Anxiety counselling for gay and bi men

Anxiety that came from somewhere

A lot of gay and bi men learned vigilance young, and learned it for good reason. Watching your voice, your hands, who you look at and for how long, which pronoun you use about your weekend — that is not a thinking error. It is a skill that was once protective and has never been switched off.

Approaches that treat the anxiety as a distortion to be corrected can miss this entirely, and can leave a man feeling that his very reasonable alarm system is one more thing about him that is wrong.

How it shows up

• Rehearsing conversations for hours before and after them
• Physical symptoms — chest, stomach, sleep — with no medical explanation
• Avoiding gay spaces, dating, or being seen, then feeling worse for the avoidance
• Performance anxiety around sex and intimacy
• Anxiety that spikes at work, particularly where you are not out
• A general sense of waiting for something to go wrong

What the counselling does with it

Person-centred counselling does not hand you a technique on week one. It gives the anxiety somewhere to be described in full, without the listener rushing to reassure you or fix it, which is usually the first time it has ever had that.

From there the work tends to move towards what the anxiety is protecting — and as that becomes speakable, the vigilance generally has less to do. Many men also find that having one fixed hour a week where nothing has to be managed reduces the baseline on its own.