discovered. It was enforced.
And now, apparently, it is being revived and sold as a return to health.
It Isn’t Consensus
I’m not trying to make an argument. I’m just noticing the volume of noise, and noticing that it doesn’t match my experience of being human, or the experience of most people I sit with in the therapy room. It’s a loud, well-resourced, self-referential ecosystem that has learned to sound like consensus.
Right now, as I write this, I am picking my nails, pulling at my beard, pushing my thumb into the palm of my hand. This is the first paragraph of an article on anxiety, and my body knows it. Something is building, something I am not quite sure about, something that could be hard. And yet I know that once I get going, I will be fine.
That is anxiety. Not a disorder. Not a malfunction. Information.
If you have arrived here after searching the word “anxiety,” you will have passed through an overwhelming wave of diagnoses, categories, techniques, potions, mindfulness scripts and breathing exercises, all of them premised on the same assumption: that anxiety is something wrong with you, something to be reduced, managed or cured. This article is not that.
A natural phenomenon, not a disorder
When we name something a disorder, curiosity stops. We label it, file it, fix it. We begin to relate to it from a cognitive distance, as though it were happening to us rather than in us, as though it were an intruder rather than a messenger. Every nervous system response is a natural phenomenon. Anxiety is no exception. It is your body doing something for a reason, and the most useful question you can ask is not “how do I make this stop” but “what is this telling me, and is it still relevant?”
It starts in the body, and it starts early
My earliest memory of anxiety is vivid. I am three or four years old, in my aunt’s garden, digging with a red-handled metal fork. A bee appears. I know bees sting, so I step back. Flight. But the bee seems to follow me, so I pick up the fork and wave it in front of me. Fight. I end up running around the garden, fork raised, a bee apparently in determined pursuit. My nervous system was doing exactly what nature designed it to do: read a signal, generate a response, and move me towards safety.
Not long after, I refused to go to the school canteen. It was noisy, full of older children, nothing like the warm familiarity of home. I sat down in the classroom and cried. Eventually, my father came. He took my hand and walked me into that tin-shed of a room with its hundred children and crashing acoustics. He sat me next to a girl I felt safe with, and that was enough. My nervous system settled because the relational context had changed. I was not broken. I was responding. And what settled me was not a technique or a strategy; it was the felt safety of another person.
How a response becomes a pattern
Well into my twenties, I was still having a physical reaction to bees and wasps. I would freeze, shut my eyes, try to pretend I was not afraid, though my body told a different story entirely. It had logged that early experience and kept the file open.
Then, as a primary school teacher, a bee got into the classroom. Children were shouting, running, and screaming. I was the adult in the room. I found a glass and a piece of card, captured the bee, opened the window and let it go. From that day on, my body stopped reacting as it once had. The pattern broke, not through a technique or a course of treatment, but through action in a relational context, being the person someone else needed me to be.
This is how anxiety works. It begins as a genuine response to something real. Over time, the nervous system learns to anticipate, to fire early, to stay on alert in situations that echo the original one, even when the actual danger is long gone. It is not irrational. It is a pattern, wired in for good reasons, and it can be rewired.
When anxiety takes over
I have been a performer most of my adult life, and I learned early on to recognise performance anxiety as excitement, energy I could channel rather than suppress. But I have also had social anxiety so severe that I could not easily speak to people. My response was cigarettes and a great deal of beer, enough to get me through the door. It helped in the short term, but it did not touch the anxiety itself. If anything, the anxiety grew, became less predictable, harder to read.
And then there was The Gambia.
The breaking point
I was leading a group on an African drumming trip when one of the group members became seriously ill and died. After contacting the insurers, arranging accommodation, and ensuring everyone got home safely, I was calm, practical, and present, the person the situation required. That evening, I sat in the bar with a friend, and we talked it through. Everything felt steady.
Then I got up to walk to the toilet, and I fainted.
I came round to find four men carrying me through the streets, aloft, running, shouting, taking me to the nearby hospital, the same hospital where she had died. Passing that room again felt surreal. The rest of the night passed in that same ward. When the doctor discharged me the following morning, I asked him whether I was going to die. He said no. He said I had had a panic attack.
My nervous system is wired for movement, organisation and decisive action under stress. That is what it did, and it did it well. But it has an overload point. What I understand now, looking back, is that I might have reached that point later, or not at all, had I allowed myself to share the weight with my friend that evening rather than holding it alone, telling him not just what had happened, but how it felt to be the one responsible. The nervous system settles in the presence of another person. That is not a weakness. That is how we are built.
What actually helps
There are no universal techniques. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What matters is noticing: noticing what your body is doing, and finding a way to shift the energy in whatever way works for you in that moment. Scrolling on your phone is a mild anxiety symptom. What can you do as you swipe through that essential video of a dog rescuing a duck from a raging river? Notice it, stop, go for a walk in the park. When you find yourself checking your emails every thirty seconds, bake a cake. When your attention scatters, try focusing on one thing or one person, completely and without distraction.
As a pianist, I used to shake my hands and flex my fingers for a full minute before sitting down to play. It was my way of moving the energy through rather than sitting on it. More recently, in Zoom training sessions, I found my attention drifting, my hands rubbing together, unable to engage with what was in front of me. I bought a fidget toy. It worked: a small, quiet outlet for the energy, and I could stay present.
The question worth asking yourself is this: Is the anxiety pulling you into the present moment, or is it pulling you out? The answer usually tells you something about what it needs.
A word, if you have been given a diagnosis
A doctor may have diagnosed you with an anxiety disorder, recommended CBT, or prescribed medication – or all three. I am not here to dismiss any of that. What I am suggesting is something that can sit alongside it: a more personal curiosity about what is actually happening in your body, and what stories your mind is constructing around it. Anxiety is often protecting you from something. It is worth asking what that is, and whether the protection is still necessary, or whether it belongs to an earlier chapter of your life.
What your body already knows
For most of us, most of the time, anxiety is not a disorder. It is a nervous system doing its job, a body that learned something once and has not yet been shown that things have changed. It is information, sometimes urgent, sometimes subtle, always worth attending to.
Your body generated this anxiety. It is quite capable of living with it, channelling it, moving it on.
You do not need to make it go away. You need to listen to what it is telling you.
Many people now turn to AI chatbots or social media for mental health advice before speaking to a professional. This article explores how these tools can both help and mislead, and how therapy can offer a grounded space to make sense of what you discover online.
A client once told me their chatbot had confirmed that all their symptoms pointed to a genetic mental illness.
They had lived for years in fear of a parent and were now beginning trauma recovery. It is true that long-term trauma can sometimes affect physical and mental health, but this person was already in therapy and beginning to find hope.
Bringing those fears into therapy became a turning point. Together, we looked beneath the surface and found an old belief that they might be permanently damaged. Through connection and understanding, that belief began to lose its grip.
Healing from trauma takes time. It is not about finding quick explanations but about helping the body and mind feel safe again. Progress grows from patience, persistence and secure relationships, whether through family, friends or therapy.
How we arrived here
By 2025, most people begin their search for mental health information online. It has been building for decades:
2000s: Search engines and symptom checkers such as WebMD start to shape how people understand illness.
2013: Crisis Text Line launches and text-based support becomes normal.
2020: TikTok turns into a global space for mental health conversations.
2023: The platform adds direct links to professional resources.
2024: AI chatbots start offering “therapy” at any hour.
2025: Research shows that many viral mental-health videos still spread false or simplified information.
With so much advice online, confusion is understandable.
Bringing AI into therapy
In my practice, I encourage people to talk about any source that has influenced how they think about their well-being. That might be a book, a video, a podcast, social media content or an AI app.
These tools are not new in spirit. Self-help books have offered neat solutions for decades, sometimes helpful and sometimes misleading. AI is simply the latest version of the same search for guidance.
If a client mentions a resource, I may look it up or ask for a short summary so that we can make sense of it together. The aim is not to judge but to understand how it fits into their personal story. Whatever a person brings into the room, we explore it within the safety of a real relationship.
Using AI with care
Technology will keep changing, but healing will always depend on human connection.
AI can be a useful reflection tool, a way to clarify thoughts or rehearse conversations, yet it cannot replace the experience of being understood by another person.
The goal is not to reject AI altogether but to learn to use it thoughtfully. When clients and therapists speak openly about what is helpful and what is not, the digital world becomes a little safer and a little kinder for everyone.
