Have you ever had a conversation with a friend, one where you share some personal details, and after a while you feel that friend is, well, not quite saying what you expected they would?
You talk about whatever is on your mind, but then when it’s the turn of your friend to share what’s on theirs, they don’t. They defer, perhaps, e.g., “We’ll talk about this next time.” Or they look at their watch, or their phone, and say, “Oh, gee, I have to go, something just came up”. “I have to complete Project X.” (There are lots of other ways they can end the conversation, too.)
Afterwards, you reflect on the conversation, and something seems off. You’ve shared all sorts of experiences and opinions, but they’ve stayed behind a kind of wall. They’ve turned the chat into a one-way monologue.
Now we’ve all read warnings where the relationship goes the other way: perhaps someone reads too much into a professional relationship, and they begin to see the therapist as a friend. Then there are therapists who step over the boundaries of their role and make friends of their clients or patients.
No, I’m talking about something that happens outside of a professional relationship. This is where friends behave like therapists, keeping their vulnerability hidden, locked away.
Even though they are not professionals, it’s as if they want to wear that label in an ordinary friendship.
Maybe it’s because society generally these days is very familiar with the tools and terms of psychology. We throw around terms like “narcissist” easily. We complete online questionnaires to find out what kind of personality type we have. We dabble in so-called armchair psychology. So perhaps it’s easy to behave in a friendship where we try to fix our friends rather than simply ‘be’ with them. We prefer control rather than the ambiguities of letting a friendship ebb and flow. Perhaps we don’t want our friend to know who we really are.
If this happens, our friend needs to ask, “What is this friendship all about?” “How did it all become about me?” “Why do my actions need analysis, and yours don’t?”
Experiencing this one-way communication is wildly frustrating if you want to build or maintain a friendship, though. While it feels satisfying to have someone listen to you, the fact that they want to end the conversation on a dime, so to speak, as if they were inviting the next person into their office, makes me question what it is they are looking for in the friendship. Do they meet their friend because they feel guilty, because they seem to be a needy person? Do they meet because they’d like to be a friend, but they can’t let down barriers they’ve constructed around themselves?
I know one thing — we need friends that feel safe enough so that both parties can share the ups and downs of life. When someone, however, persists in one-sided conversations where they stay safe behind a self-imposed wall, it not only feels weird, we’re missing what a healthy friendship can provide.
I think we’d all agree: if we want therapy, we’ll seek it in a formal setting.
