Ask a Therapist

You might have wondered if therapists ever wished that they could be friends with their clients, and my answer to that would be yes of course. Of course that’s inevitable, that’s going to happen, that there might be pairings between two people who recognise a familiarity, have a sense of peerness, a sense that in another life or another world that they might be friends. After all, regardless of the therapist’s model, whether it’s an overtly relational approach, a relationship is fundamentally what is being built in therapy, or you know, what’s happening between therapist and client. So, in some ways it’s inevitable that that’s a possibility.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing, and I don’t think it need be something that get in the way of the therapy, although that could be the case. The important thing is to name it, whether that’s something that the client’s getting in touch with – you know, fantasies about being friends with their therapist, or something that the therapist is, and to really explore together what it’s like, that that’s kind of in the room, and try and get a sense of how much it’s getting in the way, if it’s getting in the way. And oftentimes there can be a kind of grief it isn’t that way. And so, making space for that grief, you know, that in this life, in this world, the way that these two people are relating is in this professional context.