I’ve been a psychotherapist for closing on 20 years and while I can say I’ve seen a lot I certainly have not seen it all. I saw something today that threw me off enough to break my silence and write this post.

It was a subreddit I follow and the post was from a young woman whose therapist had unexpectedly died. Termination, as it is called when therapy ends, is hard on the patient under the best of circumstances but when it is unexpected and final it can be very difficult for the patient to deal with. But that isn’t what threw me off.

What threw me off was that she wrote she had been seeing her therapist for eight years and they were beginning to transition the relationship from a professional one to a friendship. This represents several ethical violations on the therapist’s part which is bad, but what bothers me is how much damage may have been done to the patient.

So for those who would seek help from my kind (psychotherapists) a warning: if your therapist is your friend is someone you think of as a friend, you need a new therapist.

A therapist needs to be able to challenge you and at times help you to dredge up painful sometimes traumatic issues from your past so they can be processed.

A friend helps you feel better by distracting you from your emotional pain.

A psychotherapist, a good one at least, cannot be your friend. An ally, yes, friendly, yes, but not a friend.