How Talking with a Close Friend is Different to Talking with OurTherapist
Know the difference to get what you need
A question I have frequently been asked as a therapist is how therapy is different from talking with parents or a trusted friend. It’s a good question, after all confiding in a good friend can give us ideas and we might hear how they see our situation. We could even see some options we hadn’t thought of.
Talking with someone we know, and trust might be comforting and reassuring, and we could call these conversations therapeutic because they provide us with something we need and moves us from one emotional state to another. But these conversations are very different from a conversation with our therapist.
What a conversation with a therapist will not do
Someone close to us will have intimate knowledge of our life which will help them understand us in the context of the relationship we have with them. Their thoughts and reactions will be based on what they know about us, and their opinion will have been shaped because of how they have seen us cope with life.
It is also likely they will have a relationship of sorts with our partner, children, other friends, or family members. In other words, they will have a connection with our world on a social or professional level. This is highly likely to cause them to:
Take sides: it is normal to take sides, it is what we do in our daily lives. Making split decisions on what is right and wrong, helps us to know what to do next.
Placate us: When we are upset, our friends and family will reassure us that everything will be ok or that there are plenty more fish in the sea. This is meant to make us feel better and encourage us to have a calmer and happier frame of mind.
Divert the conversation: People close to us might find the subjects we need and want to talk about uncomfortable and can often divert the conversation on to something easier to talk about.
Distract us: Just like parents do with children when they are sad, our friends and family will want to distract us to cheer us up.
Compare our story with others: There is no doubt that others will have experienced something similar to our own experiences. Often stories about other people are used as examples of how to cope or how to do something differently.
Tell us their own opinion: Opinions are easy to have, especially when we are not struggling with issues. Our friends and family’s suggestions of what they would do or how we can improve our situation are not always appropriate.
Give us physical comfort: A well-intentioned hug from someone we trust and feel close to, can make our challenges seem easier to cope with.
Of course, most of the time all of this is exactly what we are looking for and these actions might even bring us closer or reaffirm the connection in our relationship.
However, there are times when this just isn’t enough, and we find our thoughts going round in circles. We don’t want to listen to the stories of other people’s heroic successes, or the advice offered. Perhaps the emotional or psychological sticky plaster that used to work has lost its effect leaving us unable to contain our struggles. While our friends and family are doing the best they can, the conversations we can have with them will not always be enough to shift the challenges we face.
Talking with our therapist
The conversation we have in therapy goes deeper than any conversation we have outside of therapy. A therapist will not use any of the above strategies, instead, they will explore our experiences with compassion and empathy, being curious about us and how we see life and the situations we find ourselves in.
In therapy, we are at the centre of the conversation and that won’t change; no other topic will sneak in to distract us or the therapist from focusing on what is going on for us. Therapists are trained to be gentle though determined in teasing out thoughts and emotions, without imposing their own life experiences or opinions on us.
Our therapist will only know us in the capacity of their client which frees them up to explore our experiences in ways that can be too challenging for any other type of relationship. This makes them able to be neutral; they can see us and our experiences like an observer watching a play on a stage.
Therapists will challenge our beliefs and values, letting us see how our assumptions are affecting us. This will allow us to discover options in life, so we can change the thoughts and behaviour that are no longer serving us, or which are making our life or certain experiences seem like a struggle.
Because of their training in theory and interventions, therapists have developed skills to help us:
- See ourselves differently
- Discover any negative thoughts and behaviours we were unaware of
- Develop our self-esteem and confidence
- Discover options we might not have been aware of before
- Change our understanding of the world and how we fit into it
- Develop our coping skills and resilience
- Shine a light on resources that we didn’t realise we had
We will be uncovering stories that we might not have spoken about before or perhaps we didn’t realise were inside of us. With the help of the therapist, we can re-write the stories, so they become a resource rather than a hindrance.
We all need our friends and our family, they offer us so much comfort in life, fun and a variety of connections all of which is an important part of living a fulfilled life. We cannot underestimate the value they bring to our lives and that we bring to their life. However, now and then there is nothing that can replace the therapeutic connection open and conversation that we can have with our therapist, the conversation that is focussed just on us with no other distraction or deviation.
To read more about the journey through therapy:
If you liked this article you might also like these:
