Welcome to That’s What I Do, an occasional series about cool people in interesting jobs, being all cool and interesting and the like.

Bonne Année, folks! It’s been a while, but I’ll spare you a festive update. Nothing puts a dampener on seasonal goodwill like the spectre of the end of NATO and rules-based international order. (Or, let’s be real, the charade of rules-based international order.) Speaking of buzz kills, for Christmas, Mr G gifted me a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, hailed by the New York Review of Books as ‘disturbing’. I was hoping for less Holocaust, more Emily Henry in 2026.

Hey ho, players, you can’t always get what you want. These troubled times demand a thick skin, which is a nice segue into this week’s post – a conversation with my former therapist, Rob Lefort, in which we dig into the importance of cultivating resilience, the medicalisation of societal issues and my personal bug bear, therapy speak.

Full disclosure: I’m a therapy junkie and have tried various counsellors on for size in recent years. There was the Catalonian psychoanalyst, who suggested I write a letter to my dead uncle; and a CBT expert, whose methods I found effective, but in appearance and mannerisms, had a touch of Alan Partridge about him. Every time I logged on for a session, I couldn’t get Alan’s voice out of my head: ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday. What a great song. It really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday, doesn’t it?’

Then I found Rob, a mere twenty minutes drive from my house. Tall and grey-haired, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a black polo neck under a sports jacket, he had the ‘learned older male’ vibe I was after. (Daddy issues? Perhaps. From editors to personal trainers, I tend to thrive when it’s a dude telling me what to do. Sadly, Rob and I never delved into that particular Pandora’s box. I already had too many neuroses to plough through.)

Hands down, he was the best therapist I’ve worked with. I’m not cured of my anxieties and obsessions – we’re a perennial work in progress – but Rob gave me the tools needed to take ownership of my shit. Which is a relief, as a few months ago, he closed his practice in France and fucked off to Mexico to eat enchiladas in the sun.

I wanted to kick off the new year on a reflective note, with someone who’s seen it all in his thirty-odd years helping others, so I asked Rob, who shares his wisdom weekly in his popular Substack, The Untangled Self, if he’d indulge me.

The obligatory tigger warning: some of the stuff we get into is heavy and as with everything these days, potentially divisive. From my end, I found the conversation refreshingly honest, and I’m grateful to Rob for his insights. If you’ve thoughts or contributions on the discussion, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below, but please keep it respectful, lads. It’s all peace and love here.

On with the show…

Born in France to Franco-Italian parents, Rob moved to England when he was a teenager. As a child, he was fascinated by how the mind works. He did a degree in psychology and a masters in cognitive psychology and for almost twelve years, he never saw a patient, focusing purely on research. ‘I didn’t have any desire to be a therapist until I became a patient myself,’ he says. ‘It changed my outlook completely.’

His first job was as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in a maximum-security prison in Toronto. He admits it was a steep learning curve. ‘I was terrified. I had very little clinical experience and was in a highly stressful environment, working with people with severe pathologies. Many staff had been taken hostage and as a result, suffered from PTSD. After six months, I almost gave up, but was fortunate to benefit from a lot of supervision and I continued. It was a great experience in the end.’ Afterwards, Rob started his own practice in Canada and hasn’t looked back.

Do you ever worry your patients won’t like you? I wanted to make a good impression the first time we met, so I wore my smart dungarees and not the billowy dungarees that make me look like a sad clown. I was going for charmingly neurotic over full-on deranged, like a character in a Woody Allen film.

It does happen – my daughter is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist and worries about her patients liking her - but it rarely happens with me. If you want to be a good therapist, you need to be a truthful therapist. Your job is to shine light on what the patient can’t see. Sometimes, that’s telling them what they don’t want to hear. Unfortunately, there’s a tendency, especially in the last twenty years, to coddle patients, to make them feel good. That’s not the job of therapy. You have to be honest and ensure your patient is ready for the truth, which is a hard judgement to make. If you time it badly, they’ll leave and will either seek another therapist or very often, they’ll give up on themselves.

Is ‘fit’ important? Do you need to shop around for a therapist to find one you click with?

Verbal therapy is a relationship. It’s not the same with a medical doctor. If you have kidney stones, you know you need a urologist, who’s equipped with the right tools and experience to deal with your issue. Their personality doesn’t matter. When you’re looking for a therapist, it’s crucial. Personality influences the dynamics of trust and commitment. It affects whether people stay in therapy or drop out. I have a lot of patients come and see me because they want a man - men and women, for different reasons. Some of them pick me because I’m older. There’s that father figure going on. They’re not aware of it, but it’s important.

It’s not very politically correct to say, but around seventy-five per cent of therapists are women and the fact is, a lot of men are uncomfortable talking to women. I’ve read numerous articles suggesting men go to therapy less than women because culturally, they’re educated not to talk about their problems. That’s not entirely true.

Do men present their problems differently to women?

Yes. They present their problems better.

Interesting. Tell me more…

It depends on the problem and the patient’s personality, but in general, they tend to be more analytical and clinical in the way they present themselves. They also tend not to offer explanations. Women give you the problem and tell you why it’s the case. With men, you need to be more practical. You need to give them tools to work with. That’s a bit less critical for women.

Another problem is that we’re medicating people a lot more than we did twenty years ago. Very few general practitioners send their patients to therapy. When you give people medication and don’t explain that it will relieve the symptoms only, it doesn’t solve the underlying issue. They have to do the work to figure out what’s going on. That is what’s needed to get better. What happens instead is people take the meds and expect the problem to be solved in x number of months. That never happens. In fact, sometimes, they get worse.

For men, it’s somehow more difficult because they tend to rely more on medication. Typically, they deal with one thing at a time and are told medication is supposed to work, so why bother with therapy? Men also tend to feel more shame around mental health. There’s a dimension of feeling inadequate, being judged, being dysfunctional in their relationship or at work. It’s more acceptable for women to have these issues and therefore seek help. And it’s worse for men who do go to therapy because they’re going to be facing a woman in seventy-five per cent of cases. So it’s not that their situation is different. It’s the way they deal with it and the way society expects them to deal with it that’s the problem.

Has nature of our problems changed since you started out?

The nature of the problems hasn’t changed, the way we deal with them has. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years and what I’m increasingly seeing among adults is a loss of resilience. Before, people tended to be more accountable. Now, everyone wants a quick fix online. They’ll ask AI for the answer. They don’t want to read books, it’s too tiring and time-consuming. I have a lot of patients who bail as soon I give them the lifestyle changes they need to implement. It’s too much work.

What’s your view on therapy speak? I’d like to hold space for those who engage in psych-talk, but I’m triggered…

It’s good that psychological language is entering popular culture and people are more open to discussing their emotions and mental health issues. That said, a lot of it is distorted or badly understood. When clinical terms are taken out of context and not well defined, they can become tools for self-justification or even control. Concepts like boundaries and trauma are meant to help people reflect and be more responsible, not shut down dialogue or moralise to others. The media are among the worst offenders. I see a lot of journalists using medical terms such as ‘narcissist’, ‘psychosis’ and ‘borderline’ in all sorts of contexts. People don’t even bother to look up the definition and employ this kind of language to judge others. It’s extremely counterproductive.

Narcissism is the perfect example because this is a medical term with a strict definition. It could be a disorder or a personality trait, and it’s a spectrum. Today, it’s applied to anyone who’s a bit selfish or self-centered. If you don’t like your ex and you had a bad relationship, he’s a narcissist. This is absurd. When we’re talking about medical terms, we should be very careful. This kind of misapplication of clinical language does a disservice to the medical community and to patients. It’s like crying wolf.

Let’s get into what some are calling the ‘trauma industrial complex’ – when did our emotional pain become a product? Are we overdiagnosing trauma?

That’s a difficult one. Everybody experiences trauma in some form. Life is painful. We’re all mortals. There is loss. There is disease, accidents, wars, predators. For thousands of years, we didn’t focus on trauma. It was simply a part of life. Now, trauma sells. Books, movies, therapies, wellness programmes. And if trauma sells, everybody has to add something to the pile. It’s hard to establish whether life in 2026 is more traumatic than it was a hundred years ago. The question is, are we better or less equipped at dealing with it? Are we more fragile? Are we more in denial? Does all this selling trauma help us or make it worse?

It seems everyone is dying to give us their painful story. A lot of it is attention seeking. As soon as you raise the trauma flag, you’re interesting. Does that make us stronger as human beings? No, it makes us more self-aware, more self-obsessed. It feeds into a culture of victimisation. Are we more susceptible to suffer from trauma? I don’t think so. Are we more focused on it? Definitely. Are we more resilient? No, we’re not. The definition of insanity is a non-acceptance of reality. And reality hasn’t changed in the last 300,000 years of being human.

So instead of mining our trauma, what should we be doing?

If you look back 3,000 years, the question for the Ancient Greeks was, ‘How do human beings endure’? The Stoics, the Epicureans, the Sceptics, they all realised life is tough and were concerned with how we should face hardships.

In the culture today, it’s the opposite tendency. We focus on being fragile, on listening to every emotion and figuring out what it means. We don’t look at a situation with the objective of getting better, getting stronger, making progress; we look at it from the point of view of how much attention we’re going to get. And that’s a big problem. Because what is culture? Culture is a set of beliefs that a number of people decide to follow. And when the common denominator is attention seeking, the maximum effort goes into this and it multiplies the negative effects of all this stuff. Before the internet, if you wanted to talk about your problems, you had your village. You’d go to the café and share whatever happened to you with three of four people. Now, you go online and share it with millions. Young people are particularly susceptible because of the need to be accepted. If the main criteria is, ‘I’m going to get a lot more attention if I’m a victim’ that changes everything.

Look at education. What do we focus on today? Are we teaching boys and girls philosophy and how to be more resilient? How to deal with reality? Or are we doing the opposite? What we’re seeing in the therapy room is the result of people not with real hardships but with imaginary conditions. I have a huge number of adults who come to me because they’re convinced they have ADHD. Some of them do and have never been diagnosed, but a lot of them don’t. Ninety per cent of these people don’t even understand what ADHD is but because of all the publicity it’s getting, they’ve deicided they have it. They want a label.

What do we do? We give them stimulants. Take some Ritalin and Adderall. People with ADHD should be taught how to do things differently. Oh, but that’s too much work. As long as I have the label and the pill, I’m content. People in Ancient Greece probably had ADHD, but it wasn’t called that. They just focused on getting on with life and dealing with it. Now we focus on the symptoms and not what we should be doing as the individual to endure and get stronger and become more successful.

Let me be logical. If ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder there’s no reason we didn’t have it 3,000 years ago. Unless it’s environmental, which I don’t believe it is. The difference is we weren’t marketing it 3,000 years ago. This applies to many other things. Now there’s a whole industry that has one goal and that’s to sell medication. Don’t get me started on the sales figures for benzodiazepines and antidepressants because I spend half my time as a therapist trying to get people off these things.

My GP put me on benzodiazepines and antidepressants a few years ago. I was in a bad way and the medication gave me space in my brain to get me to a point where I could do the work and tackle the root cause of my anxiety. So I definitely see the short-term value of medication. I did find it worrying, though, that she never suggested therapy as an option. Also, during a recent visit to the doctor about something unrelated to mental health, she wanted to know if I wanted a top-up of antidepressants. I’ve been off them for three years.

These guys have quotas. They have to make money for the labs. It’s irresponsible, but let me give you an anecdote to think about. You live in France. You’ve seen the drama that unfolded last year around that poor woman, Gisèle Pelicot, who was drugged and raped by her husband. She had been abused by over a hundred guys while she was unconscious, drugged on benzodiazepines. Tell me, how many journalists raised the flag? Who questioned how this guy managed to get his hands on more than 250 boxes of benzos to drug his wife? Not once during the trial was any doctor called to testify why they prescribed all these drugs. It’s obscene. This medication should not be prescribed for more than three months as it’s dangerous, highly addictive and has severe side effects. If Pelicot had not been able to get his hands on this amount of medication, this never would have been able to happen.

Let’s end on a philosophical note. What’s the greatest lie we tell ourselves?

That being neurotic is being sick. We’re all neurotics. What does that mean? It means our most basic defence mechanism is to sweep things under the carpet when life gets too hard. We put unpleasant things at the back of our minds so we can go on living. This repression is useful because life is traumatic. If we’re too fragile, if we don’t learn to cope, we’re unable to function. Being neurotic is part of being human. We’ve forgotten this because we’ve labelled things, we’ve pathologised a lot of aspects of what it means to be human beings - to be afraid of dying, to have to deal with loss. We’ve forgotten our essential human tragedy. Our main purpose in life should be to endure.

If you enjoyed this conversation, check out my interview with Australian artist Ces Mc Cully