Tattoos, a jiu-jitsu brown belt: The caring mental health therapist behind the tough guy image

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?”

MAKING THERAPY ‘LESS SCARY’

In 2022, Mr Tan co-founded Goodity Co with a partner in a bid to make therapy less intimidating to those who may not know where to begin seeking professional help. 

The clinic’s well-attended pilot initiative that year was a pop-up cafe called Coffee Talks, where passers-by could grab a cup of coffee or tea and chat with a therapist for a 15-minute conversation on any topic of their choice. 

Patrons could buy a cuppa for under S$5 and opt to speak to a mental health professional in a casual setting for a small premium at S$12.

While not meant to simulate therapy in a long-term clinical setting, the initiative was aimed at introducing the public to the “therapeutic nature” of having a conversation with a professional. 

On top of his background as a social worker, Mr Tan has personally confronted the importance of self-reflection and unpacking childhood experiences later in life. 

When he was a child, his parents separated multiple times before divorcing when he was a polytechnic student, which left him to be passed around seven times between multiple households. 

His father was absent in his childhood, leaving his mother to be busy at work to support him and his sister. He has not been in contact with his father since the divorce but remains close with his mother and sister today.

“I was left to my own devices a lot as a child, hanging out with other boys and doing stupid things,” he said. 

While he never got into trouble with the law, Mr Tan would frequently get into fights at school, played truant and was never academically inclined, which caused him to be referred to school counsellors and social service agencies. 

Yet, he still remembers how frustrating this experience was, as the professionals he met always appeared to try and “fix him” instead of being empathetic to his family background. 

“A lot of the approaches school counsellors would take with me is to basically tell me what I was doing was wrong, and use fear and negative reinforcement on me," he recalled.

"There was hardly any attempt to understand the reason for my behaviour, or positively empower me for what I was actually doing right.”

In his clinical practice now, Mr Tan is clear about taking a different approach with his clients, many of whom are in their 20s and 30s and are seeking to unpack relationship and work life challenges. 

“I always tell this to clients: ‘I’m not the expert in the room. I don’t know what you’ve gone through, you have probably experienced a lot more than I have, so I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to work with you',” he said. 

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON VIOLENCE 

Despite the aggressive appearance of the martial arts he practises, Mr Tan also champions sport as a means to reflect and confront one’s inner struggles. 

He was a latecomer to the sport, picking up jiu-jitsu at 28 years old, but still qualified to represent Singapore at a national level in 2019. He soon found himself attending competitions in Mongolia and Thailand. 

While he may have started learning “too late” to pursue the sport professionally, he currently coaches students at a gym twice a week. 

For him, learning a combat sport also helped him adopt a healthier perspective on violence and learn how to better manage anger and impulses. 

“Any martial art, be it jiu-jitsu, boxing or Muay Thai, looks like just a scrap to the layman. But beneath it all, there’s a lot of calculated moves. I can’t just rush into an opponent blindly and try to hurt a person – I’ll probably get hurt if the person is more technical than I am,” he said. 

He recalled his first trial with jiu-jitsu where he sparred with a mother of three. Despite being confident in his fitness level and having boxing experience, his sparring partner “choked him out” in under a minute. 

During his time as a social worker, Mr Tan has also taught jiu-jitsu to underprivileged youths to give them a chance to access the expensive sport. 

“When I went to the national team and saw the kids there, I was thinking, these kids come from really good homes. But what about the kids who live in rental flats, they would never have a chance to learn jiu-jitsu and have a shot at the national team,” he said. 

Among the 10 students he was coaching at the time, Mr Tan said he noticed the students gained confidence in themselves and became more determined to overcome difficult tasks instead of feeling helpless in their circumstances. 

“You’re talking about kids who have been discounted by a lot of teachers, parents and society. These are kids that are told that, ‘You’re bad, you’re not going to be anything in life',” he said. 

“But when I taught them jiu-jitsu and taught them moves that are seemingly so difficult, when they actually execute it, you see the confidence in their eyes, and they think, ‘I can do this’.”

NOT YOUR AVERAGE ROLE MODEL 

As an owner of two businesses and part-time jiu-jitsu coach, Mr Tan barely has a moment to himself and squeezes in time to speak with me in between overseas commitments. 

“Monday is supposedly my day off, but it doesn’t happen. Tuesday I’m at the studio for jewellery business and I’ll be teaching jiu-jitsu in the evening. Wednesday, Thursday I’m having sessions at the clinic. Friday will be a full-day of the jewellery business and I sometimes shoot content for (Goodity Co’s) TikTok,” he said. 

But one perk is that the skills he has picked up between the various fields are transferable. He said he has become better at speaking to clients at his clinic from chatting with couples shopping for a wedding ring in his fine jewellery business. 

“I have to understand the couple's story and how they met, not just sell them something. That helped me unknowingly learn how to ask people about their lives in a gentle way,” he said. 

With such a full life on weekdays and a weekend filled with client meetings, he becomes slightly wistful as he talks of his dreams for a quieter future.

“In my 30s I’ve had the objective of being the supporting character to help develop others around me to reach higher, be it my therapists, jiu-jitsu athletes and my friends. In the future, I hope to have a farm and disappear into the sunset one day,” he said.  

Despite his TikTok videos and the confidence he seems to exude on social media, Mr Tan admits that he is camera shy and not a fan of putting himself on such a public platform. 

So, I have to ask, why do it, and why speak to me? 

To this, he said: “I never started out as wanting to be a role model or wanting people to take away something from my life. I live the way I live. But if my story can inspire a kid with nothing, to think, ‘I have a future’, then it’s worth it.”