Why men choose coaching over therapy | Anthony Davis & Davey Murphy

Why do so many men pick a coach instead of a therapist? Two male therapists on the stigma, the body men leave behind, and the goal of therapy that actually ends. This week's pairing: Davey Murphy and Anthony Davis, two integrative psychotherapists, on the social conditioning that keeps men out of the therapy room, the body men have quietly stopped inhabiting, the role of praise and self-compassion, and what a therapy that ends well actually looks like. About the speakers Davey Murphy is an NCPS-accredited and MBACP-registered Integrative Psychotherapist with a Master's in Psychotherapy and Counselling from Regent's University London. He works relationally, drawing on ten years of prior mentoring in the youth sector, and runs his private practice from Portsmouth, specialising in the repeating patterns and life scripts clients bring into the therapy room. Anthony Davis is a BACP-accredited Integrative Psychotherapist, Coach, and Clinical Supervisor with an MSc in Integrative Counselling and Coaching and fourteen years of experience across mental health, social care, and the charity sector. As founder of Davis Emotional Well-being in Central London, he draws on CBT, Existential, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, and Psychodynamic approaches, with specialist experience supporting men's issues, LGBTQIA+ clients, and BAME clients navigating racial or ethnic discrimination. Chapters 0:00 - Intro 2:00 - The stigma of therapy for men 7:00 - Weakness, being 'fixed', and the coach as safer choice 13:00 - Being the first therapist a man has ever seen 19:00 - Creating a room without judgment 25:00 - The body men have quietly left behind 32:00 - Anxiety, headaches, tension as unspoken emotion 38:00 - Praise, insecure attachment, and self-worth 44:00 - Why men struggle to celebrate themselves 50:00 - Therapy as vocation, not job 56:00 - The therapist's own therapy 1:02:00 - Ending well: the internal therapist 1:08:00 - What ending teaches the client In this episode Davey and Anthony open with the social conditioning that keeps most men out of the therapy room. Therapy still carries a stigma many men absorb early: it looks like weakness, it looks like something is broken and needs fixing, it looks like a place where being open comes at a cost. Coaching or mentoring is often chosen instead because it feels safer, because it focuses on behaviour and performance rather than on feeling, and because the identity of a man 'getting coached' is easier to hold than the identity of a man 'in therapy'. The pairing are direct about how often they are the first therapist a male client has ever sat in a room with. From there the conversation moves to the body. Many of the men they see have quietly stopped noticing their bodies at all. The emotion that was never named still travels somewhere, and often it shows itself as anxiety that will not settle, headaches that have no medical cause, or the low background tension that lives in the shoulders and the jaw. A significant part of the work, they argue, is teaching men to notice their body again and to read what it has been trying to say for years. The middle of the episode lands on praise. So many men struggle both to receive it and to offer it to themselves, and Davey and Anthony trace that back to insecure early attachment and to a script that treats self-kindness as indulgence. They make a real case for building praise and celebration into the therapy itself, and for teaching men to speak to themselves the way they would to someone they respect. That, they argue, is where real self-worth begins. The close is about the work itself. Both describe therapy as a vocation rather than a job, and both hold their own ongoing therapy and supervision as non-negotiable to the work. They end on what they call the internal therapist: the goal is not a client who needs a therapist for life but a client who can turn on their own internal version of the work when the room is no longer available. Ending a therapy well, they argue, is not a loss. It is the graduation the whole process was pointing at. Resources mentioned Davey Murphy - https://daveymurphy.co.uk/ Anthony Davis - Davis Emotional Well-being: https://www.davisemotionalwellbeing.com MindFriend (the platform): https://mindfriend.com/ MindFriend Pro: https://mindfriendpro.com/ Connect with us Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2OnHUJDQnwcjcp67wLC6O1 Instagram: @mindfriendtalk | @mindfriend__ TikTok: @mindfriend__ #MindFriendTalk #CoachOrTherapist #MensMentalHealth