Years ago I worked with a client who came to therapy to work on his social anxiety.

He described himself as your typical computer nerd.

He was going through a difficult divorce and for the first time in his life he was trying to overcome his fears of

meeting women he wanted to have conversations at parties without worrying about

making a fool of himself and he just wanted to have a group of friends to hang out with.

He worked on this for a number of months in therapy and incidentally I liked him.

He was a good guy.

He was nice to people and I figured if people just got to know him they'd surely like him and they'd surely want to hang out with him

So we worked on a social anxiety for a while but things were slow going

Then on the internet he found something called the pickup artist community, otherwise known as the seduction community.

In session he was using strange words, strange new words, like negging and going caveman, and he referred

to this book called The Game, and this charismatic figure who goes by the name of Mystery.

He started dressing differently. He wore fancy new shirts and

unbuttoned his shirts so you could see his chest. He had more confidence. He drastically

changed his hairstyle. He started wearing jewelry. He was meeting

women at clubs. He changed his goals from wanting friends to wanting to bag as many babes as possible. He changed his goals from wanting to hold a conversation

at a party to wanting to get as many phone numbers as possible.

So since I'm a collaborative therapist,

I just went with his new goals, but I felt uneasy about it.

His new goals felt sleazy to me.

But I didn't want to let my preferences get in the way of working collaboratively

with him. But after a number of months I couldn't take it anymore and I started confronting

...