When a Story Follows You into the Therapy Room: Reflections on Fear, Belonging, and Relationships

There are times when a television drama ends, the credits roll, and life carries on much as it did before. Then some stories refuse to leave you.

A few weeks ago, I finished watching Tip Toe. I sat in silence for a while and realised I wasn't ready to move on. Days later, I was still thinking about it. Not because it was shocking for the sake of it, but because it left me with a deep sense of discomfort and questions that I couldn't easily answer.

As a psychosexual and relationship therapist, I spend much of my working life listening to stories of trauma, shame, intimacy, relationships, loss, identity, and resilience. Difficult emotions are part of my everyday work, yet this series affected me in a different way. It stayed with me emotionally and professionally, reminding me that some stories do not end when the screen goes black. They continue in the questions they leave behind.

What unsettled me most was not simply the story itself, but the possibility that, for many people, the fear portrayed is not fiction. It is part of everyday life in ways I may never fully understand.

I recognise that, as a cisgender, heterosexual man, my experiences of moving through the world differ from those of people with other gender identities and sexual orientations. I cannot speak for the experiences of women or LGBTQ+ communities, nor should I. Those experiences belong to the people who live them. What I can do is listen, remain open to being challenged, and reflect on what my own position means within those conversations.

One question has stayed with me ever since.

If I recognise that I am more likely to be heard in some spaces, what responsibility does that entail?

 I see it as an invitation to reflect on how I use my own voice. For me, that means listening carefully, staying curious, and being willing to challenge misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, and other forms of prejudice when I encounter them. Silence is rarely neutral, and I often wonder what becomes possible when more men choose curiosity, accountability, and compassion instead.

Watching Tip Toe also reminded me why I entered this profession. Therapy is often misunderstood as a place where people come to solve problems. My experience has been very different. Therapy is where people begin to understand themselves, their relationships, and the social worlds they inhabit. None of us enters the therapy room untouched by messages about gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, or what it supposedly means to belong.

As therapists, we are taught to stay curious before becoming certain. That curiosity became my strongest response to the series. Rather than asking, "How could someone become like that?", I found myself asking different questions.

How does fear become certainty? How does certainty become prejudice? How does another human being stop being seen as a person and become a symbol of everything someone fears losing?

In my clinical work, I rarely meet people whose story begins with hatred. More often, I meet people carrying shame, loneliness, grief, rejection, humiliation, trauma, and a profound longing to belong. None of those experiences excuses violence or discrimination. People remain responsible for the choices they make. However, if we genuinely want to understand why misogyny, prejudice, or extremism take hold, we also need to understand the emotional needs that make simple answers so appealing.

Understanding is not the same as excusing. If we only condemn harmful beliefs without understanding the psychological processes beneath them, we leave those processes untouched.

Perhaps that is why the series stayed with me. It was never really about the plot. It was about what the story represented.

It reflected many of the conversations taking place across society about masculinity, identity, belonging, relationships, class, race, sexuality, and power. More importantly, it reminded me that hatred rarely exists in isolation. Misogyny often sits alongside homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, and other forms of exclusion. The target changes, but the underlying message remains remarkably similar. Some people belong. Others do not.

Only a week earlier, I had attended the Fawcett Society's Misogyny Matters conference, where this theme emerged repeatedly. Speaker after speaker demonstrated how systems of oppression rarely operate independently. Misogyny intersects with racism. Homophobia intersects with transphobia. Class prejudice intersects with ableism. Different groups become the target, yet the psychological process remains strikingly familiar. When people feel frightened, uncertain, ashamed, or left behind, certainty becomes seductive because it offers someone to blame.

As a relationship therapist, I see similar processes at work in intimate relationships. Couples rarely arrive because love has disappeared. More often, they have stopped being curious about each other's inner world. Assumptions replace questions. Certainty replaces dialogue. Blame replaces understanding. Gradually, fear replaces intimacy. The context is different, but the emotional pattern feels surprisingly familiar.

Watching the series also led me back to questions I have been writing about over the past year. Masculinity. Shame. Identity. Belonging.

Conversations about privilege have become increasingly polarised. Too often, privilege is discussed as though it were a fixed identity rather than something contextual. The reality is more complex. A person may benefit from certain privileges while experiencing significant disadvantage in other areas of life.

I often think about my own experiences. Living in Britain, people frequently assume I am Mediterranean because of my olive skin. Those assumptions are usually positive. Yet when I explain that I am Eastern European, I sometimes notice the conversation change. Curiosity gives way to uncertainty, and occasionally to prejudice. Growing up, my appearance was sometimes associated with the Traveller community, and I experienced racial abuse because of those assumptions. The same person can therefore experience acceptance, suspicion, discrimination, and privilege depending entirely on context.

This complexity matters because simplistic narratives leave little room for lived experience. In my work, I meet men whose lives have been shaped by poverty, violence, neglect, sexual abuse, relationship trauma, and profound loneliness. Some became carers while they were still children. Others have survived abuse that they have never spoken about. When they hear only that they are privileged, many feel their suffering has been dismissed rather than understood.

That feeling of being unseen creates space for simplistic narratives to take hold.

Extremist movements understand this well. They rarely begin with hatred. They begin with pain. They acknowledge genuine suffering, then redirect it towards women, LGBTQ+ communities, migrants, disabled people, or anyone portrayed as a threat to an imagined past. The emotional experience is real. The explanation is false.

Therapy asks for something much more demanding.

It invites us to hold two truths at once. We can acknowledge suffering without turning it into resentment. We can recognise privilege without denying pain. We can encourage accountability without abandoning compassion. In my experience, this is one of the hardest things we ask of ourselves, but it is also where meaningful change begins.

Working as a psychosexual and relationship therapist reminds me every day that these wider social narratives do not stop at the consulting room door. They shape intimacy, sexuality, trust, vulnerability, desire, and relationships. They influence how men understand masculinity, how LGBTQ+ people experience safety and belonging, how couples negotiate difference, and how each of us learns to relate to ourselves and others.

Perhaps that is why Tip Toe affected me so deeply. It reminded me that hatred rarely begins with hatred. More often, it begins with fear, shame, loneliness, and a desperate search for certainty, identity, and belonging.

Therapy cannot resolve political division, nor should it attempt to. What it can offer is increasingly rare. A space where uncertainty is tolerated, curiosity is valued, shame is spoken rather than defended against, and people are seen in all their complexity instead of being reduced to stereotypes or labels.

When I closed my laptop after the final episode, I realised the question I was carrying was no longer, "How does someone become hateful?"

It had become something much more challenging.

How do we build relationships, families, and communities where hatred no longer feels like the only place some people believe they belong?