Friendship therapy
There is a great deal of support available for couples in difficulty. There is almost none for friends. And by ‘friends’ I mean a whole smörgåsbord of possibilities including close friends, childhood friends, work friends, housemates, business partners, collaborators, bandmates, queer platonic friends, and any other way you might use the word ‘friend’.
And yet friendships can stall and quietly lose their shape. Perhaps something is said that can't be unsaid. One of you changes and the other isn't sure where that leaves them. Perhaps there is no conversation about it at all — just a slow thinning out, and a grief nobody quite has permission to name.
Friendship counselling or therapy is a space for two or more people to sit down together, with a third person in the room, and work on what is happening between you. You can also explore a friendship on your own in individual therapy.
What is friendship therapy?
Friendship therapy is relational work, with the friendship itself as what we are attending to. It’s relationship therapy for non-romantic partners. Sometimes it’s conflict (or avoidance of it) that brings folk into the room; sometimes it’s something else like shared grief.
Friendships are, for many people, the most significant relationships of their lives. Here are some examples of who comes, any why:
A rupture in a long friendship. Perhaps one conversation that went badly; perhaps an accumulation of small things that were never said. You both want to repair it and neither of you knows how to begin.
A friendship changing shape. A baby, a move, a diagnosis, a new relationship, a shift in money or status. Nothing has gone wrong exactly, but the friendship no longer fits the people you have become, and the mismatch is starting to hurt.
Friction within chosen family or a polycule. Where friendship, care, intimacy and sometimes housing all overlap.
Friends who are also something else. Housemates, co-carers, co-founders, collaborators... When the practical and the personal are tangled together, a dispute about money or labour is rarely only about money or labour.
People also come to grieve something together, or because one of them has something difficult to say and wants to say it kindly, with support.
What happens in the room
In the first session I want to get to know each of you, and to get to know the friendship as something in its own right. How it began. What it has given you. When it started to feel difficult, and what you have already tried.
Depending on what you are bringing, I may spend some time with each of you separately as well, so there is room for what is harder to say in front of each other.
From there, we have the conversations that don't go well or don’t happen elsewhere. I will say what I notice: the pattern you keep falling into, the thing one of you says that the other never seems to hear, the old script that has quietly been running the whole time. I may be able to help you communicate better (to say what you want to say and listen to what is said to you).
I work with a relational lens and aim for a space of warmth, shared responsibility and profound respect. That means I am not a referee. I won't be deciding which of you is right.
Worth knowing before you get in touch
Everyone involved needs to want it. Suggesting therapy to a friend is a reasonable thing to do. Pressing them into it isn't, and it tends not to work.
Also, the friendship may change with the therapy. Usually that means more honesty and more ease. Sometimes it means the relationship takes a different shape than the one you arrived with.
I work in Chorlton and Didsbury (Manchester) and online.
The thinking behind it
Friendship is usually treated as the relationship that fits around the important ones. It gets what's left after work, romance and family have taken their share, and when it fails there is no ceremony, no time off, no one to tell.
I am influenced by relationship anarchy and by tools like the relationship smorgasbord, which start from a different premise: that a relationship isn't defined by which category it falls into, but by what the people in it actually want to offer and receive — and that this is worth saying out loud rather than assuming.
You don't need to know anything about that, or to have any interest in it, to come and work on your friendship.
How do we start?
Sessions are £75 - they are a bit more than individual sessions because I take more time between sessions thinking about our work
Send me a message to arrange an initial session. I offer this at half the usual fee
I mainly work in-room, but I do sometimes work online too and I have specific training in this
Some typical questions are answered here