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You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist is a podcast for seekers, dreamers, and questioners that intimately explores the human experience. Your host, Stephanie Winn, distills years of wisdom gained from her practice as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She invites guests from a broad variety of disciplines and many walks of life, including researchers, writers, artists, healers, advocates, inventive outliers, and creative geniuses. Together, they investigate, illuminate, and inspire transformation - in the self, relationships, and society. Curious about many things, Stephanie’s uniquely interdisciplinary psychological lens tackles challenging social issues while encouraging personal and relational wellness. Join this journey through the inner wilderness.
Swell AI Transcript: 136. James Esses.mp3
James Esses:
We wouldn't go to people who are suffering severe mania and were convincing themselves that they were the messiah or suchlike and ask them, what do you feel that your condition should be kind of saying to you? What would make good treatment as far as you're concerned? Because someone who's in a state of mania is not in a position to say what it is they want. I'm sure people who believe that the messiah would like it if the therapist affirmed that they were the messiah, probably make them feel better about themselves. But we wouldn't treat it in the same way. And yet we're going to these young people with gender dysphoria and essentially saying, you've got the lived experience, so come and teach us, teach the clinicians, teach the therapists how we should treat you. It's completely back to front. You must be some kind of therapist.
Stephanie Winn: Today I'm welcoming back James Esses to the show. It's been over 100 episodes since I originally spoke with James on this podcast, so if you are a super long-time listener, you might have heard him on episode 23, James Esses Gender Updates Across the Pond. James Esses is a writer, commentator, and advocate specializing in the impact of ideology on society, And you might or might not be familiar with his story involving graduate school for counseling psychology in the UK and a legal case. So I look forward to getting caught up, figuring out what James has been up to ever since then, what the results of his case were, what they mean for therapists in the UK, and so on. So James, welcome back. Good to have you here again.
James Esses: No, it's good to see you again, Stephanie, but I feel like I've aged quite a lot since last week. I'm looking at myself in the camera and I can see a few more gray hairs.
Stephanie Winn: Oh, yeah? Okay. Well, what's been causing your gray hairs?
James Esses: Oh, God. Life, social media in particular.
Stephanie Winn: Well, maybe we'll circle back to that later. I know it can be stressful putting yourself out there, and it comes with its ups and downs. But I'd love to start with sort of recapping for anyone who is a little rusty or maybe hasn't come across your story before, sort of how you came into the limelight within the last couple of years, and then a follow up with your legal case, what happened as a result of it.
James Esses: Sure. I mean, it all happened quite accidentally, really. I was training to be a therapist in the UK. I was on a five-year master's program. I'd been doing some volunteer counseling with children on the side. And I was starting to see changes going on around me, both in the therapeutic space and kind of in the wider society. on trans stuff. And in particular, this notion that we should be putting children on powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and kind of sending them down this one-way path towards medicalization. And I felt ethically, as a training therapist, that I had to say something about it. And so I got together with a few other therapists in the UK. We put a petition to the UK government. And that basically started to kind of onslaught on social media and people threatening to go and complain to my university course provider. And that's exactly what happened. And in essence, off the back of those complaints, one day, three years into the course, I received an email saying that that was it. I was being expelled with immediate effect. without conversation or a hearing or an appeal, that I brought them into disrepute was how they worded this. And that led to three and a half years of litigation, which only recently finished actually.
Stephanie Winn: Oh, wow, I didn't realize it had been that long. What a nightmare. So catch us up on the results of that litigation.
James Esses: Well, I mean, it drags on for a long time in the legal system is very slow. And, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend it to people if they can avoid it. And I'm not a naturally litigious person myself. I mean, my background was was studying and practicing as an attorney in the UK for a while. So I know what the court system can be like. So it took a long time. It also costs, you know, a hell of a lot of money. I was I was crowdfunded. very appreciative of the generosity of people. In the end, it cost, I think, around 120-130,000 pounds, which is a crazy amount of money. But it resulted in two quite significant out-of-court settlements. I was taking action against the university I was studying at. I was also taking action against the UK Council for Psychotherapy, one of the main accreditation bodies for therapists. over here. And the statements that they put out as part of the settlement were pretty seismic and the UK Council for Psychotherapy put out a statement essentially saying for the very first time that therapists with gender critical beliefs, that those beliefs are valid, that they are protected under law, that they're valid professional beliefs, and in particular that it's a completely valid therapeutic professional belief that children should not be medicalized in the name of gender ideology. So that was quite a big shift in the narrative over here, so I was very pleased to have got that. And from the university, the statement was basically a complete vindication They, you know, apologized repeatedly for what had happened. You know, they made the point that they should never have done this. If they hadn't have done this, I would have gone on and got the qualification. And most importantly for me, they vowed to ensure that this never happens to another student again. So time will tell if they are true to their word. But, you know, as far as I was concerned, it was basically the best possible result that I could have got. And so, you know, it was all worth it in the end.
Stephanie Winn: just really want to kind of pause here and drive the message home about how significant this is for our profession, for therapists in the UK. And I wonder, too, what the significance of this case internationally will be over time, because when something like this happens in one country, it does I think set a precedent that has a ripple effect for other countries. And I'm certainly not very skilled at politics and law, but I do enjoy talking to my colleagues in different countries and just getting a perspective on what's going on. And so I think it's very significant for therapists in the UK and also hopefully significant for therapists around the world as well. because of your case, therapists are protected in their freedom of speech and freedom of belief. And this is protected specifically as a professional stance as well. It's not sort of this dividing line where, okay, you're free to have your private beliefs, but don't don't let them affect your counseling. According to the counseling profession, you have to go along with gender affirmation regardless of what you personally believe. No, it's that this is a valid professional position to take. That's really, really huge.
James Esses: No, thank you. And I agree with what you say. I think it's kind of, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of getting movement in this space, it's kind of a two-pronged approach. I think the first, unfortunately, is punishing those who try and infringe on freedom of speech or differing professional beliefs amongst therapists. And that's going to involve things like taking litigation. So I hope that the litigation I brought and the outcome sends a message to other institutions, whether it's in the UK or abroad, that if they do this to the students that they're going to suffer the consequences of that, not least actually, financially, because What I hear, and I heard this from the UK Council for Psychotherapy, that essentially their insurance premiums went up significantly after I brought the litigation. Because most of these institutions are funded through litigation by their insurers. If the premiums are going up, they're going to feel that in the pocket. I think there are kind of ways of punishing these institutions who do things badly. But I think also part of it is trying to bring them on a journey and it's a slow and arduous journey towards understanding the ethics behind what these, you know, quote, unquote, gender critical beliefs are, that actually, this is the ethical position, which is that children who feel that they're trapped in the wrong body, which is biologically impossible, should be treated, you know, with explorative psychotherapy, not with medicalization, and unconditional affirmation. So, you know, I think it's kind of that two-prong approach, but we can't rest on our laurels because I get contacted on a frequent basis by trainee therapists in the UK in different institutions. And they're finding the same stuff is essentially happening to them, not just on the gender stuff, but on some of the critical race theory as well. I've had quite a few people contact me about that. So, Things are still not in a good position as far as the therapeutic professions is concerned. I'm also speaking to more and more therapists who are deciding to just drop away and not practice anymore because they find it's too much of a minefield, which is a real shame.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, I want to talk about that, because I hear from the same types of people that you hear from. Maybe some of the exact same people, but you know, overlapping crowd in any case, I hear from a lot of trainee therapists, as well as experienced therapists who are just reaching their breaking point. I think the trainees have it the hardest because there are, you know, it's always the best people in my personal opinion. Anyway, it's it's the most thoughtful people. Oftentimes like you had a previous career you you were a barrister before you studied psychotherapy and I found similarly I've met trainee therapists for whom it's a second career. you know, maybe they're in their 30s or 40s before they start pursuing their master's degree. So they just have more life experience. They're also, you know, those who are closer in age to me, they remember a time that before the exponential growth curve of all these people identifying as trans. So it's the people with the most experience. It's the people with the most thoughtful sense of ethics who are at their breaking point saying, I don't know if I can finish this graduate program. Or I don't know if I can stay in the field because I feel so much pressure. Even for people who've made it into private practice, who've gotten some stability in their life, there's still this ripple effect that gender ideology and wokeness and the proliferation and normalization of cluster B personality traits, all those three things working together. I call it the trifecta of social contagion. It's had such an enormous ripple effect. on what the average person expects of a therapist. I think that just like it's the best people, again, in my personal biased opinion, it's the best people who are feeling like they're at their breaking point and ready to leave the profession. It's also, on the other side, some of the most thoughtful people who don't trust therapists anymore. So it's kind of like the self-fulfilling prophecy or this positive feedback cycle or something like that, where The most thoughtful people aren't going to therapy because they don't trust therapists for good reason. And then… Therapists are at their breaking point. And then I get referral requests all the time. Every now and then, I still get someone asking me to be their therapist or to see their kid. I think for most people who follow my work, the message has gotten across that I haven't done any counseling in six months and that, of course, I have too much of a public voice on this issue. Your kid would Google me. But there's also kind of this dilemma where in order to find an ethical therapist, those are the people who have to either make a choice to be a James Esses or a Stephanie Wynn type figure, or to be completely underground, have very little information about yourself online so that nobody knows your stance, and then just network privately so that James or Stephanie might refer someone to you one on one, but it's just overall, there's like this huge rip in the fabric of, of our counseling profession. And I feel like so many people don't know how to proceed.
James Esses: I agree. And I think you make a good point around the type of therapists that are speaking out. And, you know, I'm not on that course anymore. So I am not in the litigation anymore. So I can kind of speak pretty freely. I was I was concerned by I guess both the ethics, but also the kind of quality that many in my cohorts were exhibiting. A real lack of resilience amongst some. There was one individual who completely refused to do a kind of, you know, a role playing kind of chair exercise where, you know, you act out a role of a therapist and a client. in front of the class because said it was too triggering. Of what, I don't know, but it was too triggering. So just was allowed to kind of not do that, even though the rest of us were assessed by it. And equally, when all this gender stuff happened, and when I spoke out, and then when I got kicked off, I mean, none of my cohorts spoke out on my behalf. They just kept their heads down. So, I'm increasingly concerned about the quality of therapists that are being churned out. I don't know, it's kind of like robots. There's very little free thoughts, very little self reflection. And I genuinely worry for some of the clients that will now go on and see some of the therapists that I studied alongside. And I really do mean that. So I worry about where this profession is kind of going more broadly. And I think the type of trainees that have been taken on by these institutions are essentially ones that fit a certain kind of mold, which often is this kind of woke mold. So I don't know. I am also changing my view a bit around the purpose of therapy and also some of the risks associated with it. You know, I read Abigail Schreier's recent book, And I used to say, I remember I used to say this on my course, that I thought therapy was a kind of universal good and that everyone could benefit from seeing a therapist. And I've completely changed my mind on that. I've seen some of the harm that therapists have caused over the years. I see the kind of increased pathologizing of kind of normal childhood experiences as kind of mental ill health that needs to be dealt with by a therapist or a psychologist. So I've really changed my mind now. I do not think therapy is a universal good anymore, which is a kind of, it's a bit of a shame because maybe the profession's lost that kind of gleam as far as I'm concerned. But I also think it's a more realistic view of the way things are. I'm interested in your thoughts on that, actually.
Stephanie Winn: Well, one of the things that comes to mind is I don't know what your different types of licenses and degrees are called in the UK. I think it's somewhat different than here. But my license type is I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. And when I was studying in California, where I did grad school, that was the most common license type. And it was right around the time that people, especially People who had moved to California from other states, including a man I actually met from New York, he was one of the people leading this push, were pushing for a more universally transferable license type, which is the LPC, licensed professional counselor, which is more common in other states. And I think easier, I mean, as much as we have licensing by state by state, it's relatively easier to transfer states as an LPC than an LMFT, although I transferred states as an MFT intern. Anyway, I'm getting into the weeds here. But I pursued basically what was the most common type of counseling license at the time in my location. And in other states, LPC is more common, which is much more about the individual than the family. But I come from this family systems background. And I've thought about the origins of the practice of marriage and family therapy. And if I recall correctly, I don't remember the exact date, but I believe the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy was founded in the 1960s. And at one point, I thought about how much the culture changed since then. And I just did a little digging into what portion of Americans at different ages were actually married in the 60s and had families, had children. And we just had a much more cohesive family-centered society in the 60s than we do now. Marriage and family therapy, therapy for the well-being of the marriage and family unit How does that change when over the course of 60 years, there's a dramatic decline in the number of people who are embedded in these types of relationships and really motivated to make them work? I think therapy is first and foremost a relational process and that one of the goals of therapy for most people should be increasing relational harmony and functionality. That doesn't mean that there's never a time for boundary setting. And I've actually helped people leave abusive relationships and helped people through breakups and divorces. And I don't think those are universally bad things. There are times when relationships do need to come to an end or change in some way. But I think what has happened with the disintegration of the counseling profession in part has to do with the breakdown in our norms as a society as to Whether you fundamentally agree that it is good to be married if you can, that it is good to be in a family if you can, that having children is good, that as children respecting your parents is good, all these things about just the basic cohesiveness of relationships in society, I think now we live in this On the one hand, it feels very hyper-individualistic and also very lonely, but it's like the individualism is kind of an illusion because there's also a lot of groupthink that I think takes the place. lonely whether or not they're aware of it. I think we're all very lonely in society because of the breakdown in relationships and the amount of time spent online, the disconnect between, you know, people and their neighbors and so on and so forth. I think that there are certain ways of thinking and relating that kind of rush in to fill that void. So I think this is just one of the sort of axes that I evaluate this question on is, do we even value relationships anymore? And if we don't, then What is therapy about? That's just one manifestation of, overall, a bigger issue of normlessness or anomie. I changed my handle. I've mentioned this before on social media, Stephanie Nguyen, sanity specialist, because I feel like sanity should be a baseline of mental health. Anything beyond that is better, but below sanity you're in the negative zone. The counseling profession can't even define that. So it can't define relationships are good, and you should try to be on good terms with your family if you can. And it can't define sanity is good, and you should try to be sane if you can. And by the way, here are some things that qualify as sane and not sane. It's not sane to believe men can become women. So with those norms and standards, basic expectations falling apart, What is our profession doing? Like, I feel like there's no there there. There's no north on the compass, you know? Do you have an adolescent or adult child who is at risk of heading down a path of medical self-destruction in the name of so-called gender identity? The ROGD Repair Course and Community for Parents is a whole new toolkit that will be a game changer for you. ROGD Repair is an interactive and ever-expanding toolkit of psychology concepts and communication skills curated specifically for parents like you, based on what has actually worked for my clients who were desperate to improve their relationships and save their kids. ROGD Repair is designed based on my theory of the trifecta of social contagion. Gender ideology doesn't operate in a vacuum, but in a perfect storm along with wokeness and cluster B personality traits. 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James Esses: I think in part it's driven by individuals who view the role as activist first, therapist second. I think the whole thing also just feels very consumeristic and I find increasingly that therapists seem to be just willing to nod along and tell their clients whatever it is that they want to hear and Again, when I think back to my training and some of my cohorts, I mean, they simply did not have the necessary resilience to push back and to challenge clients, which is a crucial part of the role. As you say, we're dealing in the realms of sanity versus insanity and equally reality versus delusion. And I think it's a core function of a therapist or a counselor to acknowledge when a client is being delusional, as we all can. I mean, look, I've been in therapy on and off for a number of years, and the therapists that I've seen, and I've chosen them specifically for this, have been very quick to call me out on my bullshit, essentially, and I'm very glad that they do. It may sting a bit in the moment, but sometimes people need a bit of a wake-up call, and I believe that's the role of a therapist. But instead, now, it's all about just nodding along and trying to avoid any form of conflict, It's also interesting, you know, you spoke about the relational aspect of it. And that was one of the things that I've always prized so much about therapy, developing that kind of Because it is a pretty unique relationship, therapist to client. But nowadays, it's been taken over by all of this identity politics bullshit. And instead of seeing somebody as an individual, you're now seeing them as a religion or a skin color. It was being drilled into us on our course that actually, if we shared a different ethnicity to that of our client, that we should bring that up. We should just come up with that, bring it into the room and just note it. you know, as if it bears any relevance whatsoever. I mean, it's just crazy that you're viewing clients as a tone of skin rather than just as an individual. So that kind of stuff really, really pisses me off. So, you know, I don't know, increasingly, when I speak to friends or acquaintances who are talking about, you know, going into therapy, I used to say kind of great, you know, go for it. Now I'm a bit less sure. And I'll try and have a kind of deeper conversation with that person about what they're wanting to get out of this and all the rest of it, because I think people can waste a lot of money. And worse than that, I think people can be fed a lot of bullshit in the therapy room.
Stephanie Winn: I remember a time when it was rude to bring up someone's race. I mean, I'm thinking about what is analogous to that, like, Let's say you've got your build or mine and someone comes into your office who weighs 300 pounds are going to be like, oh, I see that you're fat. OK, that's rude to point out something about a person's physical appearance now at the point where they bring it up. And I've had that. I've had that clients heavier set than me who have certain assumptions or projections about how my lived experience differs from them or how there might be a gap in my empathy for them because I don't know what it's like to be fat. When someone brings that up, then there's something rich to explore there. The idea of being like, oh, you're really short or I see that you're bald. What is with this idea that you should point out someone's physical characteristics And you never know what it means to them, right? Like, just as much as a difference in skin tone could have a negative connotation to someone, which might indicate racism on their part, frankly, it could also have a positive effect in the sense that, like, You know, like here's an example of a biracial person who was, let's say, abused or neglected by one parent and loved by the other. Right. And then their therapist's skin tone reminds them of the parent who loved them. Right. But there there's a difference between because this person is biracial, so their skin tones don't match. But the automatic transference, the assumption that the client maybe unconsciously brings into the room is that this person reminds me of that parent who loved me. So the idea that it's always going to be something divisive, that it's always going to be about this idea of privilege or oppression. When that person's skin color could mean nothing to you, it could mean something positive to you, it could be a completely unconscious positive or negative association, and it could bear any degree of relevance to their presenting problem. And just the fact that they're so heavy-handed with the social justice stuff, even if I believed in it this time, which I'm very skeptical of all of it at this point, but even if I believed in it, just the way they're so heavy-handed with it, it's like, okay, you realize people aren't just like a walking bag of identities and like demographic labels, right? I don't know, I think like the emphasis on demographics to me feels like it's compensating for some kind of emptiness. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that.
James Esses: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that, you know, we're obsessed with kind of privilege versus oppression, because so much of this, and these assumptions fall into one or other bucket. I remember I saw a straight white male client a number of years back. And he told me basically that his previous therapist had essentially told him that he was privileged. Kind of almost as if maybe he didn't realize how good he had it because he was straight white male. And so now, ever since that, he kind of feels that if he complains about things in his life, that he feels kind of ashamed about it because he's got it so good and he's got nothing to complain about. You know, that pissed me off that this therapist going around telling people that they're privileged because of their sexuality or their skin tone. But equally, therapists are quick to make victims out of their clients. I mean, you know, a white therapist pointing out the, you know, the difference in skin tone with a black client. They've been taught to do that because they should, you know, address the power imbalance in the room, you know, as if to say that simply because the therapist's white and the client's black, that there is some sort of power imbalance, which again is, as far as I'm concerned, utter nonsense. And you kind of create victims out of people. But that's the trend these days. Victim hierarchies, I feel, is how most people are going about their daily lives at the moment. It pays to be a victim. We've got this obsession with self-identity which your own community will celebrate, but at the same time you can use it to show that you're in a minority oppressed state as well. I don't know, it's become almost an addiction, I think, actually. People are addicted. It's kind of narcissistic as well. I think everyone's just becoming increasingly self-obsessed. And again, with a therapist, like, I always was of the view that really, as a therapist, you shouldn't be really revealing, you know, huge swathes of information about your own personal life, because you're not there about you. You're there to deal with the client and what they've got in front of them. but I read therapist profiles online. And they're listing out all of their LGBTQ plus XYZ acronyms, and the long list of self identifiers, and it just feels very self indulgent.
Stephanie Winn: When I think of this example of how the white therapist is supposed to bring up the so called power imbalance with the black client, I'm thinking, okay, let's look at several real life examples of how that could play out. First of all, if the black client is as woke as the white therapist in this instance, they're not even going to go to a white therapist, okay? Because they've been indoctrinated to believe you can only be helped by someone who looks like you. You have to see a reflection of yourself in someone in order to be so-called safe. So if the client is that woke, they're not even going to see that therapist. So that's number one, right? And then I'm thinking, well, if the client is not that woke, they might be annoyed or put off by this projection. In the United States, there are a lot of Black families with conservative values. You could see examples of it in the culture. I like to watch dating and marriage reality TV. Sometimes you can see these Black families that are very traditional. It's like those families are all throughout America. The families where You know, they talk about their Christian values, where the man wants to approach the woman's father for her hand before he proposes to her. And people living according to those conservative values, if that's the client, right? And then they go see a white therapist who's like, let's talk about race and power. Then they're going to be put off by that person's wokeness. And they're going to feel like, you know, and these are just a couple of examples that come to mind. quickly falls apart upon examination. And it worries me that the emphasis is being put on having these conversations that actually feel very forced and artificial, and it could go wrong in so many different ways, instead of on the people skills, the skills for picking up on the nuances of what someone is giving away about themselves. A third dynamic is the fact that power is an interesting concept. And I think that it's very oversimplified by the woke identity politics. And the fact is that there could be someone who really enjoys the power of lording it over someone, weaponizing identity politics, whether it's their race or any other aspect of their so-called identity. And we see this in the people like Saira Rao and the others exposed by Matt Walsh's most recent documentary, which I haven't even seen, but I get the gist of what it's about. There are these people who are frankly sadistic. and who really enjoy having power over people. And so this is what I call gameable heuristics in my course, RGD Repair. It's like you subscribe to a belief system that is so easily hacked by bad faith actors. If it's that easy to get your trust or to differentiate where the good and the bad guys are, you're making it pretty easy for the big bad wolf to decide that he's grandma now.
James Esses: Well, I think it's interesting, the entire concept of lived experience, and that's kind of a necessity. Because I do see that, you know, saying that you should only go to a therapist who's got the same lived experience as you, only they will truly understand you. And that's completely at odds with the core therapeutic principle of empathy. which is what we should be teaching. Well, actually, I don't believe empathy can be taught. But that's the type of therapist we should be churning out, who can empathize, and even if they don't have the same lived experience, can still put themselves in your shoes. That's the entire basis of being a therapist in the first place. I think it's, I think it's crazy. But you know, I look back to some of my own experiences of being in therapy, and One of my previous therapists, and I saw her for quite a period of time, and I have a great deal of fondness towards her, but it was interesting because as part of one of our sessions, I think my kind of political views came up. I think I may have said which party I was going to vote for in the next election in the UK. And I could tell that she was kind of taken aback by that. And she came back the next session and said that she, she wasn't sure whether we could continue working together because my political views were so at odds with hers. And she felt a very strong reaction to that. And she, you know, she wasn't sure if she could continue seeing me. And, you know, that really hurt. I was, I was really quite, I mean, I was quite shocked and I was quite wounded by it. And I expressed that to her. And in the end, we kind of managed to work it through. And she actually came and apologized at a later session and said that she shouldn't have been lessing her own stuff, getting in the way of our therapeutic relationship. But I think it taught me a valuable lesson actually, of what not to do. Because you know, for therapists to kind of make that kind of judgment of a client because their political views don't align, you know, can be really quite damaging. And with the clients that I've seen over the years, I've, you know, I've made sure to not do that. I've seen clients in the past, who have kind of said, political philosophical things that are in some ways abhorrent to me. But as far as I'm concerned, it's not my responsibility to be schooling or preaching to them about my politics. Like, you know, we should be leaving that outside of the therapy room.
Stephanie Winn: Thinking about this concept of lived experience, too, I think something that really bothers me about the emphasis on that in certain places is that sharing the same so-called lived experience, I mean, first of all, no two people have lived the exact same life. And even if you can put lived experience into categories, like surviving domestic violence, or being bisexual, or growing up poor, whatever that on the outside might be called one thing, but two people are going to experience it in such a different way, it's going to have different meanings to them. And that's what I think is really interesting, personally, is how people make meaning, how people relate to their challenges, and I think the danger about this belief that you can only be helped by someone who shares your lived experience with regard to whatever the most significant pain point is or whatever it is, is that if that's how you're conceptualizing empathy, you are risking, let's say you're the client, you're risking seeing a therapist who's going to project onto you, let's say you do have that in common, domestic violence survivors, okay? Your therapist is a domestic violence survivor and you're a domestic violence survivor. And yes, there's a certain amount of knowledge that that therapist might have from lived experience, but there's also a risk that they're going to project their lived experience onto you because they see themselves in you. and that they're going to therefore be at risk of missing things about your experience and how it differs from them, or about how you're relating to it differently than they did, or whatever. And I think that's just as big of a risk. I just had to name that.
James Esses: I agree. And this infiltration of lived experience isn't just happening in the therapy room, it's happening in terms of setting overarching clinical models. I mean, I've seen it in the United Kingdom, in terms of clinical model for treating gender dysphoria and even action the government's taken. And they engage in these consultations with individuals who have lived experience, you know, i.e. children, teenagers who are saying that they're trans. in terms of what type of service they want. Which I find bizarre, because if we're coming at this from the place that gender dysphoria is a mental health condition, and that believing that you were born in the wrong body is a delusion, we wouldn't engage in the same type of consultation for other types of mental health condition. We wouldn't go to people who are suffering kind of severe mania, and were convincing themselves that they were the Messiah or such like, and ask them, you know, what, what do you feel that your clinician should be kind of saying to you? Or what, you know, what would make good treatment as far as you're concerned? Because Someone who's in a state of mania is not in a position to say what it is they want. I'm sure people who believe that the Messiah would like it if the therapist affirmed that they were the Messiah, probably, you know, make them feel better about themselves and such like, but we wouldn't treat it in the same way. And yet we're going to these young people with gender dysphoria and essentially saying, you've got the lived experience. So come and teach us, teach the clinicians, teach the therapists how we should treat you. It's completely back to front.
Stephanie Winn: It's embarrassing too. I mean, I think about, I was a mentally ill teenager and… and I would have given terrible advice. You know, if anyone asked me when I was 15, 16, and I mean, I was… I had grandiosity at that time. I thought, I mean, I was a know-it-all, right? So, I would have loved to have some… authority figures come to me and say, teach us, oh wise one, how we should help people like you. I would have given them terrible advice. Then to think that I would just feel so cringy knowing that I'd had that influence. That's what's so sad. I saw something on X recently, very wise reflections. I can't remember who they were by. If I did, I would certainly credit them, but about One of the functions of the fantasy of transition being that it gives young people an opportunity to reinvent themselves. And this was written by someone I think from Gen X who described some ways that she reinvented herself several times before social media and before we were photographing and videoing everything and there was no record. And she described like running away and lying about her age, working her first job, and then several things like that. And I had similar experiences. I ran away. I reinvented myself so many times between being a mentally ill teenager and making it safely to adulthood. I had the opportunity to just start fresh without this track record following me everywhere of everything I'd ever said, done, thought, and so on. And I think this generation is going to end up feeling so bogged down that they can never leave the past behind. For those who went through physical, medical, so-called transition procedures, then they carry that with them in their bodies or in their voices. But even for those who didn't, just to be constantly haunted by Having had this much power as a teenager, having everything on social media being photographed and videoed, but also having the authority to tell people twice or three times your age, how they should be treating people like you as if you're the expert is just so backwards. And I, yeah, I would be not only humiliated if I had given anyone any advice when I was a mentally ill teenager that was taken seriously, I would also feel a tremendous sense of guilt because that is too much power to give someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. And then I would feel responsible for the downstream consequences of that. It's like, obviously the solution is for adults to accept the responsibility that comes with adulthood and that they know things that adolescents don't.
James Esses: I think you touched on something quite important there, which is part of the appeal of children convincing themselves, telling themselves that they're trans. You know, earlier on, we kind of touched upon the benefit of being, you know, an eternal victim and the celebration that comes from being part of a certain community. So both of those are there for these children. But you raised an important point around the power. And it's quite incredible because you've got these children and they can use their identity as a stick to beat adults, but in particular their parents. I mean, they can now instruct their parents, you must call me x, you must use this type of language. And we've seen this in certain parts of the globe, in which conversion therapy legislation has been passed. Some parents have been criminalized because they're not allowing their children's transition, or because they're intentionally misgendering their children. I mean, that gives such a huge deal of power to these children. But I can see the appeal to it. you know, for the first time in their lives, maybe they can actually tell the adults what to do. They can tell their teachers what to do. If their teacher dares to misgender them, maybe the teacher will get fired. I mean, for, you know, we know already that we're kind of creating a new generation of kind of self absorbed narcissists, you know, I use those words, you know, with intent, I can see the appeal to that of this generation. So it's a very dangerous cocktail that can be offered to these kids in the form of gender ideology. I think that's why we've seen the contagion in the way that we've witnessed it.
Stephanie Winn: Maybe this is a decent place to insert a warning that I've been wanting to insert for parents, because I know we have a lot of parents of youth with rapid onset gender dysphoria who listen to this podcast and Some of them come to me for advice, so I get to meet listeners in my podcast all the time. You can go to stephaniewyn.com, book a 15-minute meeting, anyone can chat with me. You want to get a referral to someone in the types of groups that James and I run in, I have that private referral list. We can chat about your needs. You want to talk about whether my consulting services might be right for you, we can chat about that. I meet listeners in my podcast at least once a week, sometimes a lot more than that. And then there's my course, of course, so people are enrolling in my course and coming to me for help. I want to say to the people who are considering working with me or who have worked with me, I really try to give you advice to keep you out of the system, out of dealing with psychiatric hospitals. and child protective services and things like that. Because once you are involved with these other authority figures, they're going to triangulate your child. They're going to make the whole thing about gender. They are indeed going to confirm exactly what James just said about the power that is now in the youth's hands to control the adults. And gender is just this perfect multi-tool. It's the universal key card. It's this thing that you can hack any situation to make it conform to your wishes. That is just so incredibly appealing, like James is saying, to a young person who's gone from feeling powerless, weak, small, insecure, resentful towards their parents, perhaps, to just feeling like they have that power. I'm always trying to give parents advice that will keep them from situations where they're inviting those other authorities to come and triangulate their kids and get involved in their families. Once you do have those authorities involved, it's very difficult to get out of it because that's how the whole system is built at this point, just to give the kid all the power. But James, unless you had anything to add to that, I want to make sure to actually ask you about some of the other things that you've been up to.
James Esses: Sure. Yeah, let's do that.
Stephanie Winn: So once upon a time you had been planning on becoming a therapist and then you ended up having to spend years in litigation. So we started off this podcast with discussing your recent victory. So what have you decided to make your career about at this point? What have you been up to?
James Esses: I mean, a lot of my time is spent writing and engaging in advocacy, predominantly still on the gender stuff, because it's so prevalent. And if it's not happening in the UK, it's happening in my homeland of Ireland, or it's happening in the States. So there's always something in that space to turn my attention to. I've also been focusing a lot of my time on free speech more broadly, particularly in educational institutions. And actually, the new government that we've got in the UK have said they're going to row back on legislation the last government introduced, essentially protecting free speech in universities. So that's really quite concerning. So that takes up quite a bit of my time. But I've always wanted to stay in the therapeutic world in some way, particularly because I'd spent all those years training towards it. I'm currently building a network, a community, a directory of like-minded therapists in the UK, because quite often, through email or social media, I'll get prospective clients reaching out to me saying, James, how do I find a therapist who's not going to simply affirm my child's transition? How am I going to find a therapist who isn't pushing all this woke nonsense on me? And there's been a real gap in the market in that sense over here. So what I'm creating, it's called just therapy. And that is a double entendre, you know, because, for me, justice is very important. But also, therapists should be offering just therapy, and not politics and not preaching. So I found 20, 30 therapists who want to sign up to these kind of set of pledges that we're essentially making to prospective clients. And so that they can rest assured that they're with a good person, you know, who's not an ideologue and not an activist. And so I'm currently kind of building up the website and everything for that. So I'm hoping to launch that over the next few weeks or months. And I think As things stand, I mean, don't hold me to it, but as things stand today, I think I may go back into private practice myself, at least part time because I always found the therapy work so fulfilling. And in a lot of what I've been doing on social media and the advocacy and all the rest of this, you know, I can kind of get caught up in doing everything in this kind of macro level. And I think I've been missing out on some of those deeper, more meaningful personal connections as part of that and just spending time with one person trying to just help an individual rather than change, you know, the legal system in a country. So I think maybe I lost a bit of my grinding as part of that. And I feel that going back into private practice will help me be more grounded and kind of help people on a micro level as well. So that's the plan as it stands. So I'm looking forward to kind of the next adventure in that respect.
Stephanie Winn: With regard to private practice, you got kicked out of your graduate program, right? How far into it were you? If you opened a private practice now, would it have to be called coaching or something like that?
James Esses: In total, I had done four years of training, which as far as I'm concerned was enough, particularly given that awful standard of therapeutic training in this country. But interestingly enough, therapy is not regulated under statute in the United Kingdom. Actually, you don't need to have any particular accreditation or qualification to practice as a therapist and to call yourself a therapist as well. And I'm finding more and more long standing practitioners who are choosing to no longer be accredited with any of the bodies because they don't trust them, you know, to be frank. And so I think you're going to find an increase in therapists who don't have that accreditation or that formal qualification. And Some people may say, well, that's not a good thing. You know, all therapists should have to be formally qualified and accredited. But as I've alluded to earlier, the types of therapists that have been churned out on these accredited courses are not of a good standard anyway. But I've always believed that the fundamental skills that a therapist requires cannot be taught. I still believe that actually, to this day. But look, I'll have my detractors. And, and this is part of the pain of what happened to me, there will be some who can always say, Oh, well, he was just that guy who got kicked off his course. Yeah, he's just that on unqualified therapist or whatever. But I know who I am. I know what my skills are. I spent years counseling, you know, vulnerable young children, I spent a number of years as well, seeing adult clients for weekly therapy. So I, you know, I believe in myself, that I've got the ability and the personality to do this. And so I'm looking forward to kind of getting back into it again, actually.
Stephanie Winn: So in the UK, accreditation is something that you have, is it two different regulatory bodies that can offer that? The UK CP and the BA?
James Esses: They're the two main ones. There are some smaller ones, but yes, most therapists and counsellors are accredited by one of those two.
Stephanie Winn: So it's really something to add legitimacy. So anyone could hang a shingle, call themselves a therapist or a counselor, and nobody could come after them for that. But having that accreditation with the UK Council for Psychotherapy or the British Association of Counselors and Psychotherapists, having one of those adds legitimacy. But with everything that's going on in the counseling field, it maybe doesn't add so much legitimacy for a lot of informed consumers, so to speak.
James Esses: Oh, completely. Increasingly, therapists are choosing not even to mention on their website their accreditation because they don't view it as a badge of honor now. They grit their teeth and just go along with the reaccreditation process because they don't want to cause any hassle for themselves. These days, it's not particularly something to be proud of. Is the system open to abuse because you can have these charlatans putting up a therapist sign outside of the door? Potentially, but I'm more concerned with the fact that there are therapists who have been trained for many, many years and then been churned out by these accredited bodies who are, as far as I'm concerned, deeply unethical and severely lacking in terms of their skill set. That should be a bigger concern because Once you've got that badge of legitimacy, once you've got that accreditation next to your name, it gives a message to the public, you know, you are ethical, and that you know what you're doing. And unfortunately, it couldn't be further from the truth for some of the therapists we've got these days.
Stephanie Winn: In that sense, it seems like sort of a mixed blessing that the that the accreditation in the UK is really so optional. Here in the US, it's a lot more complicated. People go into so much debt to get their grad programs and then go through, you know, thousands of hours of supervision and take these exams to get these credentials which you do need to call yourself a therapist. But as I was saying at the beginning, it's, you know, some of some of the most highly qualified people are the ones having a hard the hardest time staying in it. And I think the fact that they've had to work so hard to get to where they are in their careers, and I relate to this myself as well, you know, it makes it that much harder to sort of have that nonchalant attitude that it seems like maybe some of your colleagues do of, oh, well, then I'll just call myself this and I won't advertise my credentials and it'll be fine. You know, like, it just feels like it's a lot easier to step outside the system over there in some ways. Are you looking to launch a podcast, but find yourself overwhelmed by the technical details? Or perhaps you've already gotten started podcasting, but you struggle to keep up with the parts that aren't fun? Well, my very own podcast producer can help. Nick can provide whichever services you need in order to focus on what matters most, your content. Whichever parts of the production process you find daunting, he can help you strategize or take them off your shoulders altogether. Whether your podcast includes video or just audio, whether you need someone to write your show notes and make clips for social media, or you just want your sound cleaned up a bit, Nick is your all-in-one podcast partner. His end-to-end service adapts to your unique needs, ensuring your podcast looks and sounds professional and polished. Let him sweat the technical details so you can relax behind the mic. Visit podsbynick.com to set up a free discovery call. Mention Some Therapist to receive 20% off your first month of service. Pods by Nick. Podcasting simplified. Now you did mention at the beginning that social media is stressing you out. I, you know, before we open up that can of worms, I will just say that one of my biggest annoyances about the drama I see on social media is that there is sort of this unspoken expectation amongst those who engage in a lot of the drama and infighting online, that everyone is paying attention to every little thing. that we're all just spending all day on Twitter like it's our job, excuse me, X, that everyone is supposed to be aware of all the dirt that everyone is dredging up on everyone else, and supposed to have opinions about it, and supposed to condemn whoever's got the 15 minutes of fame, of infamy spotlight on them today. The reality is that people have lives and that we are on social media in our in between moments, you know, for me, it's like when I'm waking up in the morning and I'm sleepy or you know, during a break between meetings or, you know, we're not on social media during our finest moments. And it's also not something that allows us to get the full picture of who someone is, which is why I enjoy doing long form interview podcasts over a video. I can see you. I get that you're up to some really important things. I mean, because of your case, which dragged you through years of litigation, Now it has been determined in your country that therapists are free to hold gender critical beliefs and that it's respected as a professional position. That is such a significant accomplishment. So anyway, I have complaints about just the overall picture of how certain people behave on the internet. So I come at this saying, in case anyone is listening who is offended that I do not spend all day looking deeply into every single complaint anyone on the internet has about anyone else on the internet, you're in the wrong place. Leave me alone. Get off my channel. Unsubscribe from my podcast. I don't want anything to do with you. I don't know why you've even made it this far into the interview, because you clearly need to get back on X and spend time researching why you should witch hunt the next victim. I am not interested in that type of listener. if that's what you expect of me. The answer is no, I will not cooperate. But that being said, I know some people on Twitter hate you just like some people on Twitter hate me. And I just wanted to give you a chance to, because I wasn't, like, I saw it and I was like, what's going on? I don't know what this is about. Why do people have a problem with James? So what do you want to say about that while you have the opportunity here?
James Esses: It's very interesting what people project onto others, particularly when they've never met them in the flesh. When I do meet people who I've interacted with on X, or I've seen my stuff on X and then we meet in person at an event, people always seem to be forever surprised about the way that I am. I think people expect me to be generally very angry, like a very angry, serious person and really quite militant because the type of stuff I'm putting on Twitter on X is like calling out members of our parliament for the damage that they're doing to our entire social fabric. I mean, it's pretty serious stuff. So I'm not in a particularly jolly mood when I'm posting stuff on social media, but in reality, uh that's not my kind of natural go-to um so i think it's interesting kind of the stories that we tell ourselves about people that we see online but yeah i you have a personality you're not just this one-dimensional wall of political righteousness correct well you'd have to ask my wife that i mean she might say this but i mean generally and also i do not spend as you just said We don't live our lives on social media. I spend more time than I should, and I am trying to cut down on it. But there is more to life than this stuff. And I do enjoy just having a laugh as much as anyone else. I think otherwise life would be very depressing indeed. But I, yeah, I do have people who hate me. You know, at one point I was kind of scared. I remember the, all I'd really been speaking out about was the gender stuff. It's all I was really known for. And I began to get concerned about sharing other beliefs or viewpoints I have on kind of issues affecting society, because I knew that it differed wildly to some of those who were colleagues and supporters of mine. And That kind of put me off sharing more of myself, but I'm trying to do that more and more because I appreciate this. I can't please everyone all the time. And I'd rather be congruent and be able to be myself than feel as if I'm putting on some sort of act. I've put out other viewpoints that I've got on things, which has pissed people off. I've lost probably some supporters over that, but I don't really mind about that. As far as I'm concerned, you should be able to disagree respectfully with people and still remain colleagues, friends, whatever. We don't need to disown people just because they've got different viewpoints themselves. But certainly I've said a number of things that have pissed people off. I mean, one of them recently was that this… I believe she was Asian. I believe she was an Asian woman. And she had posted something on X. basically saying that these two white guys, and she was very kind of particular about the language she was using, these two white guys were sat in her reserved seat, and that they wouldn't, that they made her move to a different seat on the train. She still did get a seat, it was just not the exact seat she had booked. And she had taken without them knowing a photograph of both of them. and posted it on X. And she'd also said that, ironically, in her words, she was on her way to a unconscious bias training, trying to make out the case that these guys did what they did, not because they're just two pricks, but because they're white and she's an Asian woman. And this took off and went viral and got like well over a million views. And I essentially called that out. And I said, Is this what we should be encouraging in society, for people with petty gripes to essentially take photographs of those they don't like, and to plaster them all over the internet for those individuals to be publicly shamed, and then to suggest that it was something to do with their skin colour? I essentially call that out. And I got an onslaught of people saying, James S's supports women having the seats taken away from them and trains and like all this nonsense. I mean, it's just crazy how things blow up. I still, I don't take back anything I said, I still fully stand by it. But I mean, it produced onslaught of anger towards me. I've had other instances as well. You know, my wife often says that, you know, Do I not just want a kind of quieter, easier life? Maybe I don't need to kind of get caught up in this stuff. Maybe I don't need to comment on these things, but I can't help it, Stephanie. Like rightly or wrongly, I feel pre-programmed that if I see some sort of injustice take place, I do have to kind of get involved in it. And it means that there is often drama going on in my life as a result of that. But I mean, I can't change that. I'm too long in the tooth.
Stephanie Winn: I did mean to say, by the way, congratulations on your wedding. Because I remember, I still remember when you posted on X, she said yeses. I was going to ask if you'd gotten married yet. So congratulations. And I'm glad you have someone who balances you out. It sounds like my person as well.
James Esses: It's definitely needed. I don't give her as much credit as I should do. But no, she's a very, very balancing perspective in my life. I think everyone needs that. I think everyone needs somebody close to them, who will support them, but also call out their bullshit, because we all do it.
Stephanie Winn: And you know, the going back to what happened on that train, I think your point is legitimate that, um, yeah, it's it's an asshole move to take someone's seat. But Why do you filter it through needing it to be about some kind of ism? Why can't you just this person is being an asshole because they're being an asshole, right? Like, and, and the races, the sexes, the identity stuff could be really anyone in either position, the person who stole the seat, the person whose seat was stolen. It's, it's sort of like, Like the idea of a hate crime in some instances, I mean, there are things that are truly, truly horrific that are categorized as hate crimes, but at the same time, it's like there is a spectrum of where you should draw the line between like, that's just an asshole thing to do to someone, period. Like, you know, why do we need to bring in this other dimension of things. And I think the irony being that she's saying she's on her way to this unconscious bias training, but it's like, well, who has the bias here? Yeah, maybe they're the assholes who stole your seat, but you're the one who's deciding that that is a reflection on their race or yours or how they're thinking about race when clearly it's about how you're thinking about race. You've decided that because they're white, that's what makes them, you know, and it's. Anyway, yeah, I mean, I think that there are There are people who are very leftist in their politics and have kind of a woke social justice lens on everything except the gender issue. And those are the people I think I end up in conflicts with on social media as well, because if I dare say something like anything politically incorrect about like how most women, once they have babies, would probably rather stay home to be with their babies than return to work. If I acknowledge the biological reality or that it's really not ideal to have to go through assisted reproductive technology and that there are ethical problems with that, if I make any of these statements that… Or here's a really explosive one. Endocrine disrupting chemicals in our environment might have something to do with rising rates of gender dysphoria. people will castigate me over that one because I think it runs up against this cognitive distortion. There's some kind of logical fallacy in their thinking, and I haven't flushed out exactly which one it is. Maybe you can help. But it's like people are so afraid to acknowledge that in addition to narratives and top-down agendas and social contagion, in addition to all of that, maybe there's even 1% of a biological component to why some people report not feeling like their body matches their brain, right? Like, OK, well, if you look at the fact that testosterone and sperm counts are down 50% from what they were 50 years ago, if you look at the rise of endocrine disorders from endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our environment, like, we have more PCOS. We have more infertility. We have endocrine disorders. We have endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our environment. I'm actually in the process of overhauling my wardrobe to get endocrine-disrupting chemicals off of my skin. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that that could be playing a role in how people feel? It's like the gender critical people are afraid to say, if you acknowledge that there could be any biological contributing factors whatsoever, it's like they're afraid that their whole argument about social contagion falls apart. As if you're saying, well, because some people do have endocrine disorders, that means that there is a such thing as a true trans and that medical transition is best for those people. I'm like, no. No, I'm saying that if we look at what the root cause is, maybe they need to holistically fix something in regard to their own body's natural sex hormone production is off.
James Esses: I don't think any discussion should be off the table. We're dealing with something that has come about in a relatively short space of time. It is very complex. So I don't think we should be trying to shame people for raising questions and wanting to have a discussion about these things. I don't know. I worry more and more that we just replace one form of identity politics with another. I mean, a lot of the people that I've collaborated with and I value their support and their friendship and I've come at the trans stuff from a women's rights perspective. But I do see, and I've been on the receiving end of this as well, like, I would say kind of male bashing, that there have been occasions in which I've been told to stay out of it because I'm a man, you know, leave it to the women. Women don't need a man to speak on their behalf as if I ever proclaimed to be speaking on behalf of anyone other than myself. So I've seen elements of this, and I'm worried that when we get the entire trans debate sorted, that we're still going to be left with a bigger gulf, which is men v. women and women v. men. I'm worried about that. I'm worried about these straight white boys in school essentially being kind of missed or left behind. I was reading something the other day in terms of educational standards and rates in the United Kingdom, and the cohort that's doing far worse than any others are the white boys from working class backgrounds, you know. So I'm worried about that. And I'm worried about the dynamic between men and women, actually. I feel like a lot of that is changing. And I see what's been posted online sometimes by adolescent boys or, you know, university students. And there's actually a lot of anxiety out there around how to even engage with women. I think increasingly, men are fearful of, I don't know, even making a kind of clumsy pass, you know, at a girl that they find attractive, because they're worried that they're going to be accused of being misogynistic.
Stephanie Winn: I feel like this warrants a larger discussion. And I'm thinking of inviting you back for a conversation about the relationships between the sexes, maybe at some point in the future. Maybe we could even do a panel on it. But just to kind of bring things full circle, some of the women who have this really intense anti-man sentiment are some of the women who have been most traumatized by men. And I would never invalidate their experiences as survivors of rape, incest, domestic violence, and so on. But I think, you know, if we look at what our What are good goals for psychotherapy, for instance? Again, bringing it kind of full circle. Is this something we want to keep in an inflamed state? Do we want to build a worldview around that wound? And do we want to keep perpetuating it by seeing it everywhere? We're not trying to gaslight our patients and say that didn't happen to you or that you don't have reason to feel wary and to want to prioritize your safety first and foremost. But I don't think that the people with the most trauma and the most reasons to distrust a whole category of people like the opposite sex, for instance, are necessarily the ones who should have all the power in terms of influencing others' worldviews as well. Because ultimately, if we look at what's best for society, I agree with you that And again, bringing it full circle, marriage and family is good. And I want a world of healthy marriages and healthy families. That means healthy relationships between the sexes. And I do worry that there are some people involved in activism who have again, very legitimate reasons for feeling the way that they do. But the concern is, yeah, building a worldview around that, trying to influence other people with that worldview, rather than finding a balanced position of, okay, these horrible things happened to me, and I'm not alone, and horrible things happen to other women as well. And there are truly some horrible men in the world. What happens to society when we let that narrative take over? What does that do to men who maybe aren't terrible? And what does it do to families and society? What does it do to trust and cooperation? What does it do in terms of bringing out the best or the worst in people? And where should something like therapy play a role maybe in helping people acknowledge that, yeah, something really horrible happened to me and horrible things continue to happen to other people. But I don't want to bring that everywhere I go and miss the opportunity to actually experience safety and healing and benefit from the people who would wish me well. So on that note, I actually want to read something that, and I know you'll have to go soon, I'm keeping you from dinner with your wife and it's late in the UK, but I went to yoga class one day, really, really annoyed with just a lot of things going on in my life. And here's what I wrote afterward, after a good yoga practice, and I feel like this kind of applies. The weight of the world is heavy, life is challenging, and people are deeply flawed. As much as possible, strive to begin each day, each moment, and each interaction fresh and new. Sweep the daily debris of grievances and frustrations that entropy will inevitably accumulate in the dimly lit corners of your mind and heart. In doing so, you free yourself and those you encounter of the chains of past faults and foibles. Generativity, creativity, kindness and connection require renewal in order to flourish. So maybe we'll close on that now.
James Esses: Very nice. Very nice. I think there's a lot to be taken from that. And look, the worlds that you and I live in, we can get bogged down with all of this stuff. I mean, it is depressing stuff. And there's a lot of awful stuff going on in it there across the globe. I try to remain grounded and I try and appreciate, to be honest, just being here and being alive. It's a crazy bloody adventure and it's not always a pleasurable experience. As far as I'm concerned, this is doing life. If it's not a bit messy, it's not life at all. I think what you read out there was lovely.
Stephanie Winn: All right, James. Where can people find you?
James Esses: On X far too often. As I said, if you ask my wife, she'd probably say I practically live there. So yes, you can find me on X. I write a substack, a new substack with Professor Matt Goodwin. He's a professor of politics over here in the UK, particularly focusing on kind of woke ideologies that have infiltrated institutions. So you can find that. And I've got my email address on my social media as well. If anyone wants support, whether they're considering training as a psychotherapist or they're concerned about what's happening within their organization, I try and help people as much as I can if I'm able to. I always welcome emails and DMs.
Stephanie Winn: Okay, wonderful. I'll include all that in the show notes as well. James, so good to see you. Thanks for joining me.
James Esses: Nice chatting. Cheers.
Stephanie Winn: I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit SomeTherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at SomeTherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender Affirming Care, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.