My Friend, the Therapist
My Friend, the Therapist
Emma Wilkins
I’d been thinking about friendship and therapy, and friendship as therapy. I’d read Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and thought about how close a therapist and client might become. At the same time, I’d been thinking about my closest friends, and the therapeutic potential of friendship.
I’d thought about the rising demand for counselling—at last the stigma was lifting, as it should—but I’d wondered, too, if there was a corresponding decline in the depth of our friendships. I’d read a lot of books that portrayed friends becoming lovers, but marveled at how rarely contemporary writers seemed to celebrate friendship as an end, not merely a means. I’d thought, when reading A Little Life, that friendship would be enough for Willem and Jude, and despaired, for Jude’s sake, when it was not.
I’d also wondered at the number of “friends” we broadcast to online compared with the few we actually share our lives with one-to-one—the ones who we counsel, and who counsel us. Was society progressing in one area—with people more open to seeking professional help—but regressing in another—were we less inclined to offer and accept it from our friends?
I wasn’t questioning the value of seeing a professional, but I was thinking that making time for equally intimate conversations with trusted friends could be just as important. Those with both—therapeutic friendship and a therapist—might have the best arrangement of all: they could weigh up advice from someone who knows better from a psychological perspective, with the advice of someone who knows them better.
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I suppose whether or not the theory bears weight largely depends on the friendship in question, and whether we’re brave enough to put it to the test. After all, it’s often easier to speak than listen, to dodge the truth than tell it. It makes sense to see a professional because they’re paid to listen—trained to uncover truths, bound by oath to keep them, and by duty not to judge.
Yes, counselling costs money, but it won’t cost a friendship, and might protect several. If we save the idiosyncrasies and anxieties we’re confused by and ashamed of for the therapy room, we can stay fun and upbeat for our friends. We also reduce the risk of betrayal. What if confiding in friends ended in more pain, not less? Imagine summoning the courage to expose your insecurities, only to have your confidant recoil. Or they might empathize, but give very bad advice. So yes, it would be risky, and the risks might not pay off…
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Anyway, I’d been meaning to write an article about friendship and therapy and friendship as therapy. Somewhere along the way, in a city I’d never heard of, a strange new sickness started to spread.. and spread... and spread. We were instructed to stay at home—to avoid seeing people outside of our own households, to keep our distance if we did.
I still saw my friends. I started walking with one, 1.5 meters apart, once a week. I saw others in scheduled meetings and in photos online; we still chatted and texted—in some cases, there was more contact, not less—but I missed the comfortable silences and the spontaneous encounters, the private conversations at public gatherings, the subconscious exchanges of physical cues.
One friend was going through a break up, another was trying to avoid one, another had lost her job, and on top of it all, we were all learning how to live through a global upheaval; to accept unprecedented prohibitions and new responsibilities, to adjust to strange new rules for living. We shared our struggles, but there was nearly always a screen between us, and sometimes it felt like the things that really mattered couldn’t fit inside its frame.
I was still thinking about friendship—even Jesus had relied upon close friends—and I still wanted to write about it, but although I had more time at home, I had three children at home all the time, and two of them had schoolwork and one of them was toilet training and someone needed something all the time.
Just a few weeks earlier, back in that magical time when libraries were places that opened and let you in, where you could look and touch and take books home without sanitizing or checking-in, I borrowed The Second Mountain by New York Times political and social commentator David Brooks. The early chapters contained some compelling critiques of the “rampant individualization” of contemporary culture, and its catastrophic emphasis on “individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom [and] self-actualization”.
Our society, says Brooks, is “built on self-preoccupation”, and is profoundly dysfunctional as a result. In the last 20 years, the (US) suicide rate has risen by 30 per cent; there is a “loneliness crisis”—and this was before we were forced, en masse and on purpose, to isolate physically too.
Psychologist Ryan Howes says that while one in four people require therapy for treatment of a mental disorder at some point in their lives, “everyone can benefit from being in therapy all the time”. Even if this were true, I don’t think therapy alone (or friendship alone, for that matter) can solve the problems Brooks describes—and neither does Brooks. His solutions include deeper relationships and the kind of outward-looking, other-centred focus that tends to spring from faith.
Therapy can align with this: it can improve our relationships and benefit those close to us; it can have a ripple effect. I don’t want to question its versatility or its value, but I do want to elevate the role of friendship—and to suggest that while professional help is superior in some ways, it can never come close in others.
Part of the reason is that although we can pay psychologists and counsellors to care for us, by giving us new insights and strategies; they might not care about us, and they’re not supposed to love us.
There are also contextual restrictions. In most cases, they don’t know our families or our friends. They don’t witness us going about our normal lives, or observe our behavior when we’re not on show—all they know is what they see and what we tell them in a contrived setting in a limited time. And we know next to nothing about them.
Another difference is that when you share your struggles in therapy, it can end up being all about you. Yes, some go along for the sake of their loved ones, but others would say the “all-about-me” element is precisely what they’re paying for.
When you share your struggles in friendship, however, there’s not one reclining couch, there are two (sometimes more), and there’s no one taking notes.
Furthermore, while therapists might need our money, they don’t need us; and although we need people we can depend on in our lives, we also need people who depend on us. We’re far less likely to feel worthless and dispensable if we know we’re a source of strength or encouragement to someone else; and if we’re not just talking about our own problems, but listening to another person’s too, we’re less likely to become self-absorbed, or assume we’re the only ones finding life hard.
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Anyway, I’d been meaning to write an article about friendship and therapy and friendship as therapy, and then there was this global pandemic and, like most things, it ended up on hold. By the time I put pen to paper, it dawned on me that I’d been unwittingly testing my own theory. It was only as I wrote that I realized that my one weekly, in-person outing during the lockdown—the walk with a friend I mentioned earlier—could also be characterized as a one-hour therapy session.
During these walks—we’re still taking them, and I hope they will continue—we talk about the highs and lows of our weeks, our personal failings, frustrations, and achievements, about what we’ve been reading and watching and thinking about. We ask each other questions, we interrogate unexamined assumptions and beliefs, we ask for and accept advice.
The act of putting our thoughts into words can clarify them even as we speak, and every now and then, one of us will stumble on a realization we’d never had before. We don’t always talk about something deep, but we always know we can. There are trivial perks, too—we exchange recipes and baked goods, puzzles and books, child-minding favors and more—but the thing we relish most is having time in our week to talk and listen and learn.
The therapeutic benefits arise from mutual trust and respect, and a willingness to discuss what we’ve been thinking and feeling as well as what we’ve been doing; to speculate about what things might mean and what we might change. It helps that as people of faith, we share similar values and priorities. It also helps that we’ve been walking. I think long drives with my husband have similar therapeutic power. Perhaps it’s to do with physical motion, or perhaps the freedom from making eye contact gives us boldness where we’d otherwise feel awkward.
Setting aside the time is crucial too. Meeting regularly means we’re not starting from scratch every time—each “session” builds on the last—and meeting for an hour means our conversations are relaxed, not rushed. I’ve benefited hugely from friendship groups too, but the fact it’s just the two of us—in line with government restrictions—makes it easier to be vulnerable, to take risks.
The thing that most enables honesty, however, is love. There’s a passage in the Bible about speaking the truth in love. Honest opinions might hurt in the short-term, but they’re often kinder in the long-term, and if we know they’re spoken in love, the friendship will survive. When we know the friendship’s not at stake, and admit that neither of us is perfect, we can be honest about ourselves too—we can share the wrongs that we regret, the thoughts we wish we didn’t have, the good we’ve left undone; we can shine a light in places that are dark, and start to clean them up.
Stepping back from this singular example, I wonder how isolation has affected friendships on a much larger scale. Have we dealt with the stress and uncertainty and pressure of this shared trial by leaning on and supporting each other more than usual? Or have our lives become more separate? Have we drifted further apart?
I hope that the risks we’ve learned to live with out of lockdown, and the sacrifices we’ve learned to make—sanitizing at the expense of convenience, checking-in at the expense of privacy, wearing masks at the expense of comfort—have taught us to take risks in our relationships too. I hope we’ll be more willing to ask deeper questions and give deeper answers, to be more vulnerable, more honest, more generous and more brave; will dare to really love our friends. Because it’s better—even safer—to care more deeply and risk greater hurt, than maintain distance. It’s messy and it’s hard but it makes life beautiful. We should not settle for less.
Emma Wilkins
Writer & Journalist
Emma has written for Eternity, Quillette and Australia's Centre for Public Christianity
Photography by Davide Gazzotti