How therapy can help you have better, healthier friendships

Have you ever opened up instagram to see picture after picture of large groups of friends hanging out on bachelorette weekends or backyard get togethers or birthday parties and felt a tinge of jealousy as you thought, “I wish I had that many friends?” 

Or maybe you see a friend you used to be close with posting pictures with all of her new friends and it nearly crushes you as you’re flooded with the hurt and confusion over where and when exactly the friendship went south and what you wish you could have done differently? 

Or maybe you’re realizing that when a particular friend pops up on your phone, it’s not excitement you feel hearing from them, but dread because you’re thinking “gosh, I don’t know if I can listen to my friend vent about this for another 30 minutes…”

And then there’s a common experience of feeling resentment that you’re always the one picking up the phone making the plans and initiating with your friend and you feel like you’re doing all of the heavy lifting in the friendship…

Friendships are some of the most beautiful and cherished relationships you can have in your lifetime, but as a therapist who specializes in friendships, we are all doing ourselves a great disservice when we only talk about the good and fun and beautiful parts of friendship.

Friendships can break your heart just as much as they can heal your heart. 

Even though friendship issues are quite common, it can be really hard to admit that you have problems in your friendships. Before you think this is just a “women’s issue” I’d offer this theme is true regardless of gender. 

It’s for this reason any many more that I find such purpose in specializing in friendships and offering friendship therapy. I want to help folks feel less alone in their friendship struggles and also normalize that struggling in your friendships does not mean that you’re doing it wrong, it just means you’re paying attention. 

If you’ve found yourself in a season of feeling hurt or lonely or discontent in your friendships, here are three ways friendship therapy can help you in this season: 

One. Discover your attachment style in friendships 

More and more folks are becoming familiar with their “attachment styles” and how it can affect their relationships. Attachment theory explores relationships with people, specifically exploring the relationship you had with your early caregiver, noticing the type of care you did or didn’t receive from that person. Based on how your caregiver responded: consistently, inconsistently, meeting your needs, shaming you for them or outright ignoring them gave you a kind of framework that becomes wired into your brain and nervous system. That framework stays with you long after you’ve left home and unconsciously informs what relationships look and feel like. 

So how does this relate to friendships? We often hear about attachment theory in connection to your romantic partners, but this theory can also be used in exploring your friendships too. 

Of course if your needs were met with consistency, kindness, and care by your parents growing up, this likely set you up to have friendships that also felt consistent, kind and caring. But if this wasn’t the case, does this mean that your friendships are doomed? Not quite. It does mean you might need to explore how some of those early attachment patterns might be showing up in your present day friendships. 

If you’re more avoidantly attached in your friendships, you might over focus on your friends needs and put your needs on the back burner. You might feel like your feelings aren’t as important and hold them in. If you felt left out or like you aren’t being made a priority, you might not ever think it’s a possibility to share that with your friend because it feels way too uncomfortable. 

If you’re more anxiously attached in your friendships, you might be really sensitive to a friend not being able to spend time with you as frequently and be really anxious as to what that distance might mean about you, them, and your friendship. You might find yourself asking for a lot of reassurance in that friendship, so much so, that it can sometimes even push a friend away. 

Not only that, different friends can bring up different things for us. So you might find yourself having an easier friendship that feels more secure with a friend and notice there’s a lot more anxious tendencies with another friend. 

Exploring how your attachment style shows up in your friendships can be such rich work in therapy. By noticing patterns, validating your needs and learning how to meet those needs and care for yourself well, playing with allowing yourself to let in care and also let out your true feelings, along with allowing your therapist to support you in navigating conflict with a friend, you can experience healthier friendships that are more connected, honest, trusting, and genuine. 

Two. Learn how to set boundaries with friends 

Let’s normalize that boundaries are actually what help make a friendship sustainable in the long run. If you’re doing deep friendship with someone, your own stuff might come up from time to time or you might become aware of some of your unhealthy patterns and want to start shifting them. 

Some examples of where someone often has some boundary work to do in their friendships is if they find themselves wanting to head home for the night at say 10P but feeling pressured to stay out way later or feeling like they have to always pick up their friends call and help them process the latest crisis. 

It’s easy to think that setting a boundary would be to tell your friends to stop pressuring you and let you leave when you want to…but that’s not necessarily the full and complete picture of the boundary. The boundary work in therapy actually shifts towards learning how to tolerate your friends being disappointed in you AND still choosing to leave at 10P when you want to. Of course it’s important to communicate with your friends their pressure doesn’t feel good for you, but it’s up to you to hold the boundary for yourself and leave when you want to even if it’s at a different time than your friends want to. 

This concept is called “differentiation” or “individuation” and it’s basically a fancy psychological term for your ability to hold both your desire for connection and attachment while also being able to maintain your sense of self. In essence, it can be easy to lose yourself in a friendship just like it can be easy to lose yourself in a romantic relationship. Exploring your patterns (again this is where attachment comes in!) and where you might merge or where you might not let in any care is important boundary work that can be done in counseling to help you have flourishing and deep friendships that feel good for you and your friend. 

Three. Grieving the ending of certain friendships

If I had something I could shout on a rooftop so everyone could hear, I would say that “Friendship breakups are REAL breakups!”

It’s not uncommon to hear that friendship breakups can actually feel more painful than a romantic breakup. There are a few reasons for this, and one that I’d like to pay particular attention to is a myth that you should just “know” how to do friendships, that it’s okay to not be a good romantic partner but something must be really messed up about you if you can’t figure out friendships. As a licensed therapist specializing in developmental trauma, I can tell you this could not be farther from the truth. 

Often times is you grew up in an emotionally and/or physically volatile, abusive, or even neglectful environment, being in an attuned caring relationship was not something you experienced firsthand nor did you see modeled for you. And if you’ve never seen how something works, how would you…know how it works? 

Giving yourself a great deal of compassion and allowing yourself to be a beginning is such an important part of caring for your friendships. 

One of the most important things we do in therapy is slow down to notice the details and notice what’s happening inside of your body. When you slow down you’re able to see things that were easily missed when you move pretty quickly. This often looks like realizing that for a huge chunk of the friendship, you were always the one initiating or deferring to your friend for what they wanted to do and often withheld your own opinions and needs. Or you’re able to sense that your body often feels really tight and constricted around this particular friend. While that tightness often has a unique meaning for you, these sensations can give you rich data and wisdom. 

When you give time and space to noticing your friendships and exploring those stories, you can often see places that need work and care. You can see patterns that are easy for you to fall into (like people-pleasing, avoiding conflict, over apologizing, etc). The beauty of therapy is that it offers you a safe and nonjudgemental container to explore all of this. You’re provided with support to slowly shift how you show up in friendships and your therapist can give you feedback on where you might be falling into older patterns and what it could look like to bring your full self into your friendships. 

Study after study shows that healthy, full, vibrant relationships keep you healthy, lower your risk for heart disease, even protect you against depression and anxiety, and bolster your sense of belonging. To that end, supporting yourself by allowing in care and feedback around your friendships is a gift that you give yourself, your friendships, and your community at large. As we often talk about in therapy, when one part of the system changes, the whole system has to change. This means that when you start showing up with more of yourself, more honesty, more directness and kindness, more compassion, not only do you change your friendships, but your friends will start shifting how they show up with you, and then in their other friendships and the change just continues to ripple out further and further! That is good change I wholeheartedly believe in and want to be a part of! 

If this resonated and you live in Charlotte, North Carolina and you’d like to explore your friendship story, feel free to reach out to schedule a free 15 minute phone consultation to hear more about how therapy at Fig Holistic Psychotherapy could help you. And if you live anywhere in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Texas, Blake is able to see you for virtual therapy sessions.