Outside the clinic
Forty-three years old, well-loved, and not going anywhere.
Ben has slept with the same teddy bear since he was eighteen months old. It is missing an eye, has been re-stuffed twice, and sits on his bedside table every night. He is not embarrassed about this.
The bear
Edward arrived at Christmas 1981, a gift from Ben's grandmother. He was a standard-issue brown bear then — both eyes intact, firm stuffing, a small red ribbon around his neck that lasted about a fortnight.
Forty-three years later he has one eye, considerably less stuffing than he started with, and fur worn smooth in the places that come from decades of being held. The red ribbon is long gone. His left ear has been hand-stitched back on at least three times by three different people, including once by Ben himself, with mixed results.
Ben's mother re-stuffed Edward in 1989 after a particularly rough patch where the bear was apparently subjected to conditions beyond his design specifications. His partner re-stuffed him in 2007, after the move to Brisbane, without being asked and without making a thing of it. Ben considers this one of the more quietly generous things anyone has ever done for him.
"There's a concept in object relations theory about transitional objects," Ben says. "Winnicott wrote about them — the thing that helps a child manage the gap between the inner world and the outer one. Edward is a very good transitional object. He has also outlasted a number of things that seemed considerably more durable at the time."
Ben's kids are aware of Edward and treat him with a respect they do not extend to most household objects. This is noted and appreciated.
A thread back
Edward, and the woman who kept him safe.
Ben's mother died in 2019. Edward was re-stuffed by her hands thirty years earlier, and that fact has not diminished with time.
Margaret Stevens was the kind of woman who did practical things quietly and without ceremony. She didn't make a speech about re-stuffing the bear in 1989. She just did it — found the seam, sourced the stuffing, and handed Edward back in better condition than she'd found him. That was how she operated.
Ben has thought about this a lot since she died. "There's a version of grief," he says, "where you hold an object because it holds the person. Edward was in her hands. She made him right again when he was falling apart. That matters in a way I'm not sure I could fully explain, and I've spent fifteen years professionally trying to explain things."
He doesn't talk about this with many people. He talks about it here because a number of the men he sees are carrying their own version of it — an object, a habit, a smell — that connects them to someone they've lost, and they don't quite know what to do with the weight of it. He wants them to know the weight is normal. That it doesn't mean you're stuck. That it means you loved someone, and the thing still knows it.
Margaret Stevens, 1947–2019. She also made a very good lamington and could read a room better than anyone Ben has ever met, including professionally.
On grief and objects
"The object is never just an object. It is the relationship, pressed into a shape you can hold."
— Ben Stevens
If you're carrying something like this
Grief doesn't always arrive in the expected shapes. Sometimes it's the bear on the bedside table, or the mug you can't throw out, or the handwriting on a birthday card in the back of a drawer. These aren't signs that you're not coping. They're signs that you cared. If you'd like to talk about it, the practice is here.
Get in touch →An unexpected return on investment
Forty-three years. Two re-stuffings. Exceptional value.
Ben has done the numbers. Edward is, per year of continuous service, one of the cheapest things he has ever owned. He finds this genuinely cheering.
The original cost of Edward, in 1981 dollars, was approximately twelve dollars. Ben's grandmother bought him at a department store in Brisbane, wrapped him in Christmas paper, and handed him to an eighteen-month-old who immediately bit his ear. The ear survived. The ribbon did not.
Two re-stuffings over four decades — the first in 1989, the second in 2007 — were performed by family members at no charge, which Ben acknowledges is a significant subsidy. The stuffing material itself, both times, cost under five dollars. Total materials outlay over forty-three years: somewhere in the range of twenty-two dollars, adjusted upward generously for the ribbon he came with.
\"That works out to about fifty cents a year,\" Ben says. \"For an object that has been in my life every single night, that has survived three addresses, one flood, and the 2007 move to Brisbane, and that has never once needed a software update or a subscription fee. The economics are extraordinary.\"
He is also, with the professional's eye for this kind of thing, quietly aware that Edward has done a non-trivial amount of what you might call informal therapeutic work over the years. The 2am anxieties, the difficult patches, the nights when sleep took a while to arrive — Edward was present for all of it, at no billable rate. Ben has not attempted to calculate the counterfactual cost of not having him, because it makes the maths uncomfortable.
\"There's a framing in financial psychology about the difference between price and value,\" he says. \"Price is what you paid. Value is what you got. Edward is the clearest illustration of that gap I can think of. He cost nothing, and he's worth quite a lot. I'm aware that's a strange thing to say about a stuffed toy. I'm saying it anyway.\"
Ben does not recommend a stuffed bear as a primary financial instrument. He does think the broader principle — that the cheapest things are sometimes the most valuable — holds up under scrutiny.
Edward: the ledger
On value and price
"Price is what you paid. Value is what you got. Edward is the clearest illustration of that gap I can think of."
— Ben Stevens
A small digression
Why a psychologist still sleeps with a teddy bear.
This is the part where Ben applies professional knowledge to his own habits and concludes that he is, in fact, fine.
The Winnicott explanation
Donald Winnicott, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, described "transitional objects" as the things that help a child navigate the gap between their inner world and the external one. The teddy, the blanket, the worn corner of a pillowcase. Objects that carry emotional weight precisely because they've been invested with it over time.
The attachment explanation
Attachment theory — Bowlby, Ainsworth — tells us that the need for comfort objects doesn't disappear in adulthood, it just becomes less socially acceptable to mention. The same neural systems that respond to a warm, familiar object at two years old are still present at forty-four. They didn't get the memo that you're a registered psychologist now.
The honest explanation
Edward has been there for a very long time. He was there for the good years and the hard ones, the moves and the losses, the things that got sorted and the things that didn't. At some point an object stops being a comfort object and starts being a record. Ben finds it useful to have a record. Most of his clients, once he tells them about Edward, admit to something similar. The names vary. The principle is the same.
On masculinity and comfort
Real men sleep with teddy bears.
Ben knows this because he is one, and because the men he sees in his practice — tradies, lawyers, fathers, veterans — have, with surprising regularity, quietly admitted to something similar.
There is a story men are told, implicitly and repeatedly, about what they're supposed to have grown out of. Softness. Comfort-seeking. The need to be soothed. The story is wrong, but it's persistent, and it does a lot of damage in the gap between what men actually feel and what they think they're allowed to feel.
Ben has lost count of the number of men who've mentioned — quietly, usually near the end of a session — that they still have a childhood toy. Or that they can't throw out their father's jacket. Or that they sleep better with a particular pillow that has, objectively, lost all structural integrity. They mention it the way you mention something embarrassing, something that wants an explanation attached to it.
He tells them about Edward. Not as a therapeutic technique — just as a fact. It usually lands.
"The idea that needing comfort makes you less of a man is one of the more expensive myths going around," he says. "Expensive in the sense that it costs people something real. It costs them the ability to ask for help, to accept it, to acknowledge that they're carrying something heavy. A teddy bear is a small thing. What it represents — the permission to need comfort — is not small at all."
Carrying something you haven't said out loud?
The practice is a place where that kind of thing gets to come out. No judgment, no jargon, no couch.
Get in touch →Edward, matchday
"He's been to more games than most people I know. He has seen things."
— Ben Stevens
At the footy
Edward goes to the football. This is not strange. This is tradition.
Ben has been taking Edward to the footy since he was old enough to go himself. He sits in the bag. He comes out at three-quarter time. This is just how it works.
The ritual started with Ben's father, who had a season-ticket spot in the same row for twenty-two years. Ben was brought to his first game at age four, Edward in tow, because Edward went everywhere. At some point the bear became part of the matchday kit — same as the scarf, same as the pie at halftime. Traditions don't always start with intention. Sometimes they just calcify without you noticing.
Ben is aware that a forty-four-year-old man producing a one-eyed teddy bear from his bag at a packed AFL ground is, on paper, an unusual image. In practice, he has never once had a negative comment. What he has had, more times than he can count, is another bloke — forties, fifties, sometimes older — clocking Edward and quietly saying something like "mine's at home" or "my kid had one of those" and then looking at the ground in a way that means the kid in question is now grown up and the bear is probably still there.
"The footy is one of the places men are actually allowed to feel something out loud," Ben says. "They cry when the siren goes. They hug strangers. They yell things they'd never say in a meeting. And then they go back to the car and they're blokes again. Edward at the footy fits into that gap perfectly. Nobody's going to call you soft for it when you're surrounded by forty thousand people who've been weeping since the final quarter."
Edward does not have a team. He supports whoever Ben is supporting, which has occasionally been a source of tension in the family but is considered non-negotiable by the bear.
A chapter that ran long
The bedwetting phase. It ended. Eventually.
Ben wet the bed until he was eleven years old. He is telling you this because shame only survives in the dark, and because a surprising number of the men he sees are still carrying something from childhood that they think makes them uniquely broken.
It was not a brief phase. It was not a tidy developmental blip that resolved itself quietly and was never mentioned again. It was years of rubber mattress covers, of strategic sleepovers that became less strategic over time, of a particular kind of vigilance that children shouldn't have to carry but sometimes do.
His parents handled it well, by his account. There was no punishment, no humiliation, no well-meaning but catastrophic intervention from a relative. There was just patience, and the mattress cover, and the unspoken understanding that this was a thing that was happening and would eventually stop happening. It did stop, eventually — late in primary school, without ceremony, as these things tend to go when they're not made into a bigger deal than they need to be.
Ben raises it — here, in print, on a page that was originally about a teddy bear — because of how many men he's met who are still, decades later, quietly mortified by something from their childhood. A phase that ran long, a thing that happened, an embarrassment that calcified into shame because nobody ever told them it was ordinary, or temporary, or that the adults around them had forgotten it by the following Tuesday.
"Shame needs privacy to survive," he says. "The things men are most ashamed of are almost always more common than they realise. I've found, professionally, that the fastest way to dissolve shame is usually very simple: you say the thing out loud to someone who doesn't flinch. That's most of what therapy is, honestly. You say it. They don't flinch. And it gets smaller."
He is not suggesting you tell a room full of people about your bedwetting phase. He is suggesting that whatever the equivalent thing is for you — the thing you've never said, the thing you think disqualifies you from being taken seriously — is almost certainly not what you think it is.
Edward was there for the whole thing. He has never once brought it up. This is among his finest qualities.
On shame and silence
"The things men are most ashamed of are almost always more common than they realise. You say it. They don't flinch. And it gets smaller."
— Ben Stevens
I've sat with men who won't admit they're struggling but will, if you give them long enough, tell you about the thing they've kept since childhood. There's always a thing. Edward just means I've got no credibility left to pretend otherwise.
Here for the therapy, not the bear.
Edward does not see clients. The psychology practice very much does.
Community & connection
The monthly teddy bear picnic. Yes, it's real. Yes, adults come.
On the last Sunday of every month, Ben organises a free community gathering in Brisbane's South Bank Parklands. People bring their bears. He brings Edward. Everyone brings something to eat. It has been running for three years.
It started, as these things often do, without any particular plan. Ben mentioned the picnics offhand in a session — a passing remark about how he'd taken Edward to a park and ended up talking to a stranger who also had a childhood bear in her bag. One thing became another. A small gathering became a regular one. Word got around.
The attendance on any given Sunday ranges from eight people to somewhere north of forty. The regulars include a retired electrician who brings a bear named Gerald, a pair of sisters in their seventies who share custody of a bear called Mrs Plum, and a rotating cast of parents who come, ostensibly, for the children and then stay because they find it surprisingly pleasant to sit on a rug in the sun with no particular agenda.
There is no program. There is no guest speaker. Ben brings a thermos of tea and a plate of lamingtons — his mother's recipe — and Edward sits on the rug next to him and the afternoon unfolds from there.
"The thing I didn't anticipate," Ben says, "is how much people want to talk about their bears. Not in a therapeutic way — just in the way that you talk about something you love. Where they came from, what they're called, what they've been through. It turns out most people have a story. They just don't often get asked."
The picnics are free to attend. They are open to everyone — bears optional, but strongly encouraged. Ben does not deliver therapy at them. He eats lamingtons and asks people about their bears. He considers this among the better uses of a Sunday afternoon.
Edward has attended every single picnic. His attendance record is, frankly, better than most of the humans.
The details
On showing up
"You don't need a bear, or a reason, or anything in particular. You just need to turn up. That's actually true of most things worth doing."
— Ben Stevens
Want to come along?
Drop Ben a note ahead of time if you'd like to — or just show up on the day. Either is genuinely fine.
Get in touch →