Outside the clinic
Thursday nights, social basketball, and a man who is very good at basketball.
Ben plays social basketball every Thursday evening in Morningside. He has been playing for four years. He is, in his own careful assessment, a polished mid-range shooter, an instinctive defender, and a calming presence on the floor. He has shared this assessment with his teammates. They have heard it. They have opted, collectively and without dissent, to say nothing.
The situation
The team is called The Hardwood Dads, which was a better name at the time they chose it and has not aged gracefully. There are seven of them — two more than required — which means two people rotate off every possession in a system that everyone insists is fine and nobody enjoys.
Ben joined in 2020 when a colleague mentioned the team needed another body. He had played basketball at school — with consistency, if not distinction — and interpreted this as adequate preparation for social D-grade. In this he was roughly correct. D-grade social basketball in Morningside on a Thursday night is not a pressure environment. The referees are volunteers who are clearly doing something else in their heads. The scoreboard is operated manually, in the loosest sense of the word. The travelling rule is treated as a suggestion by everyone, including the referees, including Ben.
Ben has described himself as a "mid-range shooter with reasonable court vision" in no fewer than five separate social settings. At least three of those settings included his teammates. His teammates listened. They nodded. Several of them made the specific face that people make when they have decided very firmly not to say something. This face has become, over four years, a regular feature of their Thursday evenings.
The truth — well understood by six of the seven Hardwood Dads — is that Ben gets to his spots enthusiastically, takes approximately three shots more per game than the score differential warrants, and has a release that conveys absolute certainty about outcomes that do not follow. He plays defence with the energy of a man who has watched a lot of basketball and the spatial awareness of a man who has not. He is what recreational athletes call a "high-effort low-efficiency contributor." This is a polite way of saying what his teammates say to each other privately, which is also fairly polite, all things considered, because they genuinely like him.
Telling a psychologist — a man who charges by the hour to help other men confront the gap between who they are and who they believe themselves to be — that his basketball self-image is a work of sustained, confident, four-year fiction is not a conversation any of them are prepared to have. They have discussed this. They have discussed it more than once. The drinks are on Ben. The subject is closed.
Ben has read this page. He has described the characterisation as "reductive and frankly a bit lazy." He asked to add a detailed statistical rebuttal. He was told the page did not have space. The page has plenty of space. The page simply did not want a statistical rebuttal from Ben.
An independent report
What his teammates actually think.
The following assessments were collected from five of the six other members of The Hardwood Dads. The sixth declined to comment on the grounds that he "didn't want to be on a website." All quotes have been lightly edited for length. None have been edited for accuracy, which is why Ben did not edit this section.
"He runs really hard."
"Ben is always moving. Always. You can't fault the effort. He's constantly in a position to receive a pass and he really wants to. Whether we give him the pass is a different question, but the positioning is there. Mostly. He's enthusiastic." Pause. "Very enthusiastic."
Team captain, plays point guard
"The mid-range thing."
"Okay, so Ben thinks he's a mid-range shooter. He does shoot from mid-range. Those are both true things. The shooting percentage is — look, I don't keep stats, but if you were keeping stats, you would be keeping them. He shoots with real conviction, which I respect. It's the kind of confidence that doesn't update on evidence. As a psychologist he probably has a name for that."
Plays centre, former school rep
"We've talked about it."
"As a group, yeah. Not in a mean way — more like 'has anyone said anything to Ben about the shooting?' and then everyone goes quiet and looks at the ceiling. Nobody's going to say it. He's a great bloke. He brings the Gatorades. I'm not the one saying it." Pause. "He drives hard to the basket sometimes, which is good. He just usually gets blocked."
Plays shooting guard, works in IT
"The defence is very — active."
"Ben really commits on defence. Arms everywhere. He's all over the place. Technically he's not always in the right position but the energy is very high, which sometimes works out. He got two steals last season. He told us about both of them at drinks after. He mentioned them again the following Thursday. We were happy for him."
Plays power forward, two steals of his own this season — unmentioned
"I just don't pass him the ball."
"Look, we've all got our system. Mine is: if Ben's open and someone else is also open, I find the someone else. If Ben is the only option, I reassess whether I'm actually being well-defended. Usually I find a better pass. It works fine. Ben doesn't seem to notice. Everyone's happy." Long pause. "Is this going to be on his website?"
Plays small forward, Ben's regular rotation partner
"I think the team is being modest."
"I appreciate the feedback. I do think there's a framing issue here where the team's reluctance to acknowledge the mid-range game is being read as an absence of mid-range game, which I'd push back on. The two steals were legitimate plays. The court vision is there — it's just that sometimes the looks I create for myself aren't ones I choose to take. That's IQ, not inefficiency." Pause. "The Gatorades are a separate thing."
Self-assessed: solid contributor. Team-assessed: solid effort guy. The gap: still under negotiation.
A professional note
Why a psychologist has failed to develop accurate basketball self-awareness for four consecutive years.
Ben is aware, in the abstract, that humans are reliably bad at accurately assessing their own performance. He is also aware that this knowledge does not protect you from being bad at accurately assessing your own performance. He is living this out in real time on Thursday nights in Morningside.
The Dunning-Kruger dynamic
The research on metacognitive accuracy — the ability to know what you know — is fairly clear: skill and self-assessment improve together, but not at the same rate, and the gap is widest in the middle. Ben is not a complete beginner at basketball. He is not good at basketball. He is in the zone where you know enough to feel competent but not enough to know what good actually looks like up close. He has described this zone to clients many times. He is currently living in it.
The feedback gap
Accurate self-assessment requires feedback. Ben's team does not give him feedback. His team gives him Gatorade and mild evasiveness. This is, in clinical terms, a feedback-poor environment — which is exactly the kind of environment in which self-serving beliefs calcify. Ben has told clients that the people who love you are the least reliable sources of accurate performance data. His teammates love him, in the way that blokes who play sport together love each other. They are proving his point.
The motivated reasoning
There is also, Ben acknowledges privately, something actively enjoyable about being the kind of player you believe yourself to be. The felt experience of a mid-range attempt is identical whether the ball goes in or not — the setup, the release, the follow-through. He has the form. The outcome is a secondary variable. He is aware this is motivated reasoning. He finds it more interesting than troubling, which is either psychological health or sophisticated denial. He genuinely cannot tell.
The honest conclusion
He is a psychologist who specialises in helping men develop greater self-awareness, acknowledge difficult truths, and move beyond the comfortable stories they tell themselves about who they are. He plays social basketball every Thursday and believes he is better at it than he is. His teammates know. He now knows they know, having written this page and then read it. He will be at training next Thursday. He will probably take the mid-range shot. The capacity to hold both things at once — the honest knowledge and the action — is, he would note, itself a form of psychological flexibility. He is choosing to call it that. Nobody at Morningside is stopping him.
I help men stop pretending to be something they're not. I play social basketball every Thursday and tell people I'm a mid-range shooter. These two facts coexist in me without apparent difficulty. I have decided this makes me human rather than hypocritical. My teammates have decided to let me have that.
Here for the therapy, not the basketball.
The Hardwood Dads are not accepting new members. The psychology practice very much is open for bookings.