David Bowman, LMFT

Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Coaching

Recently I have been delving into the childhood messaging that gay and queer men received from their respective fathers. It struck me how many current maladaptive behaviors have roots in the problem of straight men raising gay boys. I am proud to announce that my new online course and e-book on re-parenting for gay men will be available January 2025. Father Figures: Re-fathering for Gay Men consists of 17 online activities that will help you explore your own dad’s (or father substitute’s) messaging, what you expected of him and did not get, and how you can overcome the problem of the missing gay paternal energy by creating your own ideal gay father figure.

David’s Featured Posts

Love the Second Time Around

From Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” “All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes, whereas everything that one is wont to call giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no...

Lessons from Long-term Sobriety

“Relapse is part of recovery,” goes the saying. Not that we welcome relapse, but it happens. For myself and for many others, a relapse after a years-long period of sobriety is a very different affair from our initial climb out of the world of substances. At this later...

The Schemas Running Your Life

As children, we have no choice but to emulate our parents and caregivers. That is how we humans learn and grow. As our world view expands, we imbibe the norms and values of the culture around us without even knowing we are doing it. Even when we finally become aware...

The Broken-hearted Boys: The Not-So-Gay World of Crystal Meth Recovery

Any Los Angeles therapist working with the gay community cannot fail to be saddened by the prevalence of crystal meth and the abundance of users and addicts of all races, all socio-economic classes, and every intelligence level imaginable. From the rooms of...

Self-Sabotage

Stop Yourself from Stopping Yourself After spending some time doing psychotherapy, many of my clients have identified changes they would like to make in themselves and their lives, and we have worked together to map out goals, objectives, and even detailed plans and...

The Father You Always Wanted

In an earlier article, I introduced the subject of “daddy issues,” that is, problems faced by sons who either have troubled relationships with their fathers or whose fathers were largely absent during their childhood, either physically or emotionally. In Absent...