After that, I wondered out loud if I should approach my own work in the same way, while at the same time realizing that I wouldn’t actually do that… even if I should.

“I was just thinking to myself, ‘maybe I should do it Amelia’s way in my own work,’ and then, as I was thinking that, another part of my head was like, ‘absolutely not!’ really loud, and so, I think I probably wouldn’t do that even if I should,” is what I said to her.

“Well, you’re also in a little bit of a different situation with different clientele than I have. Your… clients? Or followers? Whatever you call them?”

“Community members.”

“Community members, right. Sorry. Anyway, all of your community members are men. And they’re all a certain self-selected type of man because of how you grew that community. Whereas I have a much more diverse range of clients. So, you can afford to have more or less the same vibe with all of them.”

“Oh hey, you know something else that I realized I can do that a therapist could never?”

“A lot of things, I’m sure.”

“Okay, yeah. But, with the whole dominance dynamic, I can say, ‘I’m your pet. You’re my leader. You’re the man. It’s your job to protect me… but not just physically. Not just financially. You also have to protect me emotionally, and that means that you need to be accessible and vulnerable to me.’ And I tell this to everybody, not just Felix. I have that dynamic with everyone. And so then they open up in a different way that a therapist could never get to.”

She was still sitting perched with her feet tucked under her, and this time she was holding one knee sharply angled up away from her body as she tipped back in her seat, thinking.

“I wonder if that works better with their type of thinking.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just like I was talking about with you and my friend, men tend to be very analytical in their thinking. It’s very black or white, this or that. So, if I’m a man and I’m supposed to protect my female partner, and you’re telling me I have to protect her completely, including emotionally, well, that fits into what I already know as good.”

“Did I ever tell you I used to follow a late-diagnosed autistic woman and she talked a lot about things that people don’t realize is autism in women. One of those things was that they tend to think using more typically masculine processes down to washing their bodies the same way men wash theirs. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

“Well, that would fit with you and my friend both being like that. I don’t know about the washing your bodies part, though.”

“I feel like there’s a lot for me to think about there, if it’s true. You know, in relation to the men’s mental health thing and… all of it, really.”

“Yeah, maybe we’ll talk about it next time.”

“I hope so. I want to think about it.”

“Yeah, that’d be good.”

“...while high.”

“Oh my god,” she said, making a few final notes on her paper. She then put that paper away and got a standardized form out before she asked the standard questions. “Any safety concerns today?”

No safety concerns. No thoughts of offing myself. Yadda yadda yadda.

I mean… not for a month, at least.

The next part of this article is titled: “How Therapy Does Its Thing.”