Gloucester-born psychotherapist Joshua Fletcher has written and how does that make you feel?: a book that pretends nothing and reveals (pretty much) everything you’ve ever (or never) wanted to know about therapy
Vignette: Version A
Joshua Fletcher, psychotherapist, is sitting in his office, waiting for a new client. He has no idea who she is, other than the name she has booked under. Daphne.
So, he sits and waits… And five minutes pass.
Then twenty. And still no Daphne.
The thing is: no-shows happen to all therapists. And, obviously, Josh feels concern. His specialism is anxiety. Is Daphne OK? Is there a worrying reason why she hasn’t shown up?
Finally, Josh decides she’s not going to appear. So, he packs up his computer to head home for the afternoon. Out in the lobby, he presses the lift button and watches numbers illuminate as it climbs towards him.
The doors open… And there, in front of him, is a genuine, I’ll-go-to-the-foot-of-our-stairs A-list celebrity. Somebody to turn heads in the street; to provoke whispers in public places. Selfie requests. Autographs. The full Monty.
‘Hey, Josh,’ this award-winning actor begins. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’
Joshua Fletcher. Photo: schoolofanxiety.com SO, LISTEN: that’s version A of this story. And it’s completely accurate! Josh is a highly regarded, very successful psychotherapist. (Recently gave a TEDxManchester talk on Calming Anxiety When Nothing Works.) And, yes, ‘Daphne’ was late. And, no: he didn’t think she’d show. When she did, he discovered she was a household name. (Etc.)
But psychotherapists are only sort of people, right?
(Not being rude — the opposite, really.)
I mean (in my mind, at least) they’re like vicars, or your GP when you’re describing your haemorrhoids. You can say pretty much what you want, and they’re pretty much unshockable. Calm; wise. They offer you a kind of contract: you can talk to me because I don’t process things in the way normal humans do.
Well… Daphne is one of the clients (no breaches of confidence; these are stories with truth rather than true stories) who features in Josh’s book and how does that make you feel?
This is the Noises Off version of the psychotherapist’s story. The one that whisks you behind the scenes.
Let’s turn the clock back to an hour before Daphne’s appointment-time. The bit where Josh is sitting in his office with Tony, who has just begun to put two and two together: to understand — with Josh’s help — why past events might explain why he has always felt so uneasy on his own. More than uneasy. Terrified. Even for just five minutes.
This is a ground-breaking moment for Tony.
And for Josh, too. Except that Josh downed a large Americano just before Tony walked in, and desperately needs the toilet.
(I’ll be honest here. I’d never previously considered whether or not I imagined psychotherapists planned reasonable bathroom breaks; but, now I come to think of it, that would definitely have been on my list of their capabilities.)
Josh remains professional, focused…
Despite the fact that his inner voices — who feature largely in this book — are bickering. ‘He’s doing really well,’ Josh’s compassion says admiringly of Tony.
‘You do know that holding it in is bad for your prostate, right?’ his anxiety butts (possibly unfortunate choice of words) in.
When Tony finally leaves, Josh makes a Roger-Bannister-beating dash for lavatorial relief… only to find the cubicle and the one urinal (the latter featuring Dr Patel of the GP practice downstairs) are occupied. ‘I’m really sorry, doctor…’ Josh begins, as he speeds towards the sink.
(And we haven’t even begun to revisit Daphne yet.)
‘How are you doing?’ I ask — the polite opener to a conversation such as this.
The correct reply, of course, being along the lines of: Very well, thank you. And how are you?
‘Didn’t sleep too well last night,’ Josh says. ‘So, I’m stacking myself with caffeine.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry. What was it about last night?’
‘Don’t know. Might have been something to do with the curry I ate. Quite a late-night curry.’
(And already I know more about him than I’ve probably known about any other psychotherapist, ever.)
It’s funny, I say to him, as we chat. As I read his book, it felt as if he was purposefully breaking an Omerta. The one that (see above) presents psychotherapists as being superhuman.
How interesting. Also, how counterintuitive of him to do that. Wasn’t it a risk?
He thinks for a moment.
‘There is an element of risk to it; but I’m more driven by…’ (he pauses) ‘…encouraging people to talk and maybe even consider and read about a world that is quite shrouded in mystery unless you’ve been through it. Also, you’re challenging the idea that therapists know everything. And they don’t.’
Yes — I guess they don’t. Why would they? And yet…
‘I wanted to show people the power of the therapeutic relationship; what it looks like. I also wanted to show people that we’re not these omnipotent know-it-alls with everything there. And, actually, I wanted to celebrate the connection — the human connection — between a therapist and someone else.’
The title hooked me, too.
and how does that make you feel?
I guess because it’s a cliché; and yet incredibly important, too. Because it gives authority to feelings. No matter how others might judge something intellectually (‘Why on earth would you be offended by that? Why would you get upset over something so minor?), in this question how you feel is king.
‘The key word is ‘you’; how do YOU feel about it? …For someone to park their own needs and wants and existences to give you pure empathy for a bit: and how does that make YOU feel? It is a cliché and it’s almost like a jokey, tongue-in-cheek title. I’ve never asked it in my practice and never will… But,’ he repeats, ‘the key word is ‘you’.
This man does the opposite of presenting himself as an omnipotent, god-like being. Take his early life.
Born in Gloucester?
‘I was born in Gloucester, which is why I tell everyone I’m from Manchester.’ (Joke, btw; or, at least, he laughs.) Still visits the Cotswolds now and then.
‘Lots of very well adjusted people here, Josh,’ I throw in.
‘Full of billionaires now, isn’t it? Beckhams and all that.’
His mum was a Stroud girl. ‘She actually had a very difficult upbringing, my mum; she went to Stroud — I don’t know the name of the high school.’
‘Archway?’
‘Archway — that’s it, yes, with her brother.’
He’s lived in Stroud, Dursley and Cheltenham. Went to Christ Church Primary School: ‘And, actually, we used to live off Princess Elizabeth Way, in the maisonettes that are no longer there.’
Moved to Greater Manchester when he was nine.
At one point, when he’s invited back to his old high school to give a talk, the deputy head makes him promise not to mention his behaviour record. Suspended for selling cigarettes out of the classroom window. Stealing and copying the school master key. Fighting. Cheating in exams.
As Josh begins to speak in front of this school assembly — a coughing parent; blank teenage faces — he feels far more anxious than he did addressing a highly paid corporate event the week before. The attendees there had read his self-help books; were brimming with questions.
But he gets the school’s attention almost unwittingly.
‘Hey, everyone, my name is Joshua Fletcher, and I used to be a student here. I grew up around the corner on the Abbey Lane estate.’
And, suddenly, you can hear a pin drop. Really??? This author; this motivational speaker, admired and in demand, grew up on one of the two giant council states that still surround the school.
But that’s not the whole story. Far from it.
Because of Harry.
Harry, Josh’s little brother: fellow player of games such as Halo and Portal 2.
‘Portal 2? Never heard of it…’
‘Oh, come on!’ Harry cajoles. ‘You’ll like it. It’s a couch co-op…’
So, when Harry becomes suddenly unwell, and Josh and his mum find themselves helplessly on an oncology ward at Manchester Children’s Hospital, there’s a frozen silence as the consultant gives them news that doesn’t compute.
Not only have they found tumours; they’ve found multiple tumours that have metastasised across the liver and into the perineum.
‘Is it… is it… curable?’ Josh asks.
The odds are, the doctor explains, ‘difficult’.
Yet when — after a trembling cigarette break in the hospital gardens — Josh walks back in, Harry and his mum are holding hands. Both smiling.
‘They were stronger than I ever could be.’
Yet each tells a truth about ourselves.
There’s tough Levi, the nightclub bouncer: massive, tattooed, intimidating. In no way vulnerable, surely?
And, yet, here he is, sitting in front of Josh. Slightly aggressive to begin with: ‘Tell me all my problems are because Daddy didn’t hug me’. Here in Josh’s office, nevertheless. An act of bravery allied with vulnerability all of its own.
There’s Zahra, a GP, whose panic attacks are so severe, she’s been housebound for months. She crawls in on all fours, gasping for breath, face flooded with tears: ‘I think I need an ambulance!’
And Noah, who has an untold secret even Josh might not be able to keep.
‘Yeah,’ Josh says. ‘I mean, obviously, they’re inspired by stories over the years. I work with anxiety disorders so you get a lot of similar themes that come up…’
He writes about different therapies, too. Different ways of approaching mental health issues. But he also writes about the sheer, often-unappreciated normality of difficult emotions.
‘We have this human thing where, when we’re vulnerable or anxious, we have got to fix it. Like our car’s bust or something. Social media often propagates this belief as well.’
Meaning?
‘If you’re anxious and not feeling 100 percent, that’s a human thing. Don’t get me wrong — you can become chronically depressed and develop an anxiety disorder; yeah, that needs intervention.
‘The irony is that it creates a thought feedback loop. Every day, when you try to self-optimise, you’re sending signals to the brain that you’re not good enough. I have to keep optimising.’
When you’re not even necessarily broken. A certain amount of grief, panic, anxiety and sadness is part of the human condition. Helps us make correct decisions.
‘I had an anxiety attack the other day. Wanna know why? Because I wasn’t resting; I wasn’t stopping. It was a nice warning saying: this isn’t sustainable.’
HARRY, tragically, died, 12 years ago now.
And Josh grieved; and grew.
‘There’s such a thing as post-traumatic growth and it’s something that never stops. I can’t erase the trauma and all the memories of that time in my life. But it’s nice to know that you can grow past it.’
This Northern, masculine character is unafraid of showing emotion.
‘I think it’s very important to do that because there’s not many men who convey vulnerability in a tasteful way. I mean, just walk around the Cotswolds into your local pub and start talking to the geezers in there — they ain’t going to know the slightest bit of how to talk about vulnerability.’
But they, too, feel it.
‘I wouldn’t be a therapist if Harry hadn’t got poorly. Yeah, I miss him every day. He comes with me. I like to feel like I see fragments of him in the smiles of others who overcome their challenges and fears and feel lost and hopeless, and they start to feel like themselves again. Or a new version of themselves. Or a version of themselves they feel comfortable with.’
Vulnerability means that, when famous Daphne walks into Josh’s office, he can admit to feeling as overawed as the rest of us. Brushes his hair and watches her movies, starry-eyed.
But he helps her to understand herself, and to find a form of healing.
And he understands enough of himself to be able do that.
More details of and how does that make you feel? Can be found at schoolofanxiety.com
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