Counselling and Psychotherapy
A Space to Make Sense of Things
Therapy is not only for a crisis, and sometimes it is.
Sometimes people arrive at therapy during quieter turning points. Moments when something inside begins to shift, or when the ways you have always managed life no longer quite fit. Many of the men who come to The Threshold Practice appear to be managing life well on the surface. Work, friendships, relationships. Yet privately they carry something heavier: shame, loneliness, difficulty with intimacy, or a lingering sense of not quite belonging.
Sometimes it is easy to name what is happening. Other times it shows up as restlessness, disconnection, or the sense that something in you wants to move but does not yet know how. Therapy offers a place to slow down and begin to make sense of these experiences. Not by rushing to solutions, but by listening carefully to what your life is asking of you now.
It is a space for honesty, reflection, and change.
How I Work
My approach is relational and integrative, drawing on trauma theory, psychodynamic understanding, and an existential sensibility shaped by many years of sitting with people in the complexity of their lives.
Much of my work focuses on the emotional lives of gay, bisexual, and trans men, exploring how shame, belonging, masculinity, sexuality, and identity shape the ways we relate to ourselves and to others.
Together, we might look at patterns in relationships, the ways you have learned to protect yourself from being hurt, or the quiet stories you carry about who you are allowed to be.
Sometimes the work is about loss or transition. Sometimes it is about intimacy, connection, or the search for meaning when older certainties no longer hold.
Existential themes are often quietly present in this work. Questions of authenticity, mortality, freedom, and meaning tend to surface as we move through adult life, and particularly for men who have spent years performing a version of themselves that no longer feels true. Therapy can be a place to meet those questions slowly, without rushing them into answers.
I have also come to understand that real change rarely arrives all at once. It happens through relationship, through feeling what has been held inside, through making sense of experience, and through the slow movement into a new way of being. Much of the work is about noticing where someone is in that movement, including the choke points where something inside is trying to shift but cannot yet find its way through.
Therapy is not passive. It is a living conversation, a meeting of presence and honesty. It asks for courage, but it is work that is held carefully and respectfully and in your own time.
Themes We Might Meet
Many of the men who come to therapy carry experiences such as:
Shame around identity or sexuality
Difficulty with intimacy and vulnerability
Repeating patterns in relationships
Loneliness or disconnection from community
Navigating masculinity and self-acceptance
Complex relationships with sex, chemsex, or substances
Family relationships and the experience of coming out
The quiet pressure to appear strong or successful while feeling something different inside
Therapy becomes a space where these experiences can be spoken about openly, understood more deeply, and gradually integrated into a fuller sense of self.
Some of the Men I Work With
The men who come here arrive from very different lives.
Some are out, settled, and asking deeper questions about intimacy, masculinity, or meaning. Others are not out, or are out in some parts of their life and not in others. Some are married to women, raising children, and beginning to sense that the shape of their life no longer fits. Some are coming out late, into their forties, fifties, sixties, often carrying decades of careful management of how much to show and to whom.
I also work with men who cannot come out, or for whom coming out is not safe. Men whose families, communities, or countries of origin make their sexuality dangerous. Men living in a country that names itself as proud while they carry the private knowledge that being who they are is illegal somewhere they still call home. This is a particular kind of double life, and it has its own grief.
I work with trans men exploring sexuality, masculinity, intimacy, and the long process of becoming oneself in a body and a life that the world is still learning to meet.
I work with men who have survived conversion therapy, or other forms of religious or therapeutic harm framed as care. The wounds left by people who tried to change you in the name of love are particular, and the work of meeting them in therapy is delicate. There is no agenda here other than your own self-understanding.
I work with men who carry histories of sexual harm, including childhood sexual abuse and adult sexual violence. These histories shape intimacy, sexuality, trust, and the body, often long after the events themselves have receded. The work here is not to make you tell the story before you are ready, or to fix what was done to you. It is to make space for what has often had nowhere safe to land, and to support the slow work of meeting it on your own terms.
I work with men who carry shame around sex, around chemsex, around drug use, around HIV status, around sexually transmitted infections. These are some of the most stigmatised areas of gay and bisexual men's lives, and they are often the areas where the loudest internal voice and the loudest cultural voice converge. The work is not to dismantle those voices on the first day, but to slowly listen for what is underneath them.
I also work with men whose sexual behaviour has become compulsive, or who feel they have lost agency in how they meet desire. This is not about pathologising sex or sexuality. It is about taking seriously what compulsion is often doing: managing pain, holding back grief, regulating loneliness, or attempting to feel alive when other parts of life have gone quiet. The work is to listen for what the behaviour is carrying, and to slowly find other ways of being in contact with what is true.
I work with men navigating non-monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, and other relationship structures that do not fit conventional templates. The work here is not to assess your relationship structure, but to think alongside you about intimacy, jealousy, communication, attachment, and what you are actually building, on its own terms.
I work with men whose experience of being queer is shaped by race, migration, faith, and culture. The Irish and Western queer worlds I move in often present themselves as universal, but they are not. A man arriving here from a culture, family, or country where his sexuality is unspeakable does not enter Pride as a celebration. He enters it as a question. This is work I have been doing for a long time. My own life is interfaith and intercultural, and the questions of race, family, faith, and belonging that this work asks of me are not abstract. I do not claim this as lived experience, but I do not come to it as a stranger.
What runs through all of this is shame, in its many forms. The shame that grows in silence. The shame that survives long after the conditions that produced it have changed. The shame that hides inside competence, inside achievement, inside relationships that look fine from the outside.
You do not have to arrive in any particular shape to begin this work. You only need to be ready to look honestly at the life you are actually living.
Ways of Working
Sessions are available online across Ireland, the UK, Europe, and worldwide
For clients based in Dublin, therapy can also take place outdoors through walk-and-talk psychotherapy in Phoenix Park. An eco-based approach that brings movement, breath, and the natural world into the process.
Sometimes walking side by side allows conversations to unfold in ways that feel easier and more natural than sitting face to face indoors.
The Inner Adolescent in Adult Life
My training in adolescent psychotherapy shapes much of how I understand adult life.
In therapy, we often talk about the inner child. The inner adolescent is just as vital, and often more relevant for the men I work with. The wounds we carry around shame, belonging, sexuality, and selfhood were often formed in those early years of becoming, when we were first learning who we were and how the world would receive us.
Meeting that part of ourselves with compassion can open pathways toward deeper self-acceptance and connection.
If You Are Thinking of Starting
Reaching out for therapy can feel like standing at another threshold. Uncertain, but quietly hopeful.
If you are considering getting started, we can begin with a brief introductory call. There is no pressure, simply a chance to talk about what is happening and to see whether this space feels like the right fit.
Therapy at The Threshold Practice is not about fixing what is broken. It is about creating a space where what is real can be seen, understood, and integrated. A place where you can meet yourself with honesty, curiosity, and care.