As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, one of my deepest wishes is to use the skills I’ve learned and honed over my career to promote the health and well-being of others like me.

As human beings we all have a need to be seen, listened to and understood by other human beings.

We yearn for acceptance. We yearn to be cherished. We yearn for loving kindness.

Most of us from the LGBTQ+ community have had many fewer of these experiences than we would have needed in order to really thrive. Some of us have lived in such hostile environments that the only solution has been to constrict ourselves in order to appear acceptable to others, even laughing at jokes about ourselves (click to read my article on the theme of gay jokes). We may have survived for years under these circumstances on the surrogates of approval for our achievements, appearance or some other types of external performance. And the possibility of being accepted and cherished as our full authentic selves may now still feel alien. Nevertheless a person inside us may be screaming to be liberated from a life that may look good on the surface to others but is not helping us be joyful.

Wearing a mask has been a survival strategy. Having practised this over decades, we may have lost touch almost completely with the beautiful, authentic person we are underneath mask, when we are at ease and comfortable and able to pursue our own joys.

I, Calum Anderson, have a mission. My mission is to help people from my community to heal from those wounds. I want to help you tune into a deeper version of yourself.  I want to help you bring an accepting and loving energy into your daily existence in all the different areas of life that are important to you including your relationships. Let’s start with the most important relationship of all: your relationship with yourself.

The therapy relationship is unique and can be enormously powerful. I enjoy supporting you in patiently, tenderly and respectfully exploring, appreciating and accepting the you that has had to hide from the outside world in order to get by. I believe you deserve and are capable of more in your life. I believe that you and those who love you can benefit from a series of well-paced, gradual inner revolutions that we can work on together, which can set you up for many little steps towards a life of much greater fulfilment in the very long term.

Our approach is always kind, respectful and non-judgemental. I strive to balance a compassionate, warm energy that accepts the way things are with an assertive energy for positive change in your life moving forward.

You have made it this far to my website. To continue your healing journey with my support, just click here.

I am very grateful for the many wonderful resources constantly becoming available to support the LGBTQ+ community.

I am working on my own contributions towards these resources such as on my blog. You may be interested to read my thoughts on gay jokes in the article How a handbag can hurt.

In 2020 I helped Goran and Mitch on some episodes of their podcast „Different Kind of Gay“. I love the spirit of their beautiful collaboration together and can wholeheartedly recommend the very moving and deep episode on Masculinity:

I made a short contribution to their episode on Beauty:

And I feature heavily in this episode on the theme of Rejection within the gay community:

A book that helped me a lot to understand some typical patterns in members of the LGBTQ+ community is  Alan Down’s  The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World. You can read some of my reactions to that book here. While mainly addressing gay men, many of the ideas in the book have value for anyone from the LGBTQ+ community.