You may have done therapy, read the books, and explained yourself with real accuracy. Insight has not stopped the pattern. You still pull away when closeness becomes real. You still chase men who cannot meet you. You still manage your body, your tone, your need, and your anger as if one wrong move will cost you connection. This is a small group of men doing that work in the same room, over twelve weeks. You leave with a Pattern Map you built yourself.
Cohorts of up to six men. Dates released to the waitlist first. $700 USD founding cohort, $900 thereafter.
A lot of gay men arrive at a strange place in the work. They can explain their childhood. They can name attachment styles. They can talk about shame, avoidance, people-pleasing, desire, and old wounds with real intelligence.
Then something happens.
The old pattern takes over before the adult self has finished reading the situation. That is the point this programme is built for. Not the absence of insight. The gap between understanding the pattern and being free of it.
This is for gay men who are psychologically literate, outwardly functional, and privately stuck. Not in crisis. Not looking for a course or a pep talk.
If most of these land, the work is likely worth the conversation.
This work is for the man who looks functional from the outside and still knows something keeps repeating underneath. He may have language. He may have insight. He may have done therapy. The pattern still has a body.
Across the twelve weeks you build your own written Pattern Map, guided and structured session by session. It names the main patterns you identify. Where each likely began, how it operates now, what it protects you from feeling, what it costs, and what to watch for next.
It is written in your own hand, in plain language, and built to be returned to long after the cohort ends. The point is not a beautiful document. The point is to make the pattern harder to obey blindly.
The Formation Programme is structured group work focused on how your patterns were formed, what they protect, how they operate now, and what becomes possible once they are named clearly. The focus is not advice or motivation. It is formation. Six men, moving through the same territory together.
Many gay men were shaped by more than family. They were shaped by rooms. Who was safe. Who was watching. How much softness was allowed, how much desire had to be hidden, how much need was too much. Over years, those adaptations start to look like personality: independence, charm, control, sexual confidence, emotional distance, hypercompetence. Easy to have around. Hard to actually know. Sitting in a room with five other men carrying the same adaptations, and hearing your own pattern in their words, reaches something one-to-one work cannot.
Six conversations, in a deliberate order. Each session feeds the next. The last one is where the map gets sharp.
The programme exists because these keep arriving in the consulting room with different surface details and the same underlying structure. In a group, men recognise them faster in each other than in themselves.
The pattern that looks like confidence and operates as avoidance. Intensified interest near closeness, followed by structured retreat the moment reciprocity arrives. Reads to others as composure. Reads inside the body as something else entirely.
Competence used as protection. The version of you that earns its place by being useful, articulate, or impressive. What gets sacrificed is the part underneath that wants to be known without performing first.
The body managed as a project, not lived in as a context. Mirror checks, food rules, weight self-surveillance. Imported from shame, not from health.
The programme is bounded, structured, and focused on naming the psychological patterns underneath everything else. If you need clinical treatment, choose therapy. If you want one-to-one developmental work, choose coaching. This is the group.
One cohort. Clear edges. Fixed dates, six men, twelve weeks, no open-ended drift.
The work is structured and reflective. It needs you to be stable enough to stay with discomfort. It is not for you if:
Gino Cosme is a psychotherapist specialising in gay men’s emotional lives, identity, shame, relationships, and the patterns that form when you spend years adapting to environments that did not fully see you.
The Formation Programme draws on more than ten years of clinical work with gay men across Europe and internationally, around shame, intimacy, emotional self-protection, body vigilance, loneliness, family wounds, avoidance, anger, and the private cost of appearing fine. It distils that work into a structured six-session process for men who want focused psychological clarity outside open-ended therapy.
There is no consult to book and no subscription. You join the waitlist, accept a place when the next cohort opens, and pay once.
The fee covers everything. Nothing else is added at any stage. Paid once, in full, after you accept a place.
Withdraw up to seven days before the cohort starts and you get a full refund. After the first group session, the fee is refundable minus a $150 retention, because the work has begun. After the second session it is non-refundable, because a group depends on its members staying. No friction inside those windows.
A cohort only works when its members commit to it. The early windows exist so you can leave cleanly if it is wrong for you, and so the men who stay can rely on each other.
This is the first cohort of the group version of The Formation Programme, so there are no programme testimonials yet. The group structure is new. The clinical work behind it is not.
It has been built from more than ten years of work with gay men around shame, intimacy, emotional self-protection, body vigilance, loneliness, family wounds, avoidance, anger, and the private cost of appearing fine.
As the founding cohort finishes, I may add feedback here, with explicit permission and nothing quoted without it. Until then, I would rather be clear than perform credibility I have not earned yet.
This is structured psychological mapping work informed by clinical experience. It is not designed as open-ended weekly therapy, crisis support, or treatment for acute mental health concerns. If therapy is the more appropriate route for you, I will say so.
No. There is no motivation, accountability, performance coaching, or goal-setting here. The focus is psychological formation and the patterns that keep repeating.
Join the waitlist. When the next cohort opens, you receive the dates and a place offer before anyone else. Places go in order of the list, and a short intake confirms the group is right for you before you pay.
Many men drawn to this work have. The programme is often most useful precisely when insight and language already exist and the same pattern keeps repeating anyway.
Your own written Pattern Map. You build it across the twelve weeks, guided and structured, naming the main patterns you identify: where each likely began, how it operates now, what it protects, what it costs, and what to watch for next. It is yours to keep.
Yes. The group runs on an explicit confidentiality agreement that every member signs. What is said in the room stays in the room. The Pattern Map you build is private to you.
The founding cohort is $700 USD. After that the fee is $900 USD. Paid once, in full, before the cohort begins, after you accept a place from the waitlist.
Full refund if you withdraw up to seven days before the cohort starts. After the first group session, the fee is refundable minus a $150 retention because the work has begun. After the second session it is non-refundable, because a group depends on its members staying.
The intake exists partly to protect the work. If the programme is not appropriate for you, I will tell you directly before you pay, and I may point you toward therapy, crisis support, or another route that fits better.
Twelve weeks. Six 90-minute group sessions, usually fortnightly, plus one private session with me in the middle. Cohort dates are fixed in advance and released to the waitlist.
No. It is useful for single men, partnered men, divorced men, men dating, men avoiding dating, and men who are not sure what they want from intimacy.
No. Sessions are never recorded. The group only works if every man can speak freely, and a recording would make that impossible.
You do not need another promise to become your best self. You need to understand why the same pattern keeps returning, what it protects, what it costs, and what becomes possible once it is finally named clearly. Doing that alongside five other men who recognise it changes what is possible. Join the waitlist for the next cohort.