About
A psychologist who works the way you'd hope a mate would talk.
Ben Stevens is a registered psychologist with fifteen years of clinical experience and an enduring interest in why men sit on things, and what it costs them.
Ben in the South Brisbane practice — second floor, good light, decent coffee around the corner.
I came to this work the long way around. A decade of corporate life, a marriage that came apart and was put back together more honestly, two kids, and a slow realisation that the most useful conversations of my adult life had all been with a good therapist.
I retrained in my early thirties. Since then I've worked in community mental health, hospital settings, and now in private practice — almost exclusively with men.
The men I work with are mostly in their thirties to fifties. Trades, professionals, dads, husbands, partners, sons. Some are unravelling quietly. Some are in real trouble. Most are just somewhere in the middle — competent in their lives, doing well by most measures, and aware that something isn't quite right.
What I actually do.
I sit with people. I ask questions you might not have been asked before, and I listen carefully to the answers. I draw on whatever the evidence base supports — CBT, ACT, schema therapy, EMDR for trauma — but I don't lead with the acronyms. Therapy works because of the relationship and the honest looking; the techniques are how we make that go somewhere.
I work in a way that respects the time you're giving up to be there. We don't waste sessions. We're trying to get you somewhere useful.
Outside the room.
I live in Brisbane with my partner and our two kids. I run badly, surf worse, and read a lot. I'm a Lions supporter, for my sins. I do my own therapy, because I think it's a fairly basic requirement of the job.
Credentials & training.
Qualifications
- Master of Psychology (Clinical)
- Bachelor of Psychology (Hons)
- Bachelor of Commerce
Registrations & memberships
- AHPRA Registered Psychologist
- Australian Psychological Society
- Medicare Provider
Modalities I draw on
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
- Acceptance & Commitment Therapy
- Schema Therapy
- EMDR
- Motivational Interviewing
Special interests
- Men's mental health
- Anxiety & perfectionism
- Anger & emotional regulation
- Fatherhood & relationships
- Identity & mid-life change
Outside the clinic
Sawdust, silence, and small things.
When the working week is done, Ben heads to his backyard workshop — a modest shed full of hand tools, offcuts, and the particular kind of quiet that comes from making something with your hands.
For the past several years, Ben has spent his weekends building wooden toys — small animals, cars, puzzles, and figures — and donating them to children's hospitals and wards across Queensland. No fanfare, no organisation. Just boxes left at the nurses' station.
It started as a way to switch off. It became something more. "There's something about giving a kid something handmade," he says. "Something that took time. They seem to feel it."
All toys are made from untreated hardwood, sanded smooth, and finished with food-safe oil. Every one passes hospital safety guidelines.
Outside the clinic
Thirty years of small worlds.
Ben has been collecting stamps since he was nine years old — a hobby started with a biscuit tin of his grandfather's letters and an afternoon with nothing better to do.
The collection has grown quietly over three decades. Mostly Commonwealth and Australian colonial issues, with a soft spot for mid-century pictorials from the Pacific. Some are valuable. Most are not. That's never really been the point.
"There's something about the scale of it," he says. "A whole country's history — its politics, its art, what it thought was worth commemorating — pressed onto a square of paper the size of your thumbnail. I find that genuinely interesting."
The collection lives in a series of Hagner stockbooks on the shelf above his desk. His kids remain unmoved by this.
Ben is the first person I've spoken to who didn't try to fix me in five minutes. He just stayed in the room with it until I could see it properly myself.
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