• A therapist is not a coach, and maybe you just need a coach.
• It might take a while to find a match.
• Therapy is kind of annoying sometimes.
• How you do something is how you do everything.

A therapist is not a coach, and maybe you just need a coach.

Coaches are people you go to with a specific problem, and with some specific outcome in mind. Like, if you need to get better at swimming you would go to a swimming coach. They would be able to see what it is that you’re doing wrong when you move through the water—you’re not horizontal enough, you breath ‘up’ instead of sideways, you don’t kick enough or you don’t pull enough with your strokes, whatever—and move through a sequence of psychological and practical steps to actually get better. Something like:

1. Bullshit! I’m not doing this incredibly simple thing wrong. I don’t need to change.
2. Ok, ok, ok. Maybe I do need to change this one specific thing.
3. And this other.
4. I am getting faster through the water.
5. Ok, I was wrong.

If you find a good coach—and there is an absolute talent differential in coaches—then they can turbocharge your physical performance. This can be the difference between struggling in the water, and being an international competitor.

The thing is, you can get coaches at everything now: writing, and business, and studying, productivity, and social media, and copywriting, and dating, and fatherhood, and psychedelics, and fashion, and whatever. There’s a whole world of ways in which you can improve.

The thing is with coaches—and this is a fantastic business proposition, if I were therapeutically inclined, I would absolutely become a coach instead—is that they attract the coachable. These are people who by-and-large know what they want and are willing to try things out until they get it. In other words, it’s a self selecting group. The unmotivated and unwilling get weeded out.

It’s also a limited form of change. You go from making poor fashion choices to constructing an entire gestalt that suits your body. Alongside there will be some internal movement—dressing well will make you move in the world with renewed confidence once you want people to notice you. But other stuff, more load bearing beliefs, will go untouched. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just being told gently, or frankly, what you are doing wrong and having that corrected can do you a lot of good.

But for some people, coaching isn’t enough. They are the unwilling and unmotivated to change. They’ve gone to a lot of effort to repress knowledge of the changes they need to make. Their whole identity is arranged around this. They may be a woman telling themselves ‘maybe next year he’ll tell me he finally wants children’ whilst their biological clock ticks away, or a father telling themselves that they ‘really need to work, my children need the raise!’ Whilst their toddlers grow into teenagers.

For these people, the alarm is going off in their life; why stick with a man who won’t have your kids, or avoid a home full of little people devoted to you? No amount of coaching will help these unfortunates: they haven’t gotten to the stage, psychologically speaking, of even accepting change. A coach is what they need next, but first they need their entire ontological gestalt reconstructed. And that’a what therapy is for.

It might take a while to find a match.

I have seen a lot of therapists. That’s because I don’t actually like a lot of people I meet—mostly I’m indifferent to whoever I meet, and I’m sure they are lovely and kind and great once I get to know them, but I don’t have time right now for that. It’s the same with therapists; you have to try a few out.

I tried one guy once at the top of a dim staircase in London’s Soho. His consulting room had a big leather and chrome sofa for me to sit on, and there was a flood of lonely sheafs of paper and open books and wall-long bookshelf crammed with books about just what was the right way to be gay. We had a few pleasant chats about my life, and then, towards the end of the sessions, the would invite us into a shared meditation where he would ‘tap’ various parts of his body—his wrists, his forehead, his palms, with the hope that somehow I would feel better. We didn’t last more than three sessions.

Then there was a woman, this time in Bristol, whose office had a Japanese fountain in the waiting room. It was on three layers and didn’t come higher than my knee. Limpid water flowed from level to level somehow redolent of the leonine roar of a toilet, so I had to pee before every session even if I didn’t need it when I entered the office. She had a smile which unsettled me and asked the sort of behaviourist questions that made me feel like I was learning to the test, but the test was life. It was free, and offered by my university so I went to all the sessions, but I don’t think I got anything out of it.

Therapy is kind of like dating, in that you’ve got to meet a lot of people before you get a match. It’s worth exploring a lot of therapists until you find one that clicks for you. Give it two or three sessions and see if it clicks for you. If not, move on.

Therapy is kind of annoying sometimes.

My current therapist likes to interrupt me. It’s annoying. Or it was annoying. He does it/did it after I’d been rambling about all the things that upset or annoyed or unbalanced me that week. Which was basically how I’d start every session initially. What I’ve done—which is used the experience of my week to write larger narratives of my life which suited the emotional space I was in—is a way of avoiding dealing with my life. So what I needed was interrupting. And that’s what he’s done. He’s also prodded and poked and disagreed and he constantly asks “and how is that working out for you?” This is all annoying.

But it’s what I need. I don’t need to keep spooling out rivers of invective about how my life is awful, how I’ll never get better, and then I’ll die. What I needed was to stop that river, even for a moment, so that I could see, right before me, there was no story, no trauma, no reason for things to be the way I said they were.

And that if I continued with these stories, then they would become like spells, or totems, that I cast into the world and my life would be fore-written for me just as terrible as I’d dreamed.

Your therapist isn’t your friend, they aren’t there to validate you.

How you do something is how you do everything.

It was late May, early June, and I would still turn up to sessions in a coat, and often a jumper too. The coats I loved dearly—they were gifts from parents. But the jumpers I didn’t especially like. They were either swag from work, or shapeless and grey hoodies or sweaters or the sort of preppy v-neck that you might see someone in an American college town wear, not someone who lived in Berlin.

The thing is I couldn’t stop touching the part of the body attached to my jumper. I would grab the sides by hips and flap the jumpers like great sails filled with wind, or I would pick at them with my fingers like hungry birds, or I would re-arrange myself as if some great worm were snaking away under my skin.

This was just jumpers mind you. I also couldn’t sit still: always crossing and uncrossing my legs. Shifting my weight from one hip to another. Jiggling a foot, and then a calf, and then a thigh. All of which was totally unknown to me, until he interrupted me one June day. (Yes, it was very irritating, see my point above).

“You always pull at yourself. That’s very interesting.” He said, gnomically. And then refused to elaborate. The remark had done its work, ninja like he’d stopped me in my tracks and introduced something else we could talk about.

It’s true, I always pulled at my jumpers. They shapeless and entirely divorced from my self conception. But how I really saw myself was a something to disown, disavow, try to get out of and into something more beautiful. I was literally trying to rip off clothes I hated and which covered a body part I am very self-consious about and I didn’t know it. I was also much to early to each session (often by 10 or 15 minutes), and had a real tightness in my chest the one time I was only 5 minutes early. In fact I’d emailed my therapist twice in the previous 10 minutes that I would be late, or not, and I don’t know. I also wore clothes I didn’t like, had a job that exhausted me, and was a gay man who lived in Berlin, but had no gay friends, no gay apps on his phone, and hadn’t had a date in two years.

Therapy wasn’t about how to approach boys better, or even choosing better clothes. It wasn’t about becoming fabulous and witty and glamourous. It was about a monster I had let in but couldn’t look at. When I complained about cleaning my flat, or my colleagues, I wasn’t talking about how lonely I was and how I longed to join in and let my flabby self fall in love.

All this was one big pattern. I spoke with one voice but with different words.