When was your last truly disastrous haircut?

I don’t mean a fringe that makes you look a little bit like the day-time manager of a strip-club. I mean a catastrophic, life-derailing cut. The kind of “new you” moment where you walked in with a Pinterest board of crisp Jennifer Lawrence lobs, but walked out looking like Margaret Thatcher three hours after she died. Or the pre-holiday “just tidy the ends” request that somehow transformed you into something that looks like someone pulled all that wiry fluff out the vacuum filter and plopped it on a gem squash. The colour you hoped would be “Amber Waves” but turned out “Milky Lane”.

We all remember them. I certainly remember mine. They’re burned into our brains with the permanence of a butterfly ankle tattoo. But it’s the kind of rite of passage we all kind of expect to have at some point in our lives. We can (eventually) laugh these things off because it’s part of the operating cost of being a person.

There are certain professions where inconsistency is simply baked in. It’s accepted. Hairdressers, plumbers, tattoo artists, the people who supposedly “fix damp”. It’s why middle-aged men are so insufferably, spiritually proud of having a guy. “No-no-no,” they’ll tell you, eyes shining, “you want my guy.” And then, solemnly, like he’s handing you nuclear launch codes, he’ll airdrop the number of Vuyani the Re-upholsterer. Your job is to receive it with reverence and then guard your new sacred knowledge like the last 3am pepper steak pie at the Engen.

The one profession I had never thought to place in this category – the “your results may vary” category – was therapists. Though, considering my luck with members of the health profession, I’m almost certainly demonstrating some spectacular naivety here.

The year-end therapy rush

The reason I bring it up is that it’s that time of year. The year-end collective insanity where a lot of people are both at their most fragile and also have to go to a lot of year-end parties because ke Dezemba.

I’ve had to make so much small talk over the past couple of weeks I’ve run out of things to say about the Springboks and How My Year Has Been – which feels impossible. Like running out of nose hair or something. But, almost without fail, the topic of conversation that feels like it’s guaranteed to come up and turn some lady you just met over the white wine spritzers into your new best friend, is therapy. It seems like right now, everyone has a story – a zeitgeisty current that we’re all caught up in, where we’re all either thinking about starting therapy, just started therapy, clinging to our therapy like a life-line, changing therapists or firing therapists or getting fired by our therapists.

Good therapy, bad therapy, meh therapy – never before has it felt that getting some kind of mental health help is the rule rather than the exception.

Because I am “A Man of a Certain Age”, for the longest time therapy mostly existed in a hushed, quasi-religious zone – this Scary Thing that meant you were so bad at life you were no longer capable of navigating even its simplest challenges without help. Therapy was not a lifestyle choice; it was the last stop of “I have nowhere else to go”. Therapists were distant, serious people – sober guardians of society’s mental real estate, whose paths it was very important to never cross.

When mental health help needs help

Of course, attitudes to this have been perpetually shifting, and these days getting some kind of mental health help is a normal, mainstream thing to do – Covid having put this trend-line on steroids. Therapy isn’t a sign you’ve hit rock bottom. It’s Wednesday.

Pick almost any wealthy-ish country and the statistics will tell you: the numbers of people seeking therapy are up. The demand is enough that most therapists are oversubscribed – the waiting lists have waiting lists. Under those circumstances it’s impossible that the help we’re trying to get is going to be consistent. And so, inevitably, any conversation about anyone’s “therapy journey” that lasts more than five minutes feels like it slides pretty quickly into the realm of “therapist horror stories”. The kind that pretty much all end with “I had no idea at the time, but it was the worst advice I ever got, and it totally derailed my life.”

Whether it’s being ghosted by their therapists, being eye-wateringly overcharged for “group” sessions, truly terrible advice or aimless sessions that just felt like paying for a half-hearted chat with a bored friend – every spectrum of disappointing service has made an appearance. I have my own, personal showstopper of a story: a therapist who would often declare at the beginning of a session that instead of, you know … helping, “Today was instead going to be an hour of silent reiki healing.”

Over the phone.

The strange comfort of shared therapy horror stories

I love telling that story. It feels like it sums up so much of how a well-meaning attempt to get help so often comes with having to navigate its own bizarro moments, where you just feel like Jim from The Office, staring at a camera that isn’t there with the “Is this really happening?” face. And so, at a recent re-telling of this story at a dinner party, just as I hit the punchline, the host of the evening got a look on her face: a strange, exhilarated horror and fascination – and blurted out, “Oh my God, I went to her too!”

It was like discovering that the same angry chalk-throwing maths teacher in high school had traumatised us both, and that’s why we get an absent, glassy look when anyone asks what 9×3 is. There was a nervous incredulity that became a shared, slightly horrified validation: oh my god, it wasn’t just me. I am not insane. That wasn’t normal.

And here’s the thing. It should have been obvious. Of course it should have. Therapists are humans. And humans bumble around on a spectrum ranging from “gifted” to “probably shouldn’t be allowed to do any unsupervised online shopping”. Yet because therapy is justifiably still shrouded in seriousness, we’ve inherited this belief that therapists exist above the messy realm of competence and incompetence. That they are immune to being bad at their jobs.

But with therapy going mainstream, the entire quality curve becomes a lot more visible. Suddenly, it’s no longer unthinkable that your therapist might not just be “a bad fit”, but actually just … bad.

Like finding a plumber

Maybe that’s the strangest part. For a generation currently neck-deep in self-interrogation, it feels like we’re only now starting to interrogate the person we are paying to guide the interrogation. We internalise their failures as ours. If therapy goes badly, we assume it means we must pick from the list of “therapese” that explains why it’s our fault we’re not getting better: resistant, avoidant, sabotaging.

So here is my humble conclusion:

If you’re struggling, or it’s just the time of year, or it’s something you’ve been meaning to do for a while now but just haven’t gotten around to it yet, get therapy. Truly. It’s good. It’s needed. The world is unravelling and we must cling to the few things that help. But for the love of all that is sane, treat finding a therapist like finding a re-upholsterer. Ask around. Check references. And if some woman on Zoom tries to do remote reiki on your aura, for god’s sake – get up, say thank you, close the laptop and walk away.

And, if you’ve got a guy, I’d really appreciate it.