BACP-registered psychotherapist. 15+ years working with gay men. This practice exists because most therapy gets it wrong in predictable, fixable ways.
I’m a BACP-registered psychotherapist with over fifteen years of clinical experience working exclusively with gay men. Psycosme is the practice I built because the existing ones weren’t working — not for the clients I was seeing, and not in ways that could be fixed by adjusting the therapist’s personal politics.
The problem isn’t bad therapists. It’s frameworks built for different lives. Minority stress, internalised homophobia, the specific weight of having constructed an entire identity under conditions of social pressure — these aren’t footnotes to the clinical work. They’re the work. Most therapy treats them as context. Here, they’re the starting point.
I work online with gay men across the UK and Europe in clinical therapy, and worldwide through The Formation Programme — structured pattern recognition work that doesn’t require a therapy referral or a clinical diagnosis. Just the willingness to look at what’s actually running.
“The goal isn’t to fix you. It’s to give you an accurate description of what’s actually happening — and where it came from. Recognition over rescue.”— Gino Cosme
My style is direct, precise, and humane. I don’t confuse comfort with progress, but I also don’t use directness as an excuse to be careless. Clients describe sessions as unusually precise — and that the precision is what made things move.
Not every approach is right for every person. The Process page explains how working together actually works before you commit to anything.
The stress is structural, not personal.
Gay men experience elevated rates of anxiety, depression, shame, and relational difficulty not because something is wrong with them but because they have grown up and continue to live in environments that produce specific, measurable psychological costs. Naming the structure is the first thing that changes the experience of it.
The formation shapes the patterns.
How you learned to manage closeness, visibility, and need in early environments is still running in your adult relationships. Attachment theory gives us the most precise language for understanding why intimacy triggers withdrawal, why reassurance doesn’t reassure, and why patterns repeat despite your full awareness of them.
Naming something changes its grip.
Insight alone doesn’t produce change. But accurate recognition — of where a pattern came from, what it was doing, and why it made sense in its original context — does. This is why I work with formation rather than symptom management. The symptom is the least interesting part of what’s happening.
BACP
British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy
Registered Member #00993851
BPS
British Psychological Society
Member #509049
HPCSA
Health Professions Council of South Africa
PRC 0034622
NCPS
National Counselling & Psychotherapy Society
Member #597
All sessions are conducted under BACP ethical guidelines. I do not practise conversion therapy. I do not work with psychosis or active suicidal intent — if you are in crisis, please contact a crisis service directly.
Not self-help. Not toxic positivity. Clinical essays that name the patterns gay men live with but rarely have language for — shame, formation, attachment, minority stress, the gap between who you are and who you perform. Published weekly on Substack.
Read Unfiltered Clarity →Ongoing therapy or a structured six-session programme. Both available online.