Luke Row, therapist in Croydon
The therapy profession is roughly 80% female. When people find out what I do, there's often a beat of surprise. Not shock, just a slight recalibration. Sometimes it's followed by "oh, that's really good, we need more men doing that," which is well-intentioned but tells you something about the assumption underneath: that a man choosing this work is unusual enough to be worth commenting on.
It is unusual. And the reasons it's unusual are worth thinking about, because they connect directly to the reasons some people specifically want to work with a male therapist, and to the reasons gender matters in the therapeutic relationship at all.
There's a script for masculinity in this country that most men absorb before they have the ability to question it. It goes something like: be competent, be self-sufficient, fix problems rather than feel them, and whatever you do, don't be the person who needs help. Certainly don't be the person who makes a career out of sitting with other people's pain.
Therapy is a profession built on emotional attunement, on being present with distress without trying to immediately resolve it, on tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty. It asks you to sit with someone in their worst moments and resist the urge to offer solutions. To be moved by what you hear without being destabilised by it. To hold space. I know that phrase has been ruined by wellness culture, but the actual thing it describes is real and demanding.
None of that maps easily onto what men are taught to value. We're taught to act, to fix, to be the steady one who doesn't wobble. The idea of spending your working life sitting quietly while someone tells you about their childhood isn't just counter-cultural for men - for a lot of men, it would feel like a kind of failure. Like admitting you couldn't hack it in the real world, so you retreated into a room with a box of tissues and a concerned expression.
I chose this work anyway. Not because I'm some enlightened exception to masculinity, but because my own life fell apart badly enough that I had to learn a different way of being with myself and other people. The version of masculinity I'd been performing (capable, contained, unbothered) turned out to be a prison I'd built from the inside. Therapy was how I got out. And the work itself became the thing that made more sense to me than anything I'd done before.
Here's the thing about working with a therapist who's a man: it's not neutral. No therapeutic relationship is neutral, but gender adds a particular charge that's worth being honest about.
If your father was distant, authoritarian, absent, unpredictable, and you walk into a room with a man who's asking you to be open and vulnerable, something gets activated. Not always consciously. You might find yourself performing competence, trying to impress, minimising your difficulties. You might find yourself waiting for judgement, bracing for dismissal. You might notice that you're editing yourself, choosing which emotions are acceptable to show in front of this person who is, after all, a man.
That's not a problem. That's the work.
In psychodynamic therapy, we call this transference: the way you unconsciously bring old relationship patterns into the present one. Every therapeutic relationship has it. But when the therapist is a man, it can activate very specific material. Stuff about authority. About whether it's safe to be vulnerable in front of someone who might use it against you. About what men are supposed to do with tenderness and what happens when they actually offer it.
For some people, working with a male therapist means confronting directly the thing they've been avoiding: what it feels like to be truly seen by a man who isn't going to fix you, compete with you, or tell you to get on with it.
There's another side to this, and it's particularly relevant for men who come to therapy.
When a man sits in front of a female therapist, there can be a layer of translation that gets in the way. Not always, and I want to be careful here, because plenty of female therapists are brilliant with male clients. But sometimes the experience of being a man in this culture can be hard to convey to someone who hasn't lived inside it. The particular loneliness of it. The way competence substitutes for connection. The silent terror of being found out as someone who doesn't actually know what he's doing.
It's not that women can't understand men's inner lives. Of course they can. But there's a difference between understanding something and recognising it. Between having something explained to you and nodding because you already know.
When a man comes to therapy and says "I don't know how to talk about this," the thing he's not saying is often: I've never been in a situation where talking about this was expected of me. Where it was safe. Where it wouldn't be used as evidence of weakness.
With a male therapist, there can be an implicit permission. Not because men are better at understanding men. That would be simplistic. But because the very fact of sitting across from a man who does this work for a living, who has chosen emotional depth as a profession, who is visibly unashamed of it, can loosen something. It signals that this version of masculinity exists. That you don't have to choose between being a man and being someone who feels things deeply.
I'm not suggesting this is universal. Some men specifically want a female therapist, and there are good unconscious reasons for that too. The point isn't that one gender is better. It's that gender is live in the room, and pretending it's irrelevant is a missed opportunity.
I don't sit here performing some softer version of masculinity to make a point. That would be its own kind of theatre.
What I try to do is be honest. About the fact that I'm a man who chose work the culture says men shouldn't want. About the fact that I understand the particular defences men build, because I built them myself. The competence, the stoicism, the humour that keeps everything at arm's length. About the fact that dismantling those defences is terrifying and necessary and that I know what it costs because I've done it.
When someone sits across from me and can't quite make eye contact because what they're about to say feels too vulnerable, I know that look. When someone deflects into problem-solving mode the moment a feeling surfaces, I recognise the mechanism. When someone says "I'm fine" in a voice that suggests they are anything but, I don't need to decode it. I've spoken that language fluently.
This isn't about shared experience being sufficient. It isn't. A male therapist who hasn't done his own deep work is just a man in a chair with a qualification. But when the personal understanding and the clinical training meet, something becomes available that's hard to replicate.
I want to be clear about something: choosing a therapist based on gender alone would be a mistake. What matters most is whether you feel something in the room - a sense that this person can hold what you're bringing, that they're not frightened by it, that they understand something about you without you having to explain everything from scratch.
But gender is information. It shapes what becomes possible in the relationship. It determines which unconscious patterns get activated and which stay dormant. It affects what feels safe to say and what remains unspoken.
A woman working with a male therapist might discover things about her relationship to male authority, to being heard by men, to the complicated territory of being vulnerable in front of someone who represents a group that hasn't always been safe. A man working with a male therapist might discover things about competition, about what masculinity actually requires of him, about whether it's possible to be known by another man without that knowledge becoming a weapon.
None of this is guaranteed. It depends entirely on the therapist, on the client, on what's alive between them. But ignoring it, pretending the therapist's gender is as irrelevant as the colour of the office walls, is to miss something psychodynamically important.
People sometimes ask, directly or indirectly, why I became a therapist. The honest answer is that I needed one. Badly. And the experience of being genuinely understood (not fixed, not managed, not given strategies, but understood) changed everything about how I related to myself and other people.
The fact that I'm a man doing this work is both incidental and significant. Incidental because my gender doesn't make me a better or worse therapist. Significant because the work itself (sitting with pain, tolerating not-knowing, being moved without being overwhelmed) is something men are rarely given permission to do, let alone to value.
I didn't become a therapist to prove anything about masculinity. I became one because the work itself made sense to me in a way nothing else had. Because after my own collapse, after the careful performance of having-it-together finally crumbled, the only thing that actually helped was someone willing to sit with me in the wreckage without trying to tidy it up.
That's what I offer now. Not as a man performing sensitivity, but as a therapist who happens to be a man and who understands, from the inside, what it costs to pretend you don't need this.
