Can i be friends with my therapist

What Happens If You Become Friends with Your Therapist?

Psychotherapy is an intimate process that involves a gradual building of trust between you and your therapist. Friendship isn’t part of it.

Going to therapy may mean that you frequently share your truths about life, experiences, and thoughts with your therapist.

Depending on the type of therapy you’ve selected, your therapist can then verbally validate your feelings, help you reassess a situation, and share insights that can have a powerful effect on the way you see yourself and the world.

This experience may lead you to feel you rely on your therapist and appreciate their input more each day. You may even develop feelings for them or see them as a friend. This is a natural part of the process.

But a solid connection with your psychotherapist isn’t the same as having a friendship with them. Understanding and respecting this boundary can help you continue meeting your therapy goals.

For many reasons, a therapist-patient relationship and a friendship are mutually exclusive. This doesn’t mean you can’t build a genuine bond with your therapist, though.

In fact, taking friendship off the table is essential for that to happen. Here’s why.

The therapist-patient relationship is unique

The relationship between a therapist and a patient is, by design, unlike any other.

Your therapist’s office (real or virtual) is a safe space where you can open up and explore challenges that you feel affect other aspects of your life.

This connection is also structured to help you develop coping strategies and tools to manage your emotions and reassess your thinking patterns.

Your bond with your therapist can also provide a safe way to explore how you navigate relationships in general.

Mental health professionals are trained to hold and contain your feelings, while largely setting aside their own. This is part of what makes the relationship so unique and therapeutic.

This is one of the reasons why it’s important to vet a therapist before establishing the relationship.

The therapeutic bond is inherently one-sided

Though this might sound like a negative thing, it’s actually what makes therapy work.

Your therapist is a professional whose time you are paying for. Your time together is entirely about your feelings and experiences. It’s your space.

Therapy is an opportunity for you to talk about anything you want, albeit with guidance from your therapist. There’s no expectation that your therapist will share any aspect of their personal and private life.

If you had a friend who talked only about themselves and never asked you any questions or showed interest in your life, you might start to question the friendship. But, psychotherapy is designed to be one-sided, giving you a safe place to open up without fear of judgment or worries about being selfish.

Boundaries are a crucial part of therapy

Modeling healthy boundaries can be one of the key ways a therapist helps you work on your challenges. This is especially important if you have people-pleasing tendencies, have trouble saying no, or feel overly responsible for other people’s feelings.

If you have difficulty setting boundaries in other areas of your life, therapy can help you learn how.

Your relationship with your therapist involves clear boundaries from the beginning. You’ll determine:

how often you meet
how long you meet
how much you pay
how much contact is permitted between sessions

In general, your therapist won’t disclose much about their life or emotional state.

Therapists have a professional code of ethics they must follow

All mental health professionals are bound by ethical guidelines, which are designed to protect them and their patients.

The American Psychological Association’s (APA) Code of Conduct has a section regarding “multiple relationships.” This refers to a therapist serving dual roles in a patient’s life.

Such relationships are prohibited if they have the potential to:

impair the therapist’s objectivity
make the therapy less effective
cause harm to the patient

The American Counseling Association’s (ACA) Code of Ethics also cautions therapists against extending the relationship beyond professional limits.

It does allow for some exceptions, though. For instance, attending a client’s wedding or graduation or visiting a client’s ill relative in the hospital are acceptable behaviors.

In these instances, the therapist is encouraged to make sure their judgment isn‘t impaired and no harm is done to their client.

A word on transference and countertransference

Both transference and countertransference are natural in a therapeutic relationship. In many cases, they enrich the process.

Transference occurs when a client projects feelings or wishes onto their therapist.

The feelings may be romantic or platonic and are often related to unresolved experiences in the patient’s past.

In some cases, transference can be helpful. It may shed light on unconscious processes that can be explored within therapy.

Countertransference is when this happens in reverse, and the therapist projects feelings onto the patient.

This can happen in response to transference, but it can also arise independently.

Therapists are trained to deal with countertransference and commonly address it through consultation with other therapists.

Turning a therapeutic relationship into friendship can impact your healing process and how you navigate your therapy sessions.

In general, a therapist will ensure that the boundaries of your relationship are clear. But if you feel confused about the nature of your bond, or if you’re feeling an intense desire to form a friendship, it’s a good idea to bring it up during a session.

It’s likely that your therapist is open to you expressing any feelings you have toward them, either positive or negative, as these can help highlight areas to work on.

If you feel your therapist has done anything that blurs the lines into friendship, it may be a good idea to raise this with them. You can also refer to the APA or ACA guidelines if you’re unsure.

Going by the ACA and APA codes, the same rules apply to former patients as to current ones.

Social interactions between therapists and patients are only allowed if they’re potentially beneficial to the patients.

It may seem harmless to strike up a friendship with your therapist after your sessions have ended, but there are several reasons why this may not be a good idea.

For one, it’s possible that you may want to resume therapy at some point. Many people go to therapy on and off throughout their lives, and if you’ve had a positive experience with a therapist before, it’s only natural for them to be your first call.

If you’ve formed a friendship in the meantime, resuming the therapeutic relationship won’t be possible.

More broadly, even when you‘re no longer paying them for their time, your history can make a friendship very complicated. They already have very personal information on you, while you might not know much about them.

Also, if at some point the friendship doesn‘t work out, you might end up questioning the advice and guidelines they provided when they were your therapist. This could impact your mental and emotional health.

It’s natural and not uncommon to feel close to your therapist and want to be friends with them.

However, building a personal relationship with them goes against most mental health counseling codes of ethics. It may also impact your therapeutic process and lessen therapy’s benefits.

Can You Ever Be Friends With Your Former Therapist?

Mental Health

Related Condition Centers

Mental Health

Opinion: What if they seem REALLY great?

By Jessica A. Gold, M.D., M.S.

July 16, 2019

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Making friends as an adult can be weirdly difficult. So, when you really connect with someone, you might hope that bond blossoms into “I’m definitely texting you all my thoughts during Big Little Lies” friendship. But...what if that person you feel a connection with is your former therapist?

In my time as a psychiatrist on a university campus, I’ve had more than a few patients ask if we can keep in touch on a regular basis after we end our formal therapeutic relationship. I get why. My job is to be a good listener who respects and empathizes with the person sitting across from me. As patient and therapist, we work hard for months, sometimes years. We share deep conversations and maybe even a few laughs. I’m also usually close in age to my patients, as my population of choice is college and graduate students. (Basically, I’ll actually understand a lot of my patients’ pop culture references, Big Little Lies and otherwise.)

Even though I see why some of my patients want to be friends once our sessions are over, I wouldn’t actually let it happen, and neither would most of my peers. Here’s why the prospect of becoming friends with your former therapist is so much more nuanced than “I like you, you like me, let’s hang out. ”

There aren’t official guidelines about this for therapists.

You might be wondering if your former therapist would even be allowed to be your friend, given how ethically rigorous the mental health field is. The answer is technically yes, but it’s generally inadvisable. (To be fair, I’m not talking about sending an old therapist an update on how you’re doing every once in a while. Many former therapists very much welcome those updates, me included. I’m talking about being friends friends who really share the ups and downs of life.)

The professional organizations of psychology (the American Psychological Association) and psychiatry (the American Psychiatric Association) offer no explicit rules about friendships with former patients. Their directives about “multiple” or “dual” relationships, as they’re called, explore friendships with current patients (don’t do it), along with sexual relationships with current and former patients (again, don’t do it).

Friendships with former patients are a bit more of a gray area, so I made a few calls for clarification. Dual relationships “are not disallowed as long as the client is not being hurt, [however], most of the psychologists I know would choose not to do it,” David Palmiter, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Marywood University and fellow of the American Psychological Association, tells SELF.

Rebecca Brendel, M.D., J.D., chair of the American Psychiatric Association ethics committee and director of the Masters of Bioethics Program at Harvard Medical School, had a similar take. “While there is no hard and fast rule ... it is important as a psychiatrist to think about anything that could be exploitative of prior or ongoing relationships,” Dr. Brendel tells SELF. “It is not unethical for there to be more than one dimension to a relationship, but the primary focus must always be on the patient’s interest.”

OK, so it’s not expressly forbidden, so why can’t you just make it work? Well, there’s the huge and inconvenient fact that the former patient-therapist relationship is pretty incompatible with the dynamics of a good, healthy friendship.

Therapeutic relationships are grounded in power differentials.

I asked fellow mental health professionals to share their thoughts about being friends with former patients, and wow, did they ever. The consensus? Most who responded to my social media call-outs said they would never even consider it and instead follow the “once a patient, always a patient” rule. That might be disappointing, but hear us out.

“Therapy does have elements that are common to friendship, like positive regard and wanting the other person to do well,” Aditi Ahlawat, Ph.D., a staff psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, tells SELF. “However, the focus is still on the client and their well-being. There is an intrinsic power difference in a therapeutic relationship that is not an issue in organic friendship.”

In order for therapy to work, you need to be vulnerable enough that your therapist can explore what makes you tick, usually on a much deeper level than you would with a new friend. “We are privileged to the most intimate details of other humans’ lives,” Erin Fulchiero, M.D., a psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University, tells SELF. Meanwhile, your therapist is keeping all of their dark and twisty personal stuff to themselves, not expecting much more from you than payment, showing up on time, and being willing to work. You spill your soul to them, and they respond from a professional distance.

This is an inherently imbalanced power dynamic that, in the vast majority of cases, can’t easily translate into a balanced, healthy friendship—even after you’re done with therapy, even if you only saw them a few times, even if you were seeing them for something that seemed pretty minor, or whatever the case may be.

Also, it could be really hard for them to shake a feeling of duty to you that would go beyond a typical friend’s. “I would always feel obligated,” Anna Borisovskaya, M.D., a psychiatrist from the University of Washington, tells SELF. “I would have to respond to every worrisome status post on Facebook. I would have to worry if I didn’t call them often enough—they might take it as a rejection on a variety of levels.”

On the flip side, if your former therapist were a friend, your gratitude and admiration could make it hard to stand up to them, say no to a favor they ask, or weigh in honestly about their life.

Therapy is also meant to have a beginning, middle, and end.

That’s generally speaking, of course. But in most cases, the goal is to end therapy so the patient learns how to process loss in a healthy way. Many patients start treatment to deal with some type of loss in the first place. Ending the therapeutic relationship properly can allow them to practice coping with fresh loss with the new skills they’ve learned. Even if you’re not in therapy to deal with loss, having a practice run for handling it can always be helpful in the future.

Transference can blur your feelings about your therapist.

Transference happens when you unconsciously redirect feelings about someone else, typically someone from your childhood, to your therapist. These can be positive or negative feelings, but the positive ones might help explain why you’re itching to invite a former therapist to happy hour.

For example, you might really like the way your therapist interacts with you because, without you realizing it, she reminds you of your mother. Or maybe you get easily annoyed at the way your therapist asks questions because. ..again, she reminds you of your mother.

Therapists can also redirect their unconscious feelings about someone else onto their patients, which is called countertransference. In “positive” countertransference relationships, a therapist might really like you and have the desire to be overly supportive, share more about themselves than they should, or break boundaries to support you in some way. The thing is that, as professionals, we’re trained to identify these feelings for what they are and still maintain therapeutic boundaries. Without training, you can’t as easily figure out how much of you liking your therapist is actually about them.

This isn’t to say there’s no way you like a therapist or former therapist for who you perceive them to be. (Because, remember, they’re probably getting your most authentic self and you’re getting them at work.) But it can be harder for a patient to know the difference between genuinely liking a therapist and transference.

Also, you may eventually need your therapist again.

Your mental health will ebb and flow throughout your life, so you might benefit from therapy again at some point in the future. Between how difficult it can be to find a new therapist and how exhausting it can be to brief them on your whole life story, going back to an effective former therapist can be a great option when possible.

“Every week, I have at least one patient who wants to re-enter treatment with me,” Naureen Attiullah, M.D., clinical associate professor in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at The Alpert Medical School at Brown University, tells SELF. Becoming close friends with a former therapist would pretty quickly make them off-limits for future treatment.

As always, there are some exceptions.

In general, yes, it’s best to keep your friends and former therapists in separate categories. But sometimes it’s not always that easy.

My social media call-out opened my eyes to a few special cases of unavoidable dual relationships. They all hinge on running into each other a lot socially. Early on in your therapy sessions, it’s always smart for you or your therapist to bring up what you’ll do in these situations—do you ignore them, do you casually acknowledge them, or do you actually stop to talk to them? If you agree that you’re both comfortable engaging in conversation when you run into each other, you might start wanting to be friends in situations like these, especially after you stop your therapy sessions:

Can I be friends with my therapist after therapy?

Is it possible to be friends with a former psychotherapist? Although not common, friendships may develop when you have completed therapy. There are no official rules or ethical standards from either the American Psychological Association or the American Psychiatric Association regarding friendships with former clients.

Should therapists therefore comfort crying clients? Finally, by crying in sadness or despair, clients acknowledge that they cannot avoid the loss, and through crying actually come to accept the loss. Such crying in therapy allows clients to experience their grief with the therapist and silently invites the therapist to comfort the crying client and show compassion. nine0007

Do therapists really have favorite clients?

Most therapists have favorite clients, even if few practitioners admit it. A therapist, counselor, psychotherapist, or clinical psychologist may gravitate more toward a particular client or patient because they value that person in particular.

Do therapists have feelings for their clients? It is not uncommon for therapists to have feelings for clients and vice versa—call it transference, countertransference, or whatever. But we must remember that the therapist's job is to meet the therapeutic needs and goals of the client, not the personal or professional wants and needs of the therapist. nine0007

Then, can therapists be friends with their clients?

Friendship between client and therapist may be unethical, according to the codes of ethics of many organizations that manage therapists, including the American Psychological Association [APA]. By befriending a client, the therapist risks being disciplined by governing bodies or losing their license.

Contents

Do therapists ever cry with their clients? nine0006
Whether or not you have personally witnessed a therapist crying, it is quite common. In a 2013 study, nearly three-quarters of psychologists admitted to crying during a session. Some patients may enjoy showing compassion.

Do therapists cry for their clients?
Studies asking patients what they think of their therapists' tears are sparse. In a 2015 study in psychotherapy, researchers Ashley Tritt, MD, Jonathan Kelly, and Glenn Waller, PhD, surveyed 188 patients with eating disorders and found that about 57 percent experienced their therapists crying. nine0007

How do therapists feel when you cry?
From the point of view of the therapists we interviewed, therapists felt that their tears had an important positive effect on their clients: 82% believed that the therapist's crying led the client to feel that the therapist genuinely cared for him/her, 72% believe that the client will feel it. relationships were more sincere and 61%

Do therapists annoy clients?
Yes, I think so. The therapist's job is to use yourself as a tool and be aware of how you (your tool) react. If you feel angry, annoyed, or bored with a client, chances are other people will do the same. nine0007

Are you allowed to write to your therapist?
You can write to your GP at any time. They may not respond immediately, especially if you write late at night or early in the morning, but you can usually expect a response during the day. You can also request a "live text" session where you exchange texts with your therapist in real time.

Do therapists really care?
Yes. We care. If you feel like your therapist genuinely cares about you, that's real. It's too hard to fake. nine0007

How often are therapists attracted to their clients?
Of the 585 psychologists who responded, 87% (95% of men and 76% of women) reported sexual attraction to their clients at least occasionally.

Do therapists think of me between sessions?
Your therapist's relationship with you exists between sessions, even if you don't communicate with each other. She thinks about your conversations as well, continuing to reflect on key points as the week progresses. She may even reconsider an opinion she had or an intervention she made during a session. nine0007

Can I ask my therapist how they are?
Short answer to the question: Yes. If you have a question, you must ask. Your questions are valid and probably relevant to the therapeutic process. (Frankly irrelevant questions are, of course, a different story.)

How soon after therapy can you see a therapist?
(a) Psychologists do not have sexual relations with former clients/patients for at least two years after cessation or discontinuation of therapy. (b) Psychologists do not engage in sexual relations with former clients/patients, even after a two-year absence, except in the most unusual circumstances. nine0007

Do therapists google their clients?
Do therapists google their patients? Short answer: yes. A new study published Jan. 15 in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that 86% of therapists surveyed by study authors say they sometimes search for their patients online.

Do therapists have favorites?
Most therapists have favorite clients, even if few practitioners admit it. A therapist, counselor, psychotherapist, or clinical psychologist may gravitate more toward a particular client or patient because they value that person in particular. nine0007

Is it okay to cry in front of a therapist?
There is nothing wrong with crying during a session, so continue to express your feelings as you please. This is a safe place to be yourself. No matter how you express your sincere emotions as they arise, it is safe here.

Does the therapist think about his clients?
Short answer: yes. A new study published Jan. 15 in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that 86% of therapists surveyed by study authors say they sometimes search for their patients online. nine0007

What should you not tell your therapist?
With that said, we're highlighting some of the common phrases therapists commonly hear from their clients and why they can hinder your progress.

"I feel like I'm talking too much."

"I'm the worst.

"I'm sorry for my emotions."

"I always talk about myself."

- I can't believe I told you this!
nine0113 "Therapy won't help me. "

Can the therapist stop seeing you?
Therapists usually stop when the patient can no longer pay for services, when the therapist determines that the patient's problem is beyond the therapist's competence or license, when the therapist determines that the patient is not benefiting from the treatment, when the course of treatment is

Do therapists take notes after sessions?
Therapists may want to take a few notes for supervision about major interventions they have done or topics raised by the patient. These notes, however, are best done after the session before the next patient arrives, or later in the day.” nine0007

Is it normal to cry during every therapy session?
Short answer: no, not everyone cries in counseling. However, almost everyone involved in counseling explores very strong emotions, and most clients will experience tears at some point in their therapy journey.

Do you tip your therapist on vacation?
Therapists don't ask you for a gift, a tip, or even confirmation of the holiday season. Relationships don't require small talk or other niceties, and the holidays are no exception. nine0007

Special relationship: how the relations of a psychologist and client are built

21 184

To know the human
Love, but not actions

Relations with this is agreed with this. those of us who have ever gone through (or are going through) psychotherapy. Just starting it, we feel that it has become very difficult to do without this person. And this despite the fact that we strive to become freer, gain greater independence. The terms of meetings with the therapist are rigidly “formalized”, and at the same time, it is these relationships that give us a sense of security, allow us to become extremely sincere, share memories, and speak openly about desires and fears. (Provided that we have found a good specialist and feel we can trust him.)

On the part of the psychotherapist, the decision to work with the patient also comes on the basis of a subjective feeling. Including because between them there is a resonance, which allows a therapeutic relationship to begin. This emotional unconscious response was reflected by Sigmund Freud in terms of "transference" and "countertransference".

“Transference,” explains psychoanalyst Andrey Rossokhin, “is a process in which the patient, without realizing it, endows his analyst (psychotherapist) with the qualities of various people, relations with whom played a large role in his life, mainly in childhood. At the same time, he re-experiences the feelings, desires, fears that these people once aroused in him, and begins to experience them in relation to his analyst. And in response, he also experiences certain emotions that make up his countertransference. These mutual feelings make it possible to understand what the patient's painful experience is and to move forward in treatment. nine0007
The therapist may experience a variety of feelings, including tenderness and even attraction to the client or client, but the transition to action is excluded.

“Sexual relations “therapist and client” are impossible,” stresses the Gestalt therapist Nifont Dolgopolov. - This principle provides the client with complete security: he can freely express himself and any of his feelings without fear of abuse by the therapist. In Gestalt therapy, there is no prohibition on erotic feelings, the therapist can flirt in response to the client's flirting, but this happens only as part of the therapeutic process. nine0007
The one to whom we reveal our true "I"

Many of us are the children of working parents who did not have time to seriously engage in education. And for us, a psychologist or psychotherapist becomes an ideal interlocutor: finally, they are interested in us, they accept us. A psychotherapist who listens to us without giving judgments and advice is the one to whom we are ready to reveal our secrets, our true "I", our shadow sides, oddities and quirks, new facets of our being.

As it happened with 41-year-old Veronica: “During psychotherapy sessions, I am no longer the wife of such and such, not the daughter of such and such ... I am only me and exactly me, the way I am at this very moment. I am accepted in this capacity, and I fully experience my own uniqueness. nine0007
Every psychotherapist was (and still is) a client

Sometimes you might think that the difference between the therapist and us is like between heaven and earth. But this is not so: every psychotherapist must undergo psychotherapy himself. “This is our professional duty,” says Nifont Dolgopolov. “Not only during our studies, but also when we start practice, we go through personal therapy, because due to the nature of the profession, negative conditions accumulate, and they need to be worked out.” nine0007
It seems that the only psychotherapist left without professional help was Sigmund Freud. He tried to conduct his own analysis, but he did not quite succeed. For example, he overcame his fear of the railway, but became afraid of being late and arrived at the station a few hours before the train departed.

Money is part of the contract

Listening and being present without judgment is the essence of the psychotherapist's profession (and we can't find it anywhere else). This service is paid. In this case, money is an important tool of therapy. “Payment is a guarantee of the client’s independence,” says Nifont Dolgopolov, “it helps him free himself from a sense of duty towards the psychotherapist.” nine0007
It took a while for 42-year-old Alice to understand this: “I wanted to please my therapist and be the perfect client. So I only told funny stories. But gradually I realized that I pay for this time, which means that it belongs to me and I can dispose of it as I see fit. It was a grand realization: there was something in the world just for me! And then I allowed myself to tell the therapist everything ... And the therapy finally began.

Psychotherapist - "wrong friend"

Psychotherapy sets clear limits: regular sessions, special rituals for each type of therapy, limited time, known payment. And, since all the restrictions are already set, inside them there is a field for the emergence of real freedom. The psychotherapist knows how not to put his mood, his feelings, his personality in the foreground.

“If I spend time with a friend, we exchange information as equals,” continues Nifont Dolgopolov. He tells me about his life, and I tell him about mine. I tell him about my experiences, because I enjoy it, I want it. Not so with the client. I listen to him. I do not hide my feelings, but when I say something to him, I do it with a strictly defined therapeutic goal: to help him deal with his problems. Therefore, the psychotherapist is always the “wrong friend.” In relations with the client, he maintains a distance that is beneficial to the client. nine0007
The code of ethics of the profession forbids psychotherapists not only sexual relations, but even friendship with clients, because it can disrupt the therapeutic relationship and damage therapy.

Respect and not evaluate

“The feeling of trust in the therapist, the conviction that this particular person will help, of course, is subjective, but this is the first and, perhaps, the main step towards solving personal problems,” Andrey Rossokhin believes. The therapeutic connection works like an echo: what happens to the client in the session repeats the events of his life. Are you angry with your therapist for talking too much in sessions? Fight for your territory. Is it difficult for you to bear being separated from him? Together with him, learn to part with those you love. nine0007
Through the emergence of a special connection with the therapist, therapy allows us to rethink the usual ways in which we enter into relationships with other people. “And he teaches to respect the other without judging him and respecting himself at the same time,” adds Nifont Dolgopolov.

Walk a part of the way together

The personality of the therapist is of great importance for the outcome of therapy. “Real presence is needed; so that you have a living person in front of you, - Nifont Dolgopolov is sure. “You can consult a brilliant intellectual and get nothing but dry information. In addition, when you spend time with a person who has a real life experience, when you feel that this person suffered, loved, forgot himself for the sake of others, was able to collect himself after experienced trials, this communication can become a new source of energy for you.
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