What does affirmative actually mean here?
It means three concrete commitments rather than a marketing adjective. First, your sexuality is never treated as the cause of your distress by default. Second, the harm done by a homophobic environment is named as harm rather than reframed as your oversensitivity. Third, nothing in the work is designed to change, reduce or manage who you are attracted to.
The practice does not offer conversion therapy in any form, does not refer to anyone who does, and regards such practices as abusive.
Internalised homophobia, in plain terms
Most gay and bi men absorbed a set of beliefs about themselves before they had any way of evaluating them — from a playground, a pulpit, a father, a newspaper. Those beliefs do not evaporate when you come out. They go quiet and keep operating: the flinch at your own voice on a recording, the conviction that a good relationship is for other people, the certainty that being visibly happy will invite something bad.
This is a large part of what the work is for. Not arguing you out of it, which never works, but bringing it into the daylight with another person and letting it lose the authority it has been running on unchallenged.
Affirmative and person-centred together
Person-centred counselling holds that people move towards growth when they are met with genuineness, empathy and unconditional positive regard. For a man who has spent decades being met conditionally, that combination is not a soft option — it is the active ingredient.
This practice offers one modality only. No CBT, no EMDR, no psychodynamic work, no eclectic mix. If a different model would serve you better, you will be told so plainly in the first conversation.
Fees
Delivered as standard individual counselling: 50-minute sessions, online, in English. See the full fee list.
Common questions
- Is gay affirmative therapy a separate type of therapy?
- Not a separate modality, no. It describes the stance the counsellor takes. Here that stance sits inside person-centred counselling.
- Do you offer conversion therapy or anything similar?
- No. Conversion practices are harmful, and this practice neither offers them nor refers anyone to them.
- Can affirmative therapy help with internalised homophobia?
- That is one of the most common reasons men come. The work is slow and it is not about argument; it is about examining beliefs in the presence of someone who does not share them.
Related reading
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- Counselling for shame and self-worthCounselling for shame and low self-worth in gay and bi men. Person-centred, online, unhurried. BACP-registered counsellor. Free 30-minute first conversation.