Watching mental health therapist Daryl Tan flip his martial arts sparring partner with a swift lock of the legs is a little shocking.
It’s difficult for me to reconcile the intensity of the moment with the calm Mr Tan, 38, exudes in his popular TikTok videos, where he’s better known for offering guidance than grappling.
I stand stiffly on the sidelines of the training mat, somewhat awkward in my out-of-place office wear, trying to parse the fight in something of a stupor.
As someone unfamiliar with martial arts, I’ve always thought of combat sports as just two people trying to beat each other into submission.
But seated later on the mat of the gym where I meet him, Mr Tan – who holds a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and also coaches the sport – offers an unlikely comparison: “Therapy is just like jiu-jitsu.”
As different as the two domains may seem, he said the real work of succeeding in fighting one’s opponents on a mat is done before and after the interaction, much like the work of fighting one’s demons in a therapy session.
“A fight is over in five minutes. Even though it’s that short period of time, the work is actually done outside of it, when training skill sets. After the fight, you have to reflect on what went well, what went wrong. After a therapy session you ask questions like that as well,” he added.
Mr Tan is no stranger to unlikely comparisons. With his casual manner of speech and two fully tattooed arm sleeves poking out from a simple white shirt, he is not what people tend to expect from the co-founder of therapy clinic Goodity Co and fine jewellery business Stale & Co.
“I don’t look like a therapist at all,” he said from the get-go, confronting a question I was still thinking about how to phrase.
“On TikTok, a lot of questions I get are about my tattoos. ‘Are you sure you’re a therapist? You don’t look like a therapist.’ People think a therapist should look ‘decent’ and I don’t fit into the standard archetype of how a therapist looks because I’m covered in full sleeves.”
Despite assumptions people make based on his appearance, he has over a decade of experience in social work and is open about his troubled youth.
He made the conscious choice to front videos on Goodity Co’s social media, where he tackles practical questions from a therapist’s perspective, like “Why you often feel angry” and “4 signs that you may be in a toxic workplace”.
Despite the attention it attracts from some commenters, including a netizen who continues to question his qualifications because of his tattoos, delving into TikTok therapy is one way Mr Tan hopes to make therapists “more human”.
“There’s a lot of talk about mental health these days, but there is very little information on how to access it. And if you try to Google it, there’s just a ton of information about therapist qualifications, things that makes (therapy) even more intimidating,” he said.
“Think about it, you’re going to book a session with a stranger, and sit in a room with a stranger to talk about your feelings. Now, that’s scary as hell. So instead of looking at what qualifications you have, I think the more important thing is, is this person someone that I can trust to be sharing some of my darker secrets with?”
