Hey deserving listeners, I thought I would answer patron emails. Let's get to it.

This first emails from anonymous patron, she writes, I am a cis hetero woman and all my past talk therapists were also cis women. I have some fears around

working with a male therapist and I also wonder if it could be beneficial to work

with a male therapist because of this.

But I have a number of fears and worries about working with a male therapist.

Worried it won't be as open, fear of embarrassment when talking about menstrual cycles and sex,

shame of being a preoccupied crazy girl,

the therapist having unconscious bias because of being raised in a patriarchal

society where women aren't always seen as a whole person. Inherited trauma around how poorly women were raised in history by therapists and doctors.

Fears about boundary crossings, or even just scared I'll have a crush on my therapist. Are there thoughts in the

therapeutic world on whether it would be helpful to have a male therapist in

order to work with these fears and anxieties.

End of email.

Yeah, there's a fair amount of thoughts and research

in the clinical world around this.

And in a nutshell, there are five different considerations that I can think of. One is comfort. It's

important to feel comfortable and if you don't feel comfortable with male

therapists then why put yourself in an uncomfortable situation unnecessarily.

So that's something to consider for sure.

Two is identity overlap, meaning that you are looking for a woman because you're a woman and there's

identity overlap in that way.

In the same way, if a black person wants to feel comfortable in therapy or they want to feel like understood

...