Why Can’t I Be Friends with My Therapist?
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You love talking to your therapist every week. Not only do they help you feel better and work through your problems, they seem pretty cool.
You enjoy the casual banter at the beginning of your session as much as the meat and bones of the therapeutic work. They get your jokes and seem to like the same things you do. You click with them in a way you rarely click with anyone.
So, sometimes you daydream and wonder: Could we be friends? Could we get together outside of therapy and hang out? Maybe get a coffee sometime?
Maybe you’ve been trying to work up the nerve to ask them, or maybe you’ve already asked and gotten this disappointing response: “I’m sorry. I like you a lot, but I can’t do that. It’s against my professional code of ethics and it wouldn’t be good for either of us.”
What gives? It’s hard to understand your therapist’s reasoning about why it wouldn’t work to be friends. It’s a rejection you never expected, and it stings. It feels cold.
This can be one of the hardest things to understand as a therapy client, and one of the hardest things for therapists to explain. It flies in the face of common sense, social norms, and some pretty tender feelings. It can challenge your sense that your therapist truly cares about you.
But the reason it’s a bad idea to try to be friends with your therapist has nothing to do with your therapist’s feelings about you. The truth is, many therapists wish they could be friends with their clients, too. They just know it’s not in their clients’ best interest.
And that’s the most important thing to them—your best interest. They don’t want to hurt you, and they know they probably would if they said, “Yes.”
In this article, we’ll explain why therapists can’t be friends with clients, why it’s not personal, and why this weird therapy rule allows you to experience amazing things in your relationship with your therapist that you can’t experience anywhere else.
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Why Doesn't My Therapist Want to Be My Friend?
It’s not that your therapist doesn’t want to be your friend. It’s that they want to give you good therapy, and they can’t do that and be your friend at the same time.
If your therapist became your friend, it would take away the objectivity that allows them to help you the way they do. It would make it hard for them to see you through the clear lens of clinical insight instead of the distorting filter of personal need.
It would also take away the special intimacy of the therapy relationship. That’s the paradox of therapy: your therapist doesn’t get involved with you personally, and because of that, you can get close with them in a way you can’t with anyone else.
The boundaries in the therapeutic relationship create a sense of safety that allows you to be weirder, bolder, and more vulnerable with your therapist than you can be with your friends.
Therapists are trained to be exquisitely aware of their impact on you. This is one of the things that sets them apart and makes talking to them different from talking to a friend.
Friends make decisions about how they interact with you based on their own needs (and hopefully out of affection, care, and respect for you as well).
On the other hand, your therapist makes decisions about your relationship based on their best understanding of your needs. They set their emotional needs aside for the sake of the work they’re doing with you.
This is what makes therapy special. Something that wouldn’t work in any other relationship is exactly what makes the therapy relationship work.
Thanks to their training and the nature of their work, your therapist can make space for you in a way no one else can.
So, it’s not that your therapist doesn’t want to be your friend—it’s that they don’t want to mess up your therapy. They don’t want to break the therapeutic frame (the structured nature of their relationship with you that allows therapy to happen).
Your therapist wants to see you grow. They want to see you develop the confidence, hope, and resilience to live an authentic life and pursue the things you want—including deep friendships. While your therapist might like the idea of being friends with you, what they really want is for you to use the healing you get from therapy to build amazing friendships outside of therapy.
Your therapist’s ultimate goal is for you to not need them anymore. Sentimentally, they’d probably love to keep seeing you. But they know their job is to nudge you out of the nest, not keep you in it. They want to see you soar.
What's the Harm in Being Friends with My Therapist?
It can seem so overblown for your therapist to act like it would be such a big deal to chat over a cup of coffee at the café down the street.
But as weird as it sounds, it’s real. Therapists get the heebie-jeebies about the idea of hanging out with their clients outside of therapy for good reason.
There are many stories in the therapy world of how friendships or post-therapy social interactions that seemed totally innocuous at the time ultimately destroyed the therapeutic relationship. Then, whatever friendship there was fell apart as well. It was a total loss for both therapist and client.
One reason this happens is that it’s hard, if not impossible, for therapists to live up to the expectations of the therapeutic relationship outside of therapy.
DEEP DIVE
One of the reasons friendship is incompatible with the therapeutic relationship is that the expectations of the therapy relationship are different from the expectations of friendship.
It’s true that you expect many of the same things of a therapist that you expect from a friend: to be treated with kindness and respect, to be listened to and heard, and for them to be on the same team as you, rooting for you and helping you.
However, in many ways, you expect more from your therapist than you do from a friend. You might tolerate a friend cutting you off because they’re so excited about what they have to say, for example, but you’d never tolerate that from your therapist.
And while you might expect certain friends to flake out and cancel plans without notice, or to sometimes not get back to you for days, or even weeks, you’d never accept that from your therapist.
Nor should you! That’s the whole point of the therapy relationship. Your therapist clears the deck emotionally and mentally before every session to make themselves completely available to you.
Therapists train for years to learn how to leave their emotions—and needs—outside of the room. They do this so they can be there for you in a way no one else can.
Ironically, this is probably why you like the idea of being friends with them. It feels so good to talk to your therapist instead of your friends about certain topics because your therapist is not your friend—and doesn’t act like one.
It’s okay to expect more from your therapist, because the therapeutic relationship is built to hold those expectations! Friendship isn’t.
As soon as your therapist became friends with you, everything would change. Their needs would enter the room. The less glamorous aspects of their personality would show up. You might find them to be needy, messy, insensitive, or rude.
But even if your therapist was a perfectly charming, responsive, responsible friend, you most certainly wouldn’t feel as dearly and carefully known by them as you do in the therapy room.
Just like every other friend you’ve had, they’d sometimes forget to call, tune out when you’re talking to them, or be so preoccupied they wouldn’t notice or care about how you were feeling.
And it would hurt.
HEADS UP
The Risks of Pursuing a Friendship
Many clients who have persuaded a reluctant therapist to hang out after sessions—or who have been pursued by an unethical therapist outside of the therapy room—tell the same story: whatever they saw or experienced totally disillusioned them.
After they spent time together as friends, they never saw their therapist the same way or felt the same way about them again. Usually, what they saw not only tarnished what they got from therapy, it eventually made them walk away from the friendship, too.
Sometimes, what happened was so alarming or hurtful, it opened new wounds, or even caused new trauma. The most painful experiences caused some people to lose faith in therapy altogether, leaving them with nowhere to go to address the pain their now ex-therapist caused.
Being disillusioned is part of life. We all survive being disappointed by friends, lovers, and family members, by jobs and coworkers, by homes and cities and vacations, by movies and meals, by life in general, and by (and about) ourselves. Why is therapy any different?
In some ways, it’s not. You inevitably will be disappointed by your therapist at some point. In fact, working through those disappointments or ruptures is key to strengthening the therapy relationship and can lead to breakthroughs.
However, if the disillusionment is too extreme, it shatters the careful frame your therapist has put together for the project of your transformation. For therapy to work, you have to see and experience your therapist—and yourself—in a way only the therapeutic relationship allows.
When your therapist becomes just another person who’s let you down, it becomes hard to believe in what you saw and felt in the therapy room. You can start to feel like your therapist doesn’t actually care. And that can reopen the wounds that therapy had just started to heal.
It’s so unfortunate, because what you saw and felt was real. It’s just a rare kind of animal that can’t survive outside of the carefully climate-controlled terrarium of therapy. Your therapist does care; they do see you; they just can’t sustain that intensity of attention outside of the therapy room.
What's So Special About the Therapy Relationship?
The relationship you have with your therapist is like no other relationship you’ll ever have. The way therapists see it, swapping that for a friendship would be like taking the real thing back to the store and replacing it with the knock-off version—for the same price.
You’d be giving away the unique value and potential of therapy for something you could get from people who don’t meet the special requirements to be a therapist.
Not only would a therapist who started seeing you as a friend outside of therapy be giving you the Wish version of therapy, they’d be giving you the Wish version of friendship as well.
It’s not that friendships aren’t valuable. Real friendship is one of the most valuable things in the world. Gaining the confidence and self-worth you need to invite more authentic friendship and connection into your life is often one of the most important outcomes of therapy.
But the solution to building more close friendships isn’t befriending your therapist. Yes, it’s natural to want to be friends with someone you share so much with and feel so good around. It’s not that you’re wrong to want it, or that it’s a bad idea in theory—it’s that it doesn’t work in practice.
You get a cheaper version of each type of relationship when you try to mix them together. You slowly lose all the unique benefits of the therapy relationship for the sake of a friendship that isn’t likely to be one of your best—if it even works at all.
DEEP DIVE
What Makes the Therapy Relationship Unique?
There are things you can do when you’re with your therapist that you can’t do in most (if any) other relationships. For example, you can:
- Comment on what is and isn’t working in the relationship without your therapist getting defensive.
- Analyze the relationship as it’s unfolding without it feeling weird or breaking the flow of your emotional connection.
- Spend an entire hour talking about nothing but your own feelings and reactions without your therapist feeling left out or offended.
- Tell your therapist about your controversial opinions, taboo thoughts, or forbidden feelings without it leading to a bad reaction or a fight.
- Skip all the social rituals, take off all the masks you usually wear to fit into everyday social situations, and be your full, messy, authentic self without any negative social repercussions.
Your therapist is game for conversations that wouldn’t fly anywhere else. This is part of what makes therapy so special. It’s also understandably why you’d like to talk to them more often, and maybe in settings that aren’t as formal as the therapy room.
But it’s the very limitations of therapy that allow you to experience this special relationship in the first place. As soon as the frame of therapy was gone, the relationship would change. You would go right back into all the social norms and restrictions therapy let you leave behind.
There’s nowhere else you can learn as much about the inner workings of relationships—or yourself—as you can in therapy. No other relationship in your life will ever be as transparent as your relationship with your therapist.
Think of the therapeutic relationship as a relationship lab where you can track, test, and comment on the relationship in real time.
Normally, when you overreact, under-react, share too much or too little, give up too easily, shut down, self-sabotage, etc., you don’t realize it until much later—if at all. You’re in the scene, fully invested, unaware of what’s causing you to react in a certain way.
However, when you’re with your therapist, they can help you spot your reactive patterns even when you’re right in the middle of them. Then, they can help you understand where they came from.
When your therapist says or does something triggering, you can talk about it in an open, uncensored way that would lead to defensiveness and conflict in other relationships.
This allows you to gain insight into the feelings and reactions certain moments in relationships always bring out in you.
It’s like getting a behind-the-scenes look at your own life. In the privacy of a therapist’s office, the camera stops rolling. You can see how you’re framing things.
As you start to identify the false beliefs and self-sabotaging patterns that drive the drama in your life, you can rewrite your story so the scenes you’re in play out differently next time.
Why Is Talking to a Therapist Different from Talking to a Friend?
Not only do you talk about different things with a therapist than you do with your friends, you talk to them in a different way than you do with your friends.
Sure, it’s true—if you’re interested in personal growth, therapeutic topics can spill over into everyday conversations with like-minded friends. You might talk to friends about your mental health, the internal challenges you’re overcoming, or what you’ve been learning about who you really are.
Your friends will hopefully cheer you on when you talk about these topics, and maybe share some relatable stories and experiences from their own lives. They might help you gain some insight by sharing how they overcame their own obstacles. They might give you solid advice sometimes.
But most of the time, friends don’t know how—or even want—to take you deeper than venting or problem-solving sessions can go.
Good friends are eager to validate your feelings, laugh or cry with you, and rage against the jerks who treat you poorly, but they’re probably not going to be able to help you figure out why you keep going through this same heartache over and over again.
Fortunately, that’s where a therapist excels. Because a therapist doesn’t share much about their own life with you, and because their job isn’t to give you advice, they can help you in ways your friends can’t.
A good therapist learns how to put their personal opinions, knee-jerk reactions, and biases on a shelf during the time they’re talking with you. Even if they blurt out an occasional, “Ugh, how awful,” when you tell them about something awful that happened to you (they’re human, after all), they won’t spend any more time than that processing their own reaction. They’ll immediately get back on track. They know their reaction isn’t the point.
Your therapist is there to help you understand why you feel the way you do. They do that by giving you the opportunity to go deeper into your feelings than you could if you had to give their feelings equal airtime.
Therapists don’t divert the flow of your emotions.
They don’t give you subtle—or overt—signals to change the subject because they’re feeling uncomfortable.
They just lean into your feelings, whatever they are, and nudge you deeper into them, too.
This means talking to a therapist isn’t always as fun as talking to a friend. Where a friend might try to cheer you up, make you laugh, distract you, or entertain you, a therapist usually won’t. They know the only way out is through. Their job is to help you feel it so you can heal it.
A friend can temporarily lift you out of depression, while a therapist can help you heal the root causes of it. Both of these forms of support are helpful, even necessary. A friend can’t do what a therapist does—but the opposite is true, too.
A therapist and a friend are both extremely important people in your life who can help you in very different ways. You get so much less if you try to get either of them to do the other’s job. This is why it’s good to have both, and to not mix them up.
Why Can't My Therapist Be My Friend—Even After Therapy Is Over?
It can be hard to understand why you can’t transition to friendship with your therapist even after therapy is over.
They say it would disrupt your therapy to hang out together outside of sessions—fine. But it definitely shouldn’t be an issue if you’re not in therapy anymore, right?
Actually—unfortunately—it would be an issue.
There are many reasons that being friends with your therapist is a bad idea, even after therapy is over.
Many therapists have a saying: “Once a client, always a client.”
That means two things: one, they’ll always see and know you in a certain way. And the way they know you doesn’t translate well into everyday friendship.
Two, you might want to go back into therapy with them someday. And they want to be available to you as a therapist if and when you do.
Therapists are ethically bound not to take on clients who are friends or family members. If they do, it’s called having a dual relationship, and this can cause them to lose their license.
So, if you do somehow become friends, they’re not supposed to ever take you back as a client. Many therapists would see putting themselves in that position as an ethical lapse, personal failure, and disservice to you.
PRO TIP
Can I Keep in Touch with My Therapist?
Wanting to become friends with your therapist is different from wanting to keep in touch with them.
While most therapists would hesitate to meet a former client for coffee, most of them welcome an occasional email, letter, or message.
If you reach out to them, they might or might not send a quick note back, but they like knowing how you’re doing. Trust us, they wonder about you, and they care.
Therapists are usually open to limited post-therapy interactions as long as they can maintain the same boundaries they had with you while you were in therapy. Most therapists see it as a natural development for you to want to tell them how therapy has affected your life. However, if you:
- Start emailing them weekly,
- Demand or beg for a response,
- Text them in the middle of the night, or
- Tell them you’re in crisis and need help,
They’ll probably put up a boundary. Usually, they’ll either invite you to resume therapy with them or offer to refer you to a colleague or another form of care.
But if you’re just sending them an email every now and then, most therapists won’t push back or ask you not to do that. Instead, most will be happy to hear from you.
We all dream of finding someone who knows us fully, someone who not only understands us but who also helps us understand ourselves.
We hope to one day find a person who can take all our messiness and mysteriousness, all our internal contradictions and weird secrets, and embrace them instead of being frustrated or confused by them.
But even if you’ve had a pretty lucky life, and some pretty good relationships, you might not have ever experienced that kind of intimacy. Most of us hide at least a little of ourselves from others, even the people we trust the most. And most relationships, even the best ones, come with limitations that defy our fantasies of being perfectly known.
Therapists often come as close as anyone to making us feel deeply known and understood. So, it’s natural to want to get closer to them. It’s natural to want to hold on to them.
The important thing to understand is that the reason you feel that way about your therapist is because they’re your therapist. The reason therapy has so many weird boundaries and rules is so you can experience being known in the way you can only be known by a therapist.
This is why your therapist holds the therapeutic relationship sacred—and why they don’t want to risk it, ruin it, or trade it for anything else.
Conclusion
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be friends with your therapist. In fact, it’s perfectly normal and natural. It’s part of the therapeutic process to dream of being closer with them.
Unfortunately, though, you can’t be friends with your therapist. And it’s not because you’re wrong to want it, or because your therapist doesn’t like you. It’s because there’s a paradox that makes it impossible to experience the closeness of therapy outside of therapy.
Strangely, the boundaries that create distance and formality with your therapist allow you to connect in a way that couldn’t happen in a simple friendship. As soon as you became friends, therapy wouldn’t work anymore. The magic carriage would turn back into a pumpkin.
And even if it was possible to be both, trying to become friends with your therapist probably wouldn’t work. You might not have as much in common as you think you do, and they have flaws you don’t see in the therapy room.
The disappointment of your therapist becoming a not-so-good friend could ruin everything you worked so hard for. It could sow doubt, reopen old wounds, or diminish the confidence therapy helped you gain.
Even if you waited until therapy was over, being disappointed or betrayed by your former therapist could tarnish the work you did or make it impossible to ever go back to them again as a client.
Friendship is immensely valuable, and good therapy will help you make room for more of it in your life. But there’s nothing in the world like a good relationship with a therapist.
When done right, therapy gives you something nothing else can—something no one can ever take away from you. It can help you heal pain, loss, and trauma. It can expand your sense of what’s possible. It can give you back your joy. It can change your whole relationship with yourself.
That’s what your therapist wants for you. They want their relationship with you to inspire you to have better relationships with everyone else, including yourself—and including your friends.
That’s why they don’t want to be your friend. It’s not that they don’t like you or that they wouldn’t find you interesting to talk to outside the therapy room.
It’s that “just” being your therapist is actually a whole lot. It’s a rare and special relationship that nothing else can imitate or replace—and that a good therapist will do everything they can to preserve.