Supportive Friends vs. Counselling

Friends are extremely important in life generally.  Friends may have been there for you during the many different experiences you have gone through over the years.  The value of friends to support us, coach us, guide us, distract us, remind us, teach us etc., etc. can not be overstated.  Friends provide all these important elements in a relationship and more!  Friends care about us, tell us the truth about what we need to hear, and give us humour in our lives as well as shared memories to reflect back on.   We feel connected to friends by a common interest, or a common history.  There is no doubt that one needs friends, and no doubt that a friend is distinctly different to that of a counselling relationship.

It does happen that people sometimes get confused and consider a counsellor the same  as a friend.  And of course, the reverse is also true at times.  Sometimes people feel that they do not need a counsellor because they have enough friends.   

This blog is not about trying to sway opinion in one direction or another about this point.  It is not about trying to convince someone who has great friends, that they actually need a counsellor.   It is merely about trying to clarify that friendships are distinct and different from a counselling relationship.  People may need to  have both types of relationships in their lives; friends AND a counsellor.  Though there will never be a situation where if someone only has a counsellor in their life, that this will be sufficient;  as in – they do not need friends.  If this ever happens, then there is something wrong in the counselling relationship.  A counsellor should never recommend that they be the only meaningful relationship that exists in someone’s life. 

Please, if this ever happens, then something is wrong!

Getting back to the discussion about friendships, an interesting point of divergence might be about how much someone leans on their friends to guide, support and coach them through situations.  Here is a list of questions that I thought might help one to think about this with a little more depth:

1. Is there lopsidedness in terms of the support in the friendship?  In other words, is it always one friend going to the other friend for support, and  never the other way around?
2. Do your conversations always involve talking about “problems”.  (Think of the wide variety of topics in the world, and whether you cover ground on a lot of them, or whether the discussions are instead always about personal problems one or the other of you are experiencing.)
3. Do you want to avoid your friend, because they drain you of your energy?  
4. Conversely, do you never want to be by yourself, and you always seek to be with one specific friend(s), because you just can’t figure out what to do by yourself?

Does your friend “scold” you for not doing what they told you to do?  Or just being scolded for you don’t really know why?  Or vice versa?

These are just a few questions that came to me, and you may have more questions you could ask.  

Counselling and friendships are very different entities.  A counsellor is someone who will only talk about you.  You are the forefront of their thinking when they are talking.  If there is a story that they happen to share (some self-disclosure), this will likely be something that they want to tell you, to make a point about something they are working on with you.  You are the focus, the centre and the topic of conversation with a counsellor.  In a friendship, this is not the case.  There will be a sharing of the centre of attention, and a sharing of who is the focus of the conversation.

Marie Lang, M.S.W. RSW, Sky Counselling Services – langmarie@rogers.com