Would you go to therapy with a friend?
Exploring relationship therapy.
Hey Testers! Summer’s basically here. It’s my favorite month of the year. The snowball of our descent into authoritarianism keeps rolling down the hill, feeding itself and growing stronger. But still, we have the sun. Multiple conflicting truths, right?
Lately, I’ve been thinking about relationship hierarchies and the ways we are socialized (or not) to manage conflict in relationships with people like our friends, colleagues, and roommates. We don’t have much of a paradigm for rupture and repair for relationships that are neither romantic nor familial. We have a tendency to reduce conflict within friend groups, calling it drama, avoiding conflict, either keeping our relationships shallow or letting them disintegrate.
In a recent episode of the fabulous podcast No Such Thing, the hosts (and friends of the letter) talked about male friendship through the lens of the question, “Why don’t men ask followup questions?” They identified their socialized masculinity as a factor in their discomfort seeking emotional intimacy with their friends. The episode sweetly follows them attempting to deepen their relationships by simply asking questions.
My friends are easily on par with my partner and family as the most important relationships in my life. They’re also the relationships that carry the most danger of going cold without maintenance and care. The conflicts I’ve had with friends have been some of the absolute most painful and which I’ve felt the least resourced to handle.
So I’ve had the idea stuck in my head: What would it be like to go to couples therapy with a friend?
Couples therapy and family therapy are the two most common forms of relationship therapy, and there are many theoretical models for how to go about it. (See: Emotionally Focused Therapy, Gottman, Family Systems.)
But a Google search for friendship therapists in NYC yielded basically nothing. So I reached out to my networks to find someone with insight and connected with Maggie Vaughan, MFT, PhD. Maggie is a relationship therapist specializing in couples work, but has also worked with clients who are friends, roommates, and business partners.
Maggie and I spoke about her work with these different kinds of relationships. At the end of the day, working with friends is not so different from working with romantic partners. I noticed some themes stood out as familiar couples therapy concepts with new applications. (Her quotes, which are in italics, have been edited for length and clarity.)
Attachment
Attachment theory is used in therapy to understand the patterns we fall into in relationships based on early experiences of trust, closeness, and care. We all have attachment needs – to be loved, to be known, to feel safe (some of the classics) – and the way they are or aren’t communicated and met impact any kind of relationship.
Per Maggie: “I really do think that we are all so shaped by what we’ve experienced in life in our closest relationships. I think that those attachment wounds in particular get trapped into a lot and open back up in our current relationship, and very often that is what is contributing to unwanted relationship dynamics – the activation of those attachment wounds. So I want to know, what are the major attachment disruptions that have happened in clients’ lives? Because that very often has to do with what’s happening now in that relationship.”
Expectations
Is your idea of what this relationship is the same as your friend’s? Do you even know what role you want them to play in your life? Just like with romantic partners, disagreement or lack of clarity about the nature of your relationship with friends can cause conflict.
“The question is, what do you want from a relationship? And what does that require of you, what depth of connection does that demand?”
Meaning-making
In relationships, sometimes we forget that the significance we attach to certain actions or behaviors is not universal.
Social media is an excellent hazard zone for this. Here’s a personal example of an almost-conflict I didn’t see coming. I’ve mentioned here before that I’m not much of a poster, especially on Instagram. Many of my friends are. I’ve accidentally caused offense by not reposting a picture I was tagged in. For some, this feels dismissive or rude–it sends some kind of disapproving message. I had no idea. Something so ordinary for one can be a matter of being cared for by the other. And there you can have a conflict. (We’re good.)
Existential theory
At the end of the day, we are all just humans roaming the earth trying to make sense of our lives. Sometimes, by connecting to our deepest and most universal desires, fears, and anxieties, we can connect to one other.
At the root of many conflicts between friends is the feeling that you don’t really matter to the other person. Maybe you feel invisible, or like the other person could easily walk away.
“What I’ll see with roommates is that one person doesn’t feel significant. They don’t feel as though they matter to that other person. They feel dismissed regularly. And that taps into that need to feel as though you’re not just a number on the planet. The people involved [in a relationship] need to be able to see what is uniquely distinct about whoever it is they’re related to.”
Obviously, in a time when basic mental healthcare is increasingly inaccessible to so many of us, it’s tough to imagine a world where we are all taking our friends to therapy. But why shouldn’t our friendships deserve love and care and investment? Isn’t community how we’re keeping it together? (Group therapy workshop for a friend group, anyone??)
I’d love to see this evolve as a niche. If you’re reading this and you’d like to try it out, hit me up.
You can find more on Maggie, including how to work with her, at her group practice: Happy Apple NYC.
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Theater is healing
I saw a wonderful show last week at the Public with the delightful title Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. In addition to being incredibly funny and tender, it was also a fantasy of what I often wish my job was: Find the solution to other people’s problems, and tell them to do that thing. If you’re in New York, go see this show.
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TV is (rarely, but sometimes) healing
The Rehearsal Season 2 was brilliant. Much has been written already about what it has to say about autism and diagnosis. Here’s a good one from Slate.
Thanks for reading! Would you take your friends to therapy? Tell me what you think in the comments. Hit me up with what you want to see in a future edition of the newsletter. Now go feel the sun on your face. Go!!