Clinical social worker Thawer, who hosts a podcast called The CBT Dive, says he loves carving out spaces for queer people to dig into their identities and explore how they can cope and thrive. In The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys (New Harbinger, June), Thawer draws on his professional expertise in cognitive behavioral therapy and Gestalt techniques to create a toolkit for GBTQ men.
What inspired this book?
I’d already been theorizing and talking with colleagues about acculturative stress—the stresses people experience when they’re in a new environment. I offered a full-day training [at a 2019 conference], and the central message was that queer guys have our own subculture and different determinants of our mental health outcomes. We might share the labels of anxiety, depression, body image, etc., with our straight counterparts, but the way we move through the world and how we confront these determinants is going to impact our outcomes. It was after giving that presentation a few times that I was like, oh, this could be a book.
How did you decide what therapy techniques might be useful to readers at home?
I had to think a lot about, Is this safe for people to do? What’s going to come up? What’s not going to come up? I wanted to democratize therapy as much as possible: get people tools and trust them to use the tools. I also had to be cautious of not recreating assumptions or stereotypes about people within communities—like, How am I talking about HIV? How am I talking about aging? How am I talking about body image? How am I talking about drug use? I felt a sense of accountability and responsibility to make sure I’m saying things that speak to the diversity within our community.
How did your own identity help shape the book?
The way I participate in the world even as a gay man is going to be through a subset of the gay men’s community. There isn’t one gay, queer experience. Being racialized, being Muslim; if you’re Black or Indigenous—there are other things to think about in how you’re experienced in the world, and which part of your identity is going to feel central, which part of your identity is going to get erased. On both ends of that spectrum we’re grieving about being seen or not being seen or being reduced to something when we’d rather be seen differently. How do you move through all this, and how does it impact your well-being?
What does this book symbolize for you, particularly as a queer Muslim who is also a psychotherapist?
I came from a Muslim community that was big on building community. And queer communities, they already place an emphasis on community building. So the different contexts that socialized me supported and welcomed me as a community-builder. Many of us are creating spaces we wish we had or are getting our own interpersonal, psychological, emotional needs met by building these spaces and communities. There’s work that goes into it, but it’s also deeply rewarding. Now I’m writing a book on mental health, when it’s not that long ago that being gay was a mental illness. It’s quite a marker of where we’ve come from to be able to do this.
