Most people arrive in therapy hoping I’ve got the answer. That somewhere in my training, or my experience, or my head, is the thing that will sort this out, and the work is getting me to hand it over.
I haven’t got it. You have.
That isn’t me dodging the job. It is the job.
Where did I learn this?
I didn’t learn it in a therapy room. I learned it as a teacher, years before I trained as a counsellor.
I trained in a child-centred approach, and one idea sat at the heart of it: children learn what they discover for themselves. Not what they’re told, not what they’re made to repeat back, but what they work out from the inside. Tell a child the answer, and they retain it until the test. Let them find it out for themselves, and it’s theirs for good. The research has said the same for decades.
That principle followed me into the therapy room and never left. Adults are no different. The realisation you reach yourself changes you. The one I hand you is a nice idea you’ll have forgotten by next week.
The spider and the web
Someone I worked with for several months arrived tangled in a relationship that had taken over far more of their life than it had any right to. We spent month after month looking at relationships, past and present, all over the place. We weren’t hunting for an answer. We were just looking.
Then one day they came in with an image they’d made themselves.
When they’d first arrived, they said, they’d been like a spider cowering in the corner of its web, frightened of everything that touched it, because every vibration was a mystery and any mystery might be a threat. Now it was different. Now it was as though they sat above the web, looking down. When something set the threads trembling, they knew at once what it was: a real danger, or something they could deal with without a second thought.
I didn’t give them that picture. They built it. And they’re the one living differently now, because of it.
Why I won’t just tell you what to do
I’ve offered that spider to other people since. It’s a good image, and sometimes it helps. But it has never reorganised a life the way it reorganised the life of the person who created it. And the reason is simple: they made it, and everyone else was handed it.
That’s the whole thing in one story. A truth you arrive at yourself is a different thing from the same truth passed across the room, even when the words are identical. The first rearranges how you see your life. The other is just something your therapist said.
So when you come to me wanting the answer, and I don’t reach into my pocket and produce one, that isn’t me holding out on you. It’s me refusing to rob you of the thing that would actually make a difference in the long term.
My commitment isn’t to give you answers. It’s to help you find your own. They’re already in there. My work is the conditions that help you to reach them.
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.
If you’re a parent trying to reach a struggling teenager, that blank stare is probably familiar. Have you ever wondered about the meaning of it, that look you get when you ask, over spaghetti bolognese on a Tuesday evening, what they did at school today? You’re hoping to hear about an inspiring lesson, a breakthrough moment, something that tells you they’re okay. But what comes back is nothing. Just the stare.
Here’s what’s behind it.
Their day has been consumed not by physics or history but by the social minefield of being young. Who said what to whom. What that message actually meant. Whether that look was hostile or just distracted. Whether they fit in or didn’t, and what to do about it either way. By the time they walk through your door, they’re not withholding from you. They’re exhausted. And now you’re asking them to explain something they don’t have words for, to someone they suspect might try to fix it, or panic, or both.
That’s not a criticism. It comes from love. But it lands as pressure.
The world a young person navigates is genuinely relentless. They’re trying to work out who to be with this friend and who to be with that teacher and who to be at home, and none of those versions quite match. The image that opens this article carries a phrase that I hear underneath a lot of what young people bring into a room with me:
I don’t know who to be or what to do.
That’s just what it feels like to be young and trying to make sense of a complicated world without quite enough self to do it yet.
When helping makes it worse
When we see a young person struggling, the instinct is to do something. Sort it out. Speak to the school. Have a word with the other parent. Make it stop.
I worked with a boy who was being bullied because other kids had decided he was gay. He hadn’t told his parents. When I asked him why, he said he knew what would happen: his mum would go into school, and then everyone would know, and it would be worse. He was right to be cautious. His mum did find out, and she did go in, and within days there had been a school assembly on homophobia. She’d acted from love and genuine concern. But what she’d inadvertently done was force her son to come out, publicly, before he was ready.
That’s not a story about bad parenting. It’s a story about what happens when the urge to fix overtakes the capacity to stay. The boy didn’t need the problem solved. He needed someone to sit with him in it first.
Connection happens in the body, not just the mind
We tend to think of connection as something that happens between minds. Words exchanged. Thoughts understood. But that’s only part of it, and probably not the most important part.
When two people are genuinely present with each other, something happens at a physical level. Breathing. Heart rate. The whole nervous system begins to settle, or doesn’t, depending on the quality of the contact. A young person who is flooded with stress or shut down with exhaustion can’t think clearly, can’t find words, can’t make sense of their own experience. What they need first isn’t a conversation. It’s a body to be near that isn’t also alarmed.
Think of a parent and child doing something together without any agenda. Building something. Kicking a ball about. Cooking. Fishing. Not talking much, just doing. That shared activity does something that conversation often can’t: it creates a kind of contact that doesn’t require explanation or performance. The young person doesn’t have to produce anything. They just have to be there. And in being there, something settles.
The parent has provided a connection without strings, without pressure.
What you can offer that no strategy can
Connection needs the right conditions. It can’t be rushed, demanded, or scheduled into a twenty-minute slot between homework and bedtime.
If mealtimes are where you want to reach your child, the quality of that time matters more than what’s said in it. No phones, not because it’s a rule, but because anything that breaks the contact breaks the possibility of connection. A slowed-down, unhurried atmosphere. Taking it seriously without making it serious. You’re not trying to extract information. You’re just being together.
And here’s what the research on this suggests: a young person who experiences that kind of safe, unpressured presence with a parent carries it with them. It becomes part of how they understand what relationships can feel like. It gives them something to return to.
If they mention something they saw on the way home, or something a friend said that confused them, let that be enough. You don’t need to solve it. You just need to receive it.
There is no getting it right
If you’re reading this and thinking you’ve been getting it wrong, I want to say something directly: there is no right or wrong in parenting. There’s only the question of whether you can be present with your child.
As they get older, that becomes harder. They’ll push you away. Your presence will irritate them. They’ll seem to want nothing to do with you. But the truth is that knowing you’re there, without pressure, without control, without judgement, gives them something they can’t get anywhere else. It gives them somewhere to come back to.
What young people are doing, all through adolescence, is moving back and forth between you and the world. They step away, make mistakes, figure things out, and step back. What makes that possible is knowing that you as the fallback exists. That you’re still there when they return.
You don’t need to put them on the right path. You don’t need to fix what’s going wrong. You just need to be there, steadily, as they work out who they are.
That image of the boy, not knowing who to be or what to do, isn’t a permanent state. It’s a question the young person is living. Your steady presence is part of how they find the answer.
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.
Look at the image at the top of this post. Have you ever felt stuck in a pattern, just like this image suggests?
On the left, a skull, chained and padlocked, sealed inside a glass case. On the right, a living brain, richly coloured, roots trailing like a nervous system still reaching, perched on a surfboard.
I’ve been sitting with that image all week. It does something that a thousand words of neuroscience struggle to do. It says it in one frame.
What neuroscience is telling us about trauma and the brain
Recent advances in our understanding of the brain have given us a useful idea. In a healthy mind, neural networks move fluidly between states, integrating, separating, reconfiguring in response to what’s happening. The system is flexible. It can be surprised, moved, changed by experience, and return to itself afterwards.
Neuroscientists call that metastability.
Trauma destroys it. The brain locks into a narrow loop, stuck on one channel, unable to shift. Not because something is stored in the tissue, but because the system has learned that movement itself is dangerous. Stay still. Stay defended. Stay right.
That’s the skull in the glass case. And the padlock, if you look carefully, is on the inside.
The ocean, the board, and what I learned before I had words for it
I grew up in Bude. The sound of the ocean was a constant companion; I could just peek it from my attic window. I learned to read weather in it before I knew what I was doing: the ebb and flow, the change in rhythm before a storm. There was information in that sound, and something settling in it too. I didn’t have the word for it then, but I was learning something about what it means to move with what’s coming rather than brace against it.
Many of my clients surf. It would surprise me if they didn’t. We live on the North Cornwall coast, and the sea is always there. I understand the flow state they’re describing, that quality of complete absorption where thinking stops and something else takes over. For me, it’s jazz piano. Facing the technical demands of the music, at a certain point, I’m no longer planning or deciding. I’m simply in it, and whatever wants to come out comes out. The board and the keys are different instruments for the same thing: the brain finding its way back to the freedom of childhood imagination.
When guilt becomes the padlock
Can you imagine a client whose flow state is surfing, and yet he can barely get to the beach? Not because of injury or illness. Because the responsibilities of work and family have slowly closed around him, and somewhere in that closing, pleasure started to feel like selfishness. The paddle out, the hour in the water, the thing that restores him most reliably, now arrives wrapped in guilt. So he doesn’t go. The padlock goes back on, this time not from trauma in any clinical sense, but from the accumulated weight of obligation and the gradual withdrawal of giving himself permission to be fully alive.
That’s metastability collapsing in ordinary life. The system can’t move toward what would restore it because moving has come to feel dangerous, self-indulgent, and wrong.
When being right becomes a matter of survival
And then there’s a different kind of locked brain. Can you imagine a client who must never lose an argument? Not because they’re arrogant, but because somewhere along the way, losing ground came to feel like losing themselves entirely. The self is too fragile to risk contact without armour. So arguments get created where none exist. Positions get defended past the point of reason. And the people around them, partners, friends, colleagues, gradually stop trying to reach them. The very rigidity designed to protect the self ends up isolating it.
That’s the glass case with the padlock on the inside. The system can’t be moved, can’t be influenced without feeling annihilated, and can’t lose an argument and still find itself intact on the other side.
Two very different people. The same image.
What the therapy room actually offers
What the therapy room offers, when it’s working, is a place where movement becomes possible again. Where the client who’s locked out his own pleasure can sit with someone who takes his aliveness seriously. Where the client who can’t lose an argument can be genuinely met without being beaten, and discover that the ground doesn’t disappear when they yield a little.
That’s not technique. It’s not cognitive retraining or processing stored content. It’s the therapist being present enough, free enough in themselves, to model what metastability actually feels like in a human body, in a room, in a relationship. The surfer who knows how to ride uncertainty rather than lock it away.
Healing isn’t excavation. It’s the return of movement.
Neuroscience is catching up with what relational practitioners have always known. Flexibility, genuine contact, the productive uncertainty of real relationship: these aren’t nice extras. They’re the thing itself.
The brain on the surfboard isn’t free because nothing bad ever happened to it. It’s free because it has learned to move again.
A Guardian report this week shows misogynistic abuse of female teachers rising sharply. The response from the Department for Education is more guidance.
Misogyny in schools is getting worse. A union survey of 5,000 teachers found that misogynistic abuse of female staff has climbed from 17.4% in 2023 to 23.4% this year. Nearly a quarter of female teachers, in a profession that is over 70% female, report being targeted. Called “love.” Told to “calm down.” Sexualised. Mocked. One teacher had nude AI images made of her by a student. This week, The Guardian reported on the crisis, and the Department for Education responded with more guidance. That’s not going to be enough
The Department for Education’s response was to say that misogynistic views are not innate, they’re learned, and to point toward updated relationships and health education guidance. They’re not wrong that these views are learned. But they’re looking in the wrong place for where the learning happens.
The school created the problem it’s now trying to solve
I was a boy who didn’t fit in. In the 1960s, that was very clearly defined. Boys did woodwork and science, girls did cooking and needlework. I was more interested in music and art and was, quite literally, not permitted to pursue them. So I stopped trying to comply. I found my sense of belonging elsewhere, in pop culture, in rock music, in the Woodstock generation. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and a culture grounded in the language of peace and connection.
The culture boys are swimming in online today is very different from what it was. But the school experience that drives them toward it isn’t.
OFSTED, the national curriculum, and the relentless pressure of assessment-driven learning all create a culture where personal passion, creative expression, and emotional authenticity are, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, a distraction. Emotional support, where it exists at all in schools, is frequently used as a tool to return pupils to compliance with the system rather than to genuinely meet them where they are.
You can’t squeeze out everything that makes a boy feel like himself, offer him nothing real in its place, and then be surprised when someone else steps in to fill the vacuum.
The manosphere borrowed its language from us
In the 1990s I got involved in the mythopoetic men’s movement. Robert Bly had published Iron John, and something in it resonated. Men and women gathering in fields, sitting around fires, drumming, singing in four-part harmony, finding what Bly called the wild man, the deep self that modern life had buried. It wasn’t macho. It wasn’t about dominance. It was about recovering something authentic that the world kept asking you to suppress. I recognised that hunger immediately.
Later, I drifted into the business coaching and self-development world. Same language, different destination. Boundaries, accountability, inner work, potential, healing: all of it is still there, but now in service of personal success, financial freedom, and breaking through your limitations to get what you want. I never quite bought it. There was always something hollow at the centre of it. But I watched a lot of men buy it completely, and I understood why. It sounded like the real thing. It used all the same words.
What the manosphere did was take that already-drifting language and push it further still. The message became clear. The therapy world, the self-development world, the whole culture of emotional intelligence and healthy relationships, all of it has been lying to you. We’re telling you the truth. The truth being that dominance is natural, that women respect power, that your softness has been manufactured to serve someone else’s agenda.
It’s a con, but an effective one. I can see the path that leads a young man toward it, because I walked a version of that path myself. If no one’s ever offered you something genuine, the counterfeit is harder to spot.
I know what boys actually need, because I’ve seen it work
In the 1980s, I worked in a residential therapeutic community for fifty boys who had nowhere else to go. These were boys whom the system had completely failed. What they responded to wasn’t more structure, more targets, more guidance. It was space.
I remember one twelve-year-old who couldn’t manage relationships with his parents or foster carers, who sat in his seat staring out of the window each day. One day, he started drawing the tree outside the window. It was very accomplished. Then I let him take his sketchpad outside. Then to the farm, to draw the buildings and the animals. He began to engage with education for the first time in his life. By the time he was sixteen, he’d found pottery, done it entirely on his own terms, and got a GCSE in it. It was the only one he got. It was his.
That’s what genuine support for boys and men looks like. Not forcing them into a role. Not offering them a different version of the same compliance. Seeing them for who they actually are, and allowing them to develop, from the inside out, a real sense of themselves and their responsibility to the people around them.
Boys don’t need to be told to earn more, dominate more, or control more. They don’t need a better curriculum on healthy relationships delivered by a teacher who’s been given half a day of training. They need someone to sit with them in their actual experience and take it seriously.
So what now
I married at nineteen with no real model for intimacy or a relationship. I had no idea what it meant to actually be present with another person. It took years, therapy, a different kind of culture, and a great deal of my own work to begin to understand it. I was lucky. I found people and spaces that offered something real.
Most boys today aren’t finding those spaces in schools. They’re not finding them anywhere that matters. They’re finding Andrew Tate.
If we want to change what boys are learning about masculinity, we need to look honestly at what we’ve failed to offer them: creative expression, emotional authenticity, genuine belonging, and the experience of being seen as an individual rather than a compliance problem.
More guidance from the Department for Education won’t touch it. Less government pressure on schools to perform arbitrary assessment targets might begin to. Adults, parents, educators and practitioners who are willing to be genuinely present with boys rather than managing them. That’s where the real work is.
The manosphere is filling a vacuum. The question is who created it.
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.
If this article has brought up difficult feelings
This article discusses suicide and suicide bereavement. If you’re struggling, please reach out.
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You’ve been here before. You tried therapy, it didn’t quite feel right, and now you’re left wondering what that means. Was it your fault? Are you too complicated, too resistant, too broken for it to work? Did you do it wrong somehow, or is therapy simply not for you? Finding the right therapist is harder than anyone tells you, and when it doesn’t work out, the easiest person to blame is yourself.
It probably isn’t any of those things. The fit was wrong, or the approach was wrong, or the level of work was wrong for where you were at the time. That matters more than most people realise, and nobody tells you this when you’re starting out.
I’ve had several different therapists over forty years, for many different reasons. Some felt right. Some were limited in their helpfulness. And some have been an absolute haven. The difference was rarely about their qualifications or experience.
The right therapy for the right season
At a very raw time, a bereavement counsellor handed me a paper assessment form. I started ticking boxes, felt something in me resist, screwed it up and threw it in the bin. She didn’t seem to mind. I carried on seeing her for a few weeks because I desperately needed some support, and she provided it.
But that was containment, not the deeper work. She was right for that occasion. What I needed then was someone steady to sit with me while things were very raw. Most people aren’t told there’s a difference between that kind of support and longer-term relational work. If therapy felt surface-level or the changes didn’t stick, it may simply be that you were offered crisis support when what you needed was something slower and more relational, or the other way around. That’s not failure, it’s simply a mismatch.
When the approach gets in the way
On a couple of occasions, my partner and I saw a sex therapist together. In each case it wasn’t particularly helpful. It felt more like being in a remedial class at school, being handed homework to get us back up to scratch. The therapist wasn’t really relating to us as a couple; we were being put through a process rather than being understood for who we were and what the issues actually meant on a deeper level.
We later found tantra groups where we were encouraged to explore massage, mindfulness and breathing. We were getting to know our own bodies and what we needed, rather than following someone else’s protocol. The difference was simple: in one setting we were a presenting problem to be corrected; in the other, we were two people trying to understand ourselves.
That distinction seems important. A therapist who is more interested in applying their model than in understanding you will leave you feeling processed. You might not be able to name it at the time, but you’ll feel it.
What a good fit actually feels like
I’ve been seeing my current therapist for over three years. I cycle to her each fortnight with a few thoughts going through my head, but I never arrive with an agenda. Stuff just spills out. She knows my background, elements of my childhood, my relationships, the highs and lows of life past and present. She knows about the imagery of my inner child and parts of my experience where feelings are more vivid than factual detail. Each session takes us on a journey inwards.
As we come to a close, she asks what I’m doing afterwards. It started as a way of reminding me to ground myself before getting back into ordinary life. Now she knows the answer: I will find a café, order a hot coffee and something comforting to eat, and spend at least an hour alone. No social contact, no talking, no scrolling. Just sitting with whatever happened in the room, letting it settle.
That question, “What are you doing after this?”, is a small thing. But it tells me everything about how she sees me. She is thinking about me as a whole person, not just the fifty minutes. She wants to know I’ll be alright when I walk out the door.
That is what a good fit feels like from the inside. You arrive without a plan, something moves anyway, and afterwards you need to be alone because you’re full.
So what are you actually looking for?
Not credentials. Not a long list of models and modalities. Those things matter less than you’ve been led to believe.
Start with the profile. Does something in it connect with you? Does this person seem interested in people, or in problems? If nothing lands, move on.
If something does, there’s often a phone call. Notice how you feel during it. Do you feel heard, right there in those ten minutes? That’s information.
If you get to a first session, notice what happens in the room. Do you feel like a person or a case? Are they following you, or leading you through their process?
And pay attention to the hour after. Do you need to sit quietly and let things settle, or are you left with a vague sense of discomfort and unfinished business? Both can be useful information, but they’re different kinds.
The felt sense of a session is data. Your body is registering something your mind hasn’t caught up with yet.
If therapy didn’t work before, you probably knew something was off. You just didn’t know you were allowed to trust that feeling. You are.
