The Difference Between Friends and Counselors
The Difference Between Friends and Counselors
I had a friend ask me the other day, “why would I pay all that money to see a counselor when I can talk to a friend over a beer at a bar for $7?”
Friends and meaningful connections and relationships are incredibly important. AND - I believe there’s something unique that the counselor provides that most friends aren’t able to.
Here are five differences between counselors and friends:
5 Differences Between Counselors and Friends
Counselors Can Hold Space
Most people, when we open up to them, will try to help us, but the message they will actually send us, is that it’s not okay to share with them what we’re feeling.
A lot of times when we tell our friends and family members what’s going on, their instinct is to try to get us to feel better immediately. They love us, and they’re trying to help in the best way they know how, and so totally understandably they want us to feel better right this second.
But - the way our untrained support network often responds to us when we start sharing our pain, is to basically tell us - don’t feel that anymore. Have you ever heard comments these before?:
“You know, it could be worse”
“At least X didn’t happen, that would be really bad”
“Look on the bright side…”
“One day you’ll look back at this and laugh”.
Our friends and family may be trying to help when they say these things to us, but, the subtle unspoken message behind these comments is, “stop feeling what you’re feeling right now, because it’s making me uncomfortable.”
Really well intentioned religious people have their own version of these sayings. There’s nothing evil or bad about anyone saying these things…they just don’t know any better and are speaking out of their own discomfort with our struggles. The result, however, is that it sends the message to a person in pain that they need to pretend to be better, and to pretend to be positive, even if they don’t feel that way. Take what you’re feeling and push it down because I don’t want you to feel that anymore.
Here are some classic Christian comments that mean well, but end up sending us the message that we need to keep our pain to ourselves:
“God never gives you more than you can handle”
“Everything happens for a reason”
“God is working all things for good”
Are these statements theologically true? Maybe, perhaps, who knows…
Maybe God doesn’t give us more than we can handle…maybe everything does happen for a reason…maybe God is working all things for good…maybe you believe that or maybe you don’t, but in the moment of our deepest pain, saying those things tells us that we can not express our doubts or pain in the presence of others.
The subtle message is, “everything is okay so please stop talking about what’s bothering you”.
Again - friends and family are not bad, they just don’t have the experience or training to learn how to sit with people who are in pain, and allow them to be in pain and also to feel their feelings in a supportive environment, which is what we all need more than anything.
Counselors are trained to be with people who are suffering, and help them feel those scary difficult feelings in helpful ways that lead to healing, instead of shutting them down inadvertently the way our other supports may.
The way towards healing is to first acknowledge the full depth and scope of what it is that we’re actually experiencing…not to prematurely cut our emotions off and push them down.
This is what is meant by counselors ‘holding space’...creating an environment where both the counselor and the client feel safe to explore difficult emotions and thoughts.
Counselors have training and expertise.
There’s a story about an award winning author at a dinner party who was talking to a neurosurgeon. The neurosurgeon said, without thinking, “you know, when I retire, I’d like to become a writer”. The writer, without missing a beat replied back, “I think when I retire, I’d like to take up neurosurgery”.
There’s the idea in some fields that expertise and training and skill is necessary to perform the role (like neurosurgery). However, sometimes in counseling (and I would say other female dominated professions in general…there’s a lot to unpack there), there’s the idea that the person does not have a particular skill or expertise, and basically anyone could do it (like writing, or counseling).
But, counselors have an immense amount of training and expertise that they bring with them in the counseling relationship, and that expertise is important:
Expertise allows you to see things others don’t.
Most of us can look up in the night sky and see stars. And most people can probably name a few constellations, too. I know I can go outside and name maybe one of the dippers, and on a good night maybe I can find another. Maybe I can even find what I think is Orion’s belt, but most of the time if I’m honest I’m not so sure if it’s Orion’s belt or just three random stars.
So, I can look up at the stars and see something.
A few years ago when the Disney movie Moana came out my daughter was just at the right age to become totally obsessed with it. We watched the movie literally every day, and then we would watch all the bonus material that came with the movie. In Moana, and this is true, there are people who can navigate across oceans without using a compass at all, just by using their hands and looking at the stars. It’s totally amazing and incredible, right? They look at the same stars and the night sky, and yet they can make so much more sense of what they’re taking in than I can. They can navigate across the oceans, while I’m struggling to find the little dipper.
Similarly, counselors have been trained through countless hours of practice and training to see and listen to a person talking, and pick up on all kinds of subtle nuanced things that most people just haven’t learned to pick up on.
When I was in seminary doing an internship as a hospital chaplain, they would call it learning how to “read the living human document”. And weeks, and months, and years, of paying incredible attention to another person, and to themselves, gives counselors an expertise to pick up on subtleties and reflect them back to clients in a way that enables their growth that friends and family may not possess.
A good counselor is like the wayfinders in Moana that can navigate across the oceans with only the night sky and their hands…and most of our friends are kind of like me looking up at the stars trying to find a constellation or two. It’s not that I can’t see anything when I look at the sky, but, a wayfinder can make sense of it all on a whole different level, the same way a counselor can when they’re in the presence of another person.
Counselors use “evidence-based treatments”
We’re all familiar with old wives tales…
These ideas or myths that are supposedly true, and most people believe them to be true, but, are actually not true. That’s what the popular show MythBusters is all about…it’s these kind of crazy scientists figuring out whether myths or old wives’ tales are actually true or not. They tested the myth that a frozen turkey accidentally dropped at thanksgiving could crush a foot or a small pet, whether a speeding snow-plow could flip over a parked car, whether you could escape from prison using a rope made of toilet paper or human hair. It was a fun show, and got to the bottom of some of the myths and old wives tales that most people believe, which may or may not be actually true.
Mental health, it turns out, has a lot of myths or old wives tales as well.
Most of what our friends offer us, may turn out to be old wives’ tales…things they’ve heard that has been passed down for generations, but, who knows if it’s actually true or helpful…it’s just what they’ve heard and so they’re sharing it.
Counselors however, are committed to using evidence-based treatments, which means that counselors use treatments that have scientifically been proven through research to benefit clients. Just like scientists and doctors try out medicines in medical trials with control groups and independent and dependent variables, the theories and treatments that counselors draw from use all of those same processes to make sure they really are effective.
A great example of this comes from John Gottman’s work on married couples. In the 1980s John Gottman created a “Love Lab”, where newlyweds would basically have a conversation while researchers videotaped them and analyzed them. They famously analyzed and coded over 60 different numbers per minute of data, and over 1,800 points of data for a 15 minute conversation. Over 3,000 couples have been in the “Love Lab”, and today, Gottman can watch a couple for an hour in the Love Lab and predict with 95% accuracy whether or not the couple will still be married in 15 years. That data was then used to create marriage therapy interventions, that then get tested against control groups to see whether or not they actually benefit couples.
Counselors, ideally, are doing much more than just sharing trite sayings or trendy cliches. They are integrating evidence-based treatments to actually help clients experience transformation, growth, and healing.
Counselors are Confidential
Counselors are required by their code of ethics to maintain confidentiality. Some family and friends are great at this, but some aren’t.
If you have very personal, sensitive, and vulnerable things you need to talk about, counseling is a safe space where you can process it knowing that it won’t leave that space.
I have people every week tell me incredibly personal details from their lives, and then share that they have never told anyone else that in their entire life. Part of that comes from my ability to “hold space” like I mentioned earlier, and part of that comes from the confidential nature of the relationship.
The counseling relationship can be all about you
Most relationships have a really beautiful reciprocity; a give and take to them, a dance between two people. Once we start actually keeping score and saying I did two things for you so you need to do two things for me, that’s a sign that the relationship is in trouble…but even for those relationships where no one is explicitly keeping score, there is the unspoken understanding that you’re both giving and taking and that the relationship isn’t completely one-sided.
And that’s great for most relationships.
One of the beautiful things about the counseling relationship is that it’s different in that it really is all about you. It’s a space that’s just for you and what you're going through.
Sometimes we need that space in our life, when we can just focus on ourselves without having to worry about whether we’re taking up too much of someone's time. This can be a really growing and freeing experience for all the people-pleasers out there who aren’t used to having a relationship with others without worrying about how the other person is feeling and affected by your situation.
Sometimes people will even come into counseling and wonder, ‘can my therapist handle this?’, or ‘will I make them really depressed if I share this with them?’. That’s normal and we can talk about that in the session, but, over time hopefully a client will learn that this really is their space to share anything and everything going on with them without having to worry at all about how the person listening to them is going to be affected by what they have to say.
The counseling relationship is all about you, and that’s a really special and unique relationship that people are really grateful to have in their lives.
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