00;00;10;11 - 00;00;32;29
Jasmine
Hey there and welcome to this episode of Psych Attack! I'm doctor Jasmine B. MacDonald. Today I have the pleasure of catching up with Rahim Thawer again. Rahim, join me previously to discuss the role of envy in our social and sexual lives. And if you haven't had a chance to check that episode out, please come out some time and make sure you do that as a reminder for folks who did tune in.

00;00;33;01 - 00;01;10;01
Jasmine
Rahim is a racialized queer social worker who works as an instructor and psychotherapist, a clinical supervisor and consultant, public speaker, podcast host, and a writer he calls Toronto home and currently teaches at the University of Alabama. His work explores the intersection of mental health and systemic oppression. He has a particular interest in examining innovation in queer relationships and exploring how anti-racist, queer affirming psychoanalytic frameworks can support social workers, training therapists and organizational leaders.

00;01;10;04 - 00;01;32;25
Jasmine
Today, we're catching up because Rahim has written a book called The Mental Health Guide for CIS and Trans Queer Guys, which is currently on pre-sale and is being released the 1st of June 2025. So Rahim has kindly come along to discuss the book with me and had an absolute blast catching up with you last time, so thank you for joining me again, Rahim.

00;01;32;27 - 00;01;45;24
Rahim
Happy to meet you here virtually. I think we decided after our last meeting that we were going to be friends. So I'm thinking about how to find my way to Australia to talk about this book.

00;01;45;27 - 00;02;04;17
Jasmine
Yes, please. That would be excellent. I mentioned to you that, I spent a little bit of time in Vancouver, and on that trip, I also spent a little bit of time in Nashville and fell in love with Nashville. And so either way, we can come there and visit. We love Canada. And you have experience in Melbourne as well.

00;02;04;17 - 00;02;06;05
Jasmine
So, you know.

00;02;06;07 - 00;02;10;21
Rahim
Look, I'm actually very close to Nashville, just a few hours drive away.

00;02;10;24 - 00;02;11;24
Jasmine
Very nice.

00;02;11;27 - 00;02;12;27
Rahim

00;02;12;29 - 00;02;14;07
Jasmine
Very nice.

00;02;14;10 - 00;02;32;09
Rahim
Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited about this book. It's really my my first book and I have a few in the pipeline. But you know this one well they're all unique but it feels really special. So I'm excited to tell you about it and tell your listeners about it.

00;02;32;11 - 00;02;42;04
Jasmine
Amazing. And so give us a little bit of the background of what led up to writing the book, your professional experience and interest in this space.

00;02;42;07 - 00;03;17;13
Rahim
Right. Well, I'm a queer guy. And I've worked in, like, I call myself a professional gay for a long time because I'm a gay person who has worked with a lot of other gay people. And I say gay, you know, like, broadly speaking, LGBTQ plus people. Some years ago, I was really thinking about how gay men in particular navigate relationships and a landscape of connection seeking that's quite different than our straight counterparts.

00;03;17;15 - 00;03;48;15
Rahim
The norms are different. The way sex is positioned is different. It's celebrated. It's more central. It can be casual. Sex can be seen as an achievement. More of us are single. More of us are more likely to be non-monogamous relationships and this entire subculture that we live in or operate in affects our mental health the same way everyone's environment affects their mental health.

00;03;48;18 - 00;04;33;26
Rahim
And I did a couple of presentations on connection seeking and queer guys, those who aren't fairly well. And I started writing a book about connection, seeking the rewards and challenges of long term relationships and casual sex, and trying to attain both things and all the things all at once. And that project is still kind of alive and well, but on the back burner over kind of took over was, hey, it's not this realization that, hey, it's not just our world of connections seeking that impacts our mental health.

00;04;33;28 - 00;05;04;17
Rahim
It's also like all these other experiences, like coming out, I think. I mean, coming up is kind of the easy one, you know, because it's seen as like a rite of passage and a developmental milestone. But ask any gay man, and they've been thinking about sexual health much longer than a lot of their straight counterparts and in a different way, you know, and we've had to because HIV has looked different in our communities.

00;05;04;19 - 00;05;35;15
Rahim
And while we're online and celebrating our bodies and thinking about sex and what it means to us in that process, we've also become we've created quite a body conscious subculture. We were talking in our last episode a bit about envy and envy of of other men, people who are of the same gender, who we might ask ourselves, do I want to be like this person or do I like this person?

00;05;35;18 - 00;06;08;02
Rahim
That confusion, I would suggest, is a unique experience to some of us who are gender and sexual minorities and ultimately becomes a determinant of our mental health. So this book is about all of these unique experiences and positioning them as determinants of mental health. There's no particular outcome that needs to happen for you to be to have good mental health, but you need to move through a determinant in a particular way.

00;06;08;04 - 00;06;40;27
Rahim
One way I explain that is, you know, if you take a general social determinants of health theory, you know, a person that has employment is going to have some kind of a sense of financial security. They're going to be better off in some regard than the person who doesn't have any employment. And the person who doesn't have any employment might find joy in application of their skills in other ways, whereas the person who is employed could hate their job.

00;06;41;00 - 00;06;59;13
Rahim
So it's not about having or not having. That's part of it, but then it's how you move through it, if that makes sense, right? And so in this book, I'm looking at a slew of determinants, of mental health for queer guys.

00;06;59;15 - 00;07;16;02
Jasmine
I'm wondering sometimes in writing and thinking about my own work, but also talking to other people who write. They often say they're writing the book that they wish they had to read, like this doesn't exist, so they created it. Does that resonate for you?

00;07;16;05 - 00;07;33;25
Rahim
You know what? Maybe I haven't thought about it that way. Actually, that makes a lot of sense because I often was have been looking for it. My whole life I've been looking for books and media representations of my experience says so inadvertently now.

00;07;33;28 - 00;07;34;23
Jasmine
Yeah.

00;07;34;26 - 00;08;11;24
Rahim
I'm also so passionate about mental health, and I really love queer people. And I love thinking about queer joy. And I think about queer people as my people. And I want my people to do well in the world. You know? And I think we have a lot stacked against us at times. I want us to have, like, the opportunity and the dignity, you know, for wellness, for joy, for fulfillment, and all of that is part of mental health.

00;08;11;26 - 00;08;15;19
Rahim
And so I think that's a bigger part of where this book comes from.

00;08;15;21 - 00;08;50;02
Jasmine
With the work that, me and my team focus on is mental health focus. And often the subgroup aspects of that are an afterthought. It's what is it like for First Nations folks as a cliff note to broader anxiety mental health aspects, what is it like for LGBTQ plus folks? And so putting your community at the forefront and focusing on these issues, seems like a really important and powerful starting point of this, isn't there is a uniqueness here, and there is an importance here.

00;08;50;02 - 00;09;00;11
Jasmine
And you talking about not it's not the clinical aspects necessarily, but the joy aspects in the continuum of mental health.

00;09;00;13 - 00;09;01;22
Rahim
Absolutely.

00;09;01;24 - 00;09;03;28
Jasmine
Yeah. Quite a range. Yeah.

00;09;03;28 - 00;09;30;19
Rahim
And I like that you mentioned that LGBTQ people can sometimes be the afterthought because that acronym means so many things. And, a couple people said to me, well, this is a good book that you've got, but what about queer women? And I was like, I know some. A lot of this is grounded and lived experience in conjunction with my clinical experience.

00;09;30;21 - 00;09;45;08
Rahim
And a lot of queer women operate in an entirely different subculture than, like, cis gay men. You know, like the these are different worlds to some degree. And so when.

00;09;45;11 - 00;09;46;22
Jasmine
You have a book.

00;09;46;24 - 00;09;47;12
Rahim
Yeah.

00;09;47;15 - 00;09;53;15
Jasmine
This book doesn't have to represent all the folks. That mainstream work really doesn't represent.

00;09;53;17 - 00;09;57;11
Rahim
Totally everything either.

00;09;57;13 - 00;10;25;09
Rahim
My own clinical interests of combining cognitive behavioral therapy, Gestalt work, which is like embodied, chair work and role playing and some psychodynamic inquiry. And I call it inquiry because in each section there's a few questions that are called Digging Deeper, where you can dig deeper about the origins of shame or you experience in your family of origin.

00;10;25;11 - 00;10;40;22
Rahim
It prompts you to think about when you started experiencing grief around masculinity. So there's opportunities to go deeper as well. And so I'm really excited about how that might be received, the combination of these modalities.

00;10;40;24 - 00;10;59;18
Jasmine
Yeah, I'm noticing, patterns in the way that you work in the way that you think of not we're not sticking to clinical aspects. We're talking about, a continuum of experiences. And we're not just talking about the research or theories, but what's the experiential part of this and having those examples in your work. And I think that's really exciting.

00;10;59;21 - 00;11;16;00
Rahim
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I'm I'm excited about this. I, you know, it's hard to know how it will be received and how impactful it will be or or, you know, or if it'll miss the mark. But I'm I'm looking forward to finding out. It feels great to have gotten to this point, so I'm happy about that.

00;11;16;03 - 00;11;37;03
Jasmine
Yeah. So from that description of the different sections and and angles of what you've written up in the book, it sounds like it will be useful first hand for people, you know, cis and trans queer guys themselves, but also for people working to support like therapists working in this space and potentially using the resources together.

00;11;37;06 - 00;12;05;14
Rahim
Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, from a book marketing perspective, it was important for us to put together a self-help guide that's contained that somebody can get, you know, to sell a companion guide to say, here's a guy that you take to a therapist. It's challenging because we know that there there's a lack of mental health services or if they exist, are not always accessible, or they don't meet people's needs.

00;12;05;22 - 00;12;36;25
Rahim
So absolutely, like it's intended for our cis and trans queer guys to be able to use on their own, but also in collaboration with the therapists and I think therapists and other service providers who support queer guys, can also benefit from it, right? I imagine the tools can be extrapolated with other communities and populations to, you know, but my hope is that we start to, you know, we talk about culture, humility and cultural competence all the time in, in trainings.

00;12;36;28 - 00;13;07;20
Rahim
And I'm hoping that people will get a deeper sense of the kinds of questions that they can ask queer guys about their experiences around shame, sexuality, body image, substance use, the legacy of Aids, the landscape of connection, seeking, their experiences of disenfranchized grief, particularly around masculinity. What it's felt like to have a chosen family and perhaps be estranged from their family of origin.

00;13;07;22 - 00;13;28;11
Rahim
Sometimes our grief in connection to our family of origin is not that we're strange, but it's that we're not seeing for, you know, all the rainbow and glory that we could be seen with. And I want people to dig into that because that's very important experiences to talk about and put language to.

00;13;28;13 - 00;13;51;20
Jasmine
Great. I can see and hear the passion that you have. And I know that the talent that you have. So this might not be that friendly a question, but I wonder if you might if there might be a part of the book that you really want to emphasize now and not as it's the best or your favorite pop, but just as an example of some key points, a bit of a taster to get people really excited about what's in the book.

00;13;51;22 - 00;13;55;26
Jasmine
Yeah, okay. I've really put you on the spot.

00;13;55;29 - 00;14;39;27
Rahim
That's right, that's right. There's a chapter on aging, which. It was never an afterthought for me, but it does come in a latter part of the book. I want to emphasize that. I've tried to make this book speak to the broadest possible, you know, breadth of our communities. And I've had the honor of working with a lot of elders in our community, and aging in general is challenging in a, you know, a capitalist neoliberal world, where cost of living is very high, all of this kind of stuff.

00;14;40;00 - 00;15;15;24
Rahim
But for queer guys, where we live in a subculture or a youth is really, really valorized where I've heard lots of older gay men talk about feeling insignificant and irrelevant as they've aged. I've heard gay men talk about unexpected chronic health issues or stigma as they didn't expect. For example, you know, learning to live with the stigma and disclosure of HIV and then later on being diagnosed with cancer, for example.

00;15;15;26 - 00;15;53;24
Rahim
And so talking about embracing aging value that comes with wisdom and lived experience and the relevance of like, there's so much relevance, you know, for our elders who are aging and there's something that all gay men need to confront, which is this part of our subculture that is built around anxiety around aging and mortality. It's not just an anxiety.

00;15;53;24 - 00;16;22;29
Rahim
I think it's a deep, deep fear. And we all have to go through that. And so we all actually need to confront that yesterday. You know, we lost a huge generation or a big part of a generation of gay men to Aids in the epidemic. And with advances in prevention and treatment more of us are going to grow older which is great.

00;16;23;01 - 00;16;44;00
Rahim
But we need a place to grow older. And we need to think about what cultivating community is going to look like for our survival and our mental health. It's great to talk about how we navigate connection seeking differently, but if it means that a lot of us are going to be single later on in life, that part's also okay.

00;16;44;02 - 00;17;14;24
Rahim
But we need to think about what our social safety net is going to look like. Right. We can't just cast each other off as less relevant or insignificant. I think thinking about aging, our anxiety around mortality and aging, our overemphasis on youthfulness and anything that suggests hyper masculinity and distance from illness, aging, death, aids, we have to confront that.

00;17;14;27 - 00;17;24;05
Rahim
Like I think we've been collectively harboring that fear and we need to confront it. It's essential for our mental health.

00;17;24;07 - 00;17;46;17
Jasmine
That's really powerful. It brings to mind to me that the way in I think social work in psychology we might teach and train and think about development aspects in neat little boxes and not the nuance and the intersectionality and, and the complexity that you're talking about here. So it sounds really interesting.

00;17;46;19 - 00;18;06;10
Rahim
Thinking, you know, when you were just talking about developmental psychology, you know, you know, if you look at Erikson's map of the psychosocial stages, we get to a point of, I forget what he calls it, but contribution or, do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah.

00;18;06;14 - 00;18;09;29
Jasmine
And it's something like contribution or irrelevance. Something like that.

00;18;10;01 - 00;18;53;00
Rahim
Yeah. And I think there is a kind of a there the or normative milestones. That whole developmental theory is based on a kind of heteronormative expectation about the trajectory of your life. And if you don't get married and don't have kids and don't pass something on, you have to rethink the developmental trajectories. And another chapter I have in that book is what I call a determinant of our mental health, which is called milestone heteronormativity, which is all the milestones our peers experience where we feel overlooked or we feel uncertain.

00;18;53;00 - 00;19;27;14
Rahim
It activates a kind of existential angst, angst, just being like anxiety or unsettled ness and the existential is literally about existence, you know, like, what is my purpose? Who am I? What is my life? What does it mean? What is my contribution? And a lot of that does get activated. I see it a lot in my in my I'm almost 40, but throughout my 30s I've seen a lot of it when I seen my straight counterparts, you know, get married, have double incomes, buy homes, have kids, and those are great for them.

00;19;27;17 - 00;19;54;07
Rahim
And it's a little bit different than envy because it doesn't activate and envy me because it's not a thing I want, but it activates something inside. Call that milestone heteronormativity because it makes me think about the need for a whole other developmental trajectory for people who are not following that relationship. Escalator. You know, we have to measure our progress in a different way.

00;19;54;10 - 00;20;16;14
Jasmine
Yes. I think that aspect of that that's really interesting is that sometimes the sureness and the confidence of folks who have settled down, married and had kids, especially in the conversations that they'll have with their friends or on a social network, you haven't done that yet. And to I, I'm conscious of this as someone who's decided having children is not for me, me, my partner.

00;20;16;17 - 00;20;40;28
Jasmine
That's not for us. And so I'm not trying not trying to inject and say this is the same thing at origin, but except to say that this is resonating and showing an interest in me of what must be like for cis, and trans queer men, and to develop and expand thinking on that, because I don't have a confidence in what my meaning in life is all like, he's this thing I've created or what?

00;20;41;00 - 00;20;51;29
Jasmine
Who's going to look after me when I'm older? There are all these other elements that you've already raised that then adds complexity to that. And those conversations I've had with friends are already kind of hard enough. Yeah.

00;20;52;01 - 00;21;18;28
Rahim
Listen, thank you for that. But I don't think you need the extra caveat. I think as a woman in the world who's decided not to have kids, you are going against a kind of heteronormativity. And there's so much pressure right? There's so many indicators in small and big ways in, in our environment that let us know that we're doing life the right way or another way.

00;21;19;01 - 00;21;27;12
Rahim
Right. And that's tough. That's a tough thing to have to confront all the time. I would say you're dealing with it too frankly.

00;21;27;14 - 00;21;50;13
Jasmine
This book is very exciting for him. Can I ask again these questions. Not prepared. So I'm very much putting him on thought. What was the part that was maybe the most challenging to write? For whatever reason it might be drawing on evidence or it's challenging as a therapist or whatever, what what part was or all the kinds of aspects in the book that were quite tricky to put together.

00;21;50;16 - 00;21;57;19
Rahim
You know, I'm going to say it was getting started all together.

00;21;57;21 - 00;21;58;17
Jasmine

00;21;58;19 - 00;22;21;23
Rahim
Because I put like a book proposal together and I sent it to a new Harbinger Press and they sent it back and said you need to change the tone because you're not speaking to the reader. And I was like, I don't know. I don't get it. I don't know what you're talking about. And they gave me another guideline to read and another guideline, and they were very helpful.

00;22;21;25 - 00;22;56;08
Rahim
But my impatience, ADHD, impulsiveness, all of these things combined. I was like, I'll look at this later. And so I sat on it for several months, and then I hired somebody to help me. I was like, can you help me? Like, how should I do this? And, that person, their name is Nick. They're a great human, and they help me, like, find my voice, because writing a self-help book where you're speaking directly to the reader is kind of a it's different than what I'm used to.

00;22;56;10 - 00;23;25;04
Rahim
And so once I got into that, it got a bit easier. And sometimes, like when they edited parts of it, well, they edited all of it. But in parts the editors would note your voice changed here. It's like you're like you're saying we and you're talking about it academically, and then you're including yourself in it, and it's all of a sudden a very different thing.

00;23;25;04 - 00;23;47;10
Rahim
And I'm like, oh yeah, that's like, I do a lot of public speaking and I do do that. Sometimes I'll say you, I'll say weak because I'm part of the community. I'm talking about. Other times it's academic. So and that is fine for a public speaker, not for coherent text. So I think for me that was the hardest part.

00;23;47;13 - 00;24;14;18
Rahim
And then once I got into it and found the rhythm it started to flow pretty quickly. This particular publisher also had strict guidelines. There were like chapters X to X by this date. Then this second batch by this date third batch by this date, fourth batch by this date. And you know, I didn't meet any of my deadlines, but they were it was helpful that they were there.

00;24;14;20 - 00;24;16;16
Jasmine
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

00;24;16;18 - 00;24;36;23
Rahim
So the structure thinking about finding my voice and learning how to write to the reader, like those were some of the challenges. So I wouldn't say that there was a specific chapter or topic area that was hard. One of the chapters is on shame and of course, by the time I got to shame, I thought to myself, let this be the last time.

00;24;36;25 - 00;24;39;29
Rahim
I'm so tired to say.

00;24;40;02 - 00;24;43;01
Jasmine
If you listen to the previous episode, that will make sense.

00;24;43;03 - 00;24;43;28
Rahim

00;24;44;00 - 00;24;45;18
Jasmine
I think.

00;24;45;21 - 00;24;47;04
Rahim
I just had this happens, like in this.

00;24;47;04 - 00;24;50;04
Jasmine
Space a lot.

00;24;50;06 - 00;24;51;29
Rahim
And so that.

00;24;52;01 - 00;25;12;15
Jasmine
Shows its importance. Right? We're often really fascinated with a specific topic because it it resonates and it's an important thing. And then I don't know, I find sometimes in the things that I work on, I get to the point where I'm like, does anyone people know this? Like, is this boring to other people? And then you have to remember, no, you just you have all this expertise and shame.

00;25;12;15 - 00;25;17;10
Jasmine
Other people want to know it. You just like I'm still talking about this.

00;25;17;12 - 00;25;47;00
Rahim
Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I just I can't dine out on one topic my whole life, like I. So I am excited to to branch out. I say that I'm exhausted of talking about shame, but also the reality is, is that I'm a therapist. I am a gay man. I've been talking about something for a while. I've built a level of expertise in an area, and still, when I have to sit down and write about it, it tugs at parts of my heart and my own lived experience.

00;25;47;02 - 00;26;14;03
Rahim
And I'm reminded that I'm not cured. I haven't, you know, resolved all of my wounds. Right. And I think when you're reminded that you're the wounded healer, but the wounds are like a bit open, it's just like a tender place that maybe you want to avoid sometimes. Or you're like, I need to travel here a little less. It's getting a bit heavy.

00;26;14;05 - 00;26;37;16
Jasmine
Yes. My sense is that that will resonate better with readers as long as you put, you can do it in a way where you're okay. At the end of the day, that I think. I think people picking up the book will sense that in a positive way of not just being told, here is what research says about these things, or from an outside perspective of this is what you should do around your mental health.

00;26;37;16 - 00;26;40;04
Jasmine
I think that is powerful in itself.

00;26;40;06 - 00;26;45;20
Rahim
Great, perfect.

00;26;45;23 - 00;26;48;10
Jasmine
Apologies. I hope I haven't said something down there.

00;26;48;12 - 00;27;10;06
Rahim
No, no, not at all. Not at all. No no no, I I'm I'm nodding. I'm agreeing with you. I'm thinking it says yeah, I deeply hope that it resonates with people. I wrote a three part essay on shame that's on, my medium.com, blog and a number of folks reached out to me to say that it really spoke to them.

00;27;10;06 - 00;27;32;26
Rahim
So I was really happy to hear that. But also, regardless of the topic I speak on, people will often come up to me afterwards and say, I'm experiencing the same thing, but what do I do? Yeah, and I have to appreciate that not everyone just feels a kind of satisfaction for having open up to opened up a can of worms.

00;27;33;02 - 00;27;57;02
Rahim
Like for me, I'm like, I want this. That feels great. Whereas other people are like, no, no, no, how do I fix it? So the book is focused in that way. There's concrete tools to do some. I don't know if it's fixing, but think about it as being like in a bike mechanic's garage where they're always doing something, but like, who knows what's actually getting done?

00;27;57;02 - 00;27;58;02
Rahim
You know.

00;27;58;04 - 00;28;00;19
Jasmine
Someone's mental health tinkering?

00;28;00;21 - 00;28;11;04
Rahim
Exactly. Spin the wheel. Do the thing. I'm doing something I don't know, but. Well, I go in there. That's in there.

00;28;11;07 - 00;28;30;06
Jasmine
So, Raheem, thank you so much for coming along to talk to us about the book. It sounds fantastic. And once again, it's been absolute pleasure to to talk and think and be challenged by, different ideas that that have come up in a conversation. So I really appreciate your time.

00;28;30;08 - 00;28;47;12
Rahim
Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. And I look forward to to more chats. I think we're going to meet in, a park in Vancouver or Nashville or Toronto and hang out and talk about all of our weird psychology things.

00;28;47;14 - 00;29;02;16
Jasmine
Yes, please. I look I very much look forward to that. For other people who won't get the chance to do that with you personally, but they want to keep up with the book and things that you're working on. What's the best way for them to do that?

00;29;02;19 - 00;29;33;04
Rahim
Oh, yeah. You can check out my work at lady@event.com led by 87.com that I'll take you to all of my socials. If you're a therapist, I've got a slew of self published guides on Amazon that you might be interested in, and you can preorder the book that we talked about today. I've also got, another one called the Politicize Practitioner that is a collection of essays that'll be coming out in the next year.

00;29;33;07 - 00;29;43;22
Rahim
I was I've got some exciting things on the go, things that I'm really passionate about. And I'd be honored if you followed, shared, liked and join me on that journey.

00;29;43;24 - 00;29;50;06
Jasmine
Beautiful. Thank you so much for him.

00;29;50;09 - 00;29;50;18
Jasmine
And.