Meet the former friends having therapy to recover their relationship

You should go to therapy,” my sister told me, as I paused to take a breath after regurgitating a story about how I was feeling sadly unaligned with an old friend.

I reminded her that I was already in therapy, but would make sure to bring up this specific subject during our next session. “No,” she shook her head. “You should go to therapy with her… like couples therapy, but for friendship.”

During the silence that followed, she added: “It’s a thing now.”

I was intrigued by the concept; it felt both alien and simultaneously totally reasonable. We all have friendships that have fizzled out, whether we’ve grown apart, built up resentment around an unresolved disagreement or have found it all too difficult to adjust to each other’s life changes. In fact, I have lost several valuable friendships over the years – ones I still think about, and mourn, to this day. But what if a bump in the road didn’t have to spell the end of the journey? What if, just like our romantic relationships, we started taking our friends to therapy – could we salvage those most precious of platonic relationships?

In my quest to understand more, and possibly save a struggling friendship, I began reaching out to therapists – a good percentage of whom said they had started treating pairs or even groups of friends together. “Since our friends are often a longstanding and integral relationship in our lives, it makes sense that if for whatever reason there’s a breakdown in that relationship, therapy may be a positive way of intervening and repairing it,” Tami Sobell, therapist and founder of TS Therapy explains. “It offers a safe space for friends to air out their concerns, resentments and feelings, and facilitates more meaningful, bond-enhancing conversations.”

And this was certainly the case for Debs, who found that going to therapy with a friend helped them really hear each other for the first time in a long time, and gave them a clear path to follow in order to repair things. “I’m no stranger to therapy, I’ve been in and out of it my whole life,” she says. “So I felt like it was the obvious thing to do when I was finding a really cherished friendship difficult to maintain.”

She says her friend’s reaction to the suggestion of therapy was positive straight away. “I explained that it was an indication of how much I valued our friendship and how I wanted to actively work to get us feeling back on track.”

The friends were in different places in their lives; one married with a baby, and the other recently single and living alone, so the gap in their understanding of each other’s lives had been widening for some time. “We just couldn’t fully grasp the nuances of how we were each feeling in our lives. I felt she just didn’t understand the pressures on me as a parent and she felt I was unempathetic to the difficulties that singledom in her thirties brought up,” Debs continues. “Our issues, our schedules, our responsibilities were so different, and I think we just both felt drained, and increasingly resentful, trying to understand each other.”

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The friends attended four sessions together in total and found that having a safe space to really unburden themselves, through guided questions, made the gap feel decidedly smaller almost immediately. “It was good to have someone else comment on what was happening and simplify things for us,” Debs explains. “[Our therapist] also made it all seem more normal and helped us see it wasn’t either person’s fault, but both people could still take action to change it. It was just a relief to be given some practical solutions, rather than both trying to solve things on our own.”

And Debs is not alone. “As a therapist, I’ve received more requests from friends, and even colleagues, wanting to use the therapy space to work on their relationships,” says Tasha Bailey, author and psychotherapist. “We’re also seeing more friends and siblings going to couples therapy together, especially on reality TV shows, and these examples teach us that sometimes we need a safe space and an impartial professional to help the friendship to move forward.” Crucially, they also teach us that this is normal. “The older we get,” Bailey adds, “the more complicated and often conflicted our friendships become, and having a therapist to help navigate a particular bond can be really helpful.”

Buoyed by the idea that a complicated friendship is normal, but need not necessarily be accepted as such, I ask Bailey what to expect from sessions. “It’s going to feel very different from going to individual therapy,” she explains. “In personal therapy, your therapist is just there for you, and though they will hold you accountable, they are almost always on your side. In friendship therapy, you are not your therapist’s main client, the relationship is. Your therapist will not be there to take a side between you or your friend. Instead, they will be there to bring you closer to understanding the needs of your relationship and how to nurture it going forward.”

She also notes that therapy isn’t just for crisis moments – “you don’t need to wait for your friendship to be on the rocks before therapy is an option” – in fact, trying therapy together at the start of a conflict will equip both parties with the skills and reflection to prevent tension from escalating further.

So how does one broach the topic with a friend? Even as a convert to the idea of friendship therapy, I know I’d have a complex mix of feelings if a friend came to me with the suggestion. “Start by sharing how much you value the friendship,” Bailey advises. “Explain how you’re keen to strengthen the relationship by working on some of the challenges that have been coming up, and how therapy could make a difference. Remember, this is a significant decision. Time, finances and feelings are all big considerations when thinking about going to therapy, so give your friend time to process your suggestion.”

She adds: “If they’re open to it, propose finding a therapist together and brainstorm qualities you both feel are important in this third party – this could even be a bonding experience in itself.”

When I think about it now, it seems wholly strange that it has not always been the norm to go to therapy with our friends. I have taken up large portions of my personal therapy sessions in the past discussing my friendships – they are of huge emotional significance in my life and impact the way I view the world – yet, until the ripe old age of 34, I’d never considered that working on these precious bonds together might be much more effective than trying to do so alone, with just one side of the story to work from.

And as I explored further, I found that the purpose of friendship therapy is not solely to revive a flailing friendship, it can also be used to end a friendship in as painless a way as possible (if there is such a thing). “In just the same way as couples therapy, sometimes the outcome of friends’ sessions together is that the friendship just really doesn’t benefit either or both parties anymore, and causes more harm than good,” Sobell says. “The sad reality is that not all friendships are built to withstand an entire lifetime, but giving these friendships their due diligence, love and care – even in their ending – can be incredibly healing for both parties.”

Such was the case for Jenny* who, when faced with the ending of a once-treasured friendship due to her decision to remain childfree, wanted to respect the union and ensure that the tie was cut cleanly and respectfully. “[My friend’s] life became entirely about children, whereas I had made the conscious decision to focus on the opposite,” Jenny says. “It sent us off in different directions, with little in common anymore, and I think we both wanted to make room for different friendships in our lives, ones that could meet us where we were at now, rather than being based on past similarities.”

The pair acknowledged they loved each other and decided to go to several sessions of friendship therapy in order to part on as best terms as possible, “leaving nothing on the table” that could cause pain, frustration or regret down the line. “It forced us to reflect and grieve in a way that felt healthy, rather than heavy. In a sense it was ironic because in ending things in this way we learned how to be a better friend to each other.”

And it’s never too late to learn how to be a better friend, to strengthen the bond with those people we are bound to not by blood or law but by love. And as with all forms of love, friendships take work, and therapy can often feel like great work – if you’re taking it seriously. But as Jane Austen writes in Northanger Abbey, “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends.”