8 Reasons Why Friendship Isn’t Therapy & Therapy Isn’t Friendship
Friendship has so many wonderful benefits. People who have a fulfilling social life tend to live longer. Connection is an important part of being human. Feeling connected can make us calmer, happier, more confident and more satisfied. However, healthy relationships require reciprocity, and when the emotional burden is one-sided, friendships can be taxed. This is just one of the many reasons why it is potentially harmful to rely on friends in lieu of a therapist.
Relying On Friends As Guides
Imagine you go through a major change, perhaps a parent dies, you get divorced, or something else happens that shines a light on the fragility of life, giving you a stronger sense of urgency to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do. One of those happens to be to climb a mountain – and you’ve never had the time to do it. So you begin investigating opportunities for mountain climbing. Many of the trips you’ve looked into are guided, and you begin to realize that the guided trips are more constrained by a time frame and are more costly. In addition, they involve going with people you’ve never met before. After a conversation with a friend, you realize that a few of your friends may know as much about climbing as a guide would.
To save money and prevent having to be with people you don’t know, you invite a few of your friends to join you on this adventure. They have excellent advice about gear and recommendations for things you can read to prepare for the trip. Everyone agrees to go but a few weeks before the trip, one friend bows out due to a work-related event and another with lots of experience in this area cancels due to a family commitment. You are left with a sinking feeling that the remaining friends on your trip don’t fully have the big picture and experience you need in order to feel confident about the adventure. Had you paid someone to be your guide or joined an already organized camping trip, you’d be in much better shape.
Vast Differences Between Therapy & Friendship
When asked about why they haven’t tried therapy, people sometimes name their ability to talk with friends as a reason. What’s missed in this understanding is the wisdom of the therapeutic process held by the therapist, who acts as a guide in uncharted territory. An experienced therapist knows the terrain of the psyche, knows the risks involved in exploring it, knows how to create the conditions for emotional safety, and has an array of tools for personal transformation. The promise of the therapeutic hour is that your therapist will engage in a reliable way every time with consistent empathy and compassion. There is separation between your life circumstances and your therapist’s – and the therapy hour is a time devoted to understanding and navigating yours. Like a properly guided mountain climbing adventure, you leave the experience with more resources within to enrich and sustain you in all other aspects of your life.
Formal Therapy Training Goes A Long Way
Granted, there are many similarities between the ways we communicate with friends and how this happens during therapy. However, counseling involves a specific kind of communication. Some of your best friends are likely great listeners or they know how to ask questions that demonstrate that they know you and are interested in your life. On the other hand, a trained therapist is not only listening, asking questions, and resonating with you; they are also focused on healing your deepest emotional wounds. They apply years of training to the process of healing as well as having a commitment to being fully present during your session. Additionally, a therapist is paying attention to the non-verbal communication happening in your session and is willing to ask about it. In friendships, it is more common to respect a person’s privacy by not questioning non-verbal communication or bringing up things that are unspoken.
The Therapy Room: A Predictable Safe Haven
Therapy also allows for difficult experiences to be contained. Having a designated space to meet (even if it’s a predictable one away from your therapist’s office for virtual sessions), allows for challenging emotions to be explored without leaving you feeling unsupported or confronted with coworkers or difficult family members while you are processing the things that you are most challenged by. Your therapist’s office can become the one place where you share vulnerabilities which can’t be expressed anywhere else in your life, and knowing that the space is also unlike anywhere else provides your senses with the signals they need to feel safe.
Therapy Offers Safety In Times of Conflict
Therapy is designed to embrace and work with conflicts. Not only is it a place to problem-solve those that happen in your daily experience, it also provides a context to dissect your response to disagreement, unmet needs, and painful experiences in your past which influence how you navigate difficult situations. Part of the listening a great therapist does is directed towards blind spots you may have that are causing problems for you. It’s these moments in friendships and family relationships that often become stressful, and the perspective another may offer can be unreliably clouded by their own perspective. The commitment your counselor has with you is that they will say what’s most important for your healing, even if it’s hard to hear.
Therapy Can Lead To Better, Stronger Friendships
There is nothing more pleasurable than spending time with a good friend or a family member who understands you. In fact, every therapist has the goal of helping you heal so that healthy relationships with others are a significant and rewarding part of your life. Connecting with others is as important as nutrition, sleep, and other basic necessities. . Friendships are precious, and the gift you can offer your friends is to be with them most often with the emotional resources you need in order to fully enjoy your time together. The same goes for family. Then, when the opportunity arises for one of you to step into the time-honored role of “being there” during the hard times, it is truly an honor for both of you.
Using Friends As Therapists Can Lead to Strained Relationships
Having the emotional strength to support a friend in a crisis can be gratifying, and having a friend you know you can count on during hard times is priceless. But, a healthy ratio between these two elements requires attention. Most of us are unable to navigate the reciprocity of a healthy relationship when we’re hurting. Those are the times our friends carry the burden of the relationship for us. Things get problematic, though, when that balance between supporting and being supported becomes stuck in one direction.
Imbalance can happen for a number of reasons. A friend might have the bandwidth for one problem, but then they are faced with a challenge in their own life, making it more difficult to be present for you. Or, a series of unfortunate events can cause a cascade of emotional distress and, while the comfort of turning to a friend seems the most natural thing to do, it feels overwhelming on the receiving end. A third reason the relationship scales can be thrown off balance is when the problem you are seeking support for hits close to home in the emotional life of your friend, stirring up emotions they are not interested in experiencing at this time in their life. This is something called countertransference and it’s something that therapists can also experience if they don’t do a lot of their own therapy to manage it.
Once these kinds of imbalances occur, they can easily become a pattern, especially if they go undetected and there is no communication about the dynamics in the relationship. Let’s face it, we enjoy friendships in large part because they are spontaneous and enrich our lives without a lot of analysis. However, it’s essential that each person “sweeps their side of the street” by having insight into their own personality enough to fully participate in a caring and kind manner. Without that, the relationship feels transactional. In other words, friendship can feel reduced to what each person is getting out of it for themselves, which can feel hollow. Without the skills to stay the course, friendships languish and this leads to hopping from one friend to another without any deep attachments.
Forming Healthy Attachments
Learning to form healthy attachments to the people in your life is a final benefit of therapy. Your therapist is like a mountain climbing guide in repairing and rebuilding your attachment style, which is another way of describing the way you connect with other people. Your therapist is deeply committed to giving you the experience of a relationship with another that is based on consistency, reliability, kindness, and consideration. In practicing these qualities during the counseling session, we learn their value, and we begin to appreciate how they form the foundation for healthy relationships in all aspects of our lives. For most of us, that means unlearning old habits, some of which have cost us relationships in the past.
The good news is that it is possible to change with a partner/therapist who is willing to hold you accountable for what works and what doesn’t work. The saying, “It takes two to tango” is very accurate, but it takes a while to learn to tango if you didn’t grow up with people in your life who knew how. Think of your counselor as a relationship dance instructor AND a climbing guide all rolled into one. And when you learn how to partner with someone in the safe context of therapy, you can count on growing a lot as an individual and improving relationships outside of the therapy room.
Overall, both friendship and therapy can be tremendously beneficial in a person’s life. However, for all of the reasons shared, we believe that they are not interchangeable. If you have any interest in giving counseling a try – and are located in Nashville, Chattanooga, Memphis, somewhere else in Tennessee, or another state where we are licensed, we are here for you. Feel free to reach out at clientcare@nashvillepsych.com or (615)582-2882 with any questions or feedback. We’d love to hear from you.
