Choosing a Therapist
Working with a male therapist
Some people actively look for a male therapist. Others are wary of the idea. Either response can be worth taking seriously.
Why it might matter
Gender is not the most important thing about a therapist. But it is not nothing.
Some people look for a male therapist because they imagine it will be easier to talk about certain things. Some because it feels harder, and that is exactly the point. A therapist's gender can affect what feels safe, what feels dangerous, what you perform, what you hide, and what you expect will happen if you are honest.
In psychodynamic therapy, that material is not a problem to work around. It can become part of the work itself.
For men considering therapy
Many men arrive in therapy fluent in competence and almost wordless around need. They know how to solve, provide, deflect, perform, minimise, keep going. They may not know how to sit in front of another person and say what is actually happening.
Working with a male therapist can sometimes reduce the feeling of translation. Not because men automatically understand men better, and not because women cannot work deeply with male clients. But because there can be something specific about sitting with a man who has chosen emotional depth as his work and is not ashamed of it.
That does not make the work easy. It can bring up competition, embarrassment, fear of weakness, the old instruction to get on with it. Those reactions matter. They often point to the very rules that have been running your life.
For women and LGBTQ clients
For some women, LGBTQ clients, and people with complicated experiences of men, working with a male therapist can carry a different kind of charge. Male authority, being heard by men, being vulnerable in front of a man, anger toward men, the wish to be understood by a man, the fear of not being safe: any of these may be live in the room.
That does not mean you should choose a male therapist. It means that if you do, the fact of it can be spoken about rather than ignored.
A good therapeutic relationship is not neutral in the sense of being blank. It is reliable enough that what gets stirred up can be noticed, thought about, and understood.
How I work with this
I am a BACP registered psychodynamic therapist in Croydon. I have been in private practice since 2017, first in Central London and now in Croydon, working with adults in person.
I do not treat being a male therapist as a selling point in itself. Gender alone is not enough. What matters is whether the relationship can hold what you bring, including the feelings you have about sitting with this particular person in this particular room.
If you are curious about the longer story, I wrote more personally about this in Why I Became a Male Therapist.
Is it better for men to see a male therapist?
Can women work with a male therapist?
Do you only work with men?
Where do sessions take place?
Working with me
If you are looking for a male therapist in Croydon, you can read more about individual therapy, how psychodynamic therapy works, or who I am.
When you are ready, you can send a message and we can think about whether it makes sense to meet.