My Clients Are Not My Friends. Our Relationship Is Something Else Entirely.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent nearly two decades as an educator and mentor to hundreds of students one-on-one. I have sat in lessons with three-year-olds and ninety-year-olds and just about every age in between. My students came from radically different backgrounds, demographics, cultures, family systems, personalities, and life experiences. Some stayed with me briefly, and some stayed with me for more than a decade.

Over the course of all of those relationships, I learned something about human connection.

When I think about those students now, I am admittedly not that interested in whether they remember me as the person who taught them chords or how to access their head voice. Sure, I’m delighted if they still have a passion for music and have more skills there.

But even more so, I care about whether they remember me as somebody who was safe, nurturing, encouraging, and celebratory of them. I care about whether they experienced me as a human who saw them and genuinely believed in them. I care deeply that there was someone in their life who was genuinely delighted in who they were.

Because at the end of the day, I think that is ultimately what helps people learn and integrate. I think relational safety and a sense of being wholly accepted is what helps people take risks and tolerate failure long enough to become competent at something. I strongly believe that safe, embracing connection allows change and integration to happen (and for efficacy’s sake, happen faster too!)

This philosophy has followed me directly into the therapy room.

As a relational, trauma-focused therapist, I care much more about whether clients feel seen and believed more than whether they learn a bunch of skills.

I am very clear that I am not friends with my clients. Therapy is not friendship, and there are important reasons for that distinction.

Friendship involves a kind of reciprocity that therapy does not. It is not my client’s job to take care of me, center my pain or lived experience, or offer reciprocity. They do not need to ask questions about my life so that our conversations feel balanced or worry that they have spent the entire hour talking about themselves. They don’t need to remember my birthday, emotionally support me when I’m struggling, make room for my problems, or wonder whether they have adequately reciprocated the amount of care that I have offered them.

The spotlight stays brilliantly and importantly on them! 

And yet I also see myself as a surrogate attachment figure, particularly in the framework of attachment-oriented trauma therapy. I am aiming to create a relationship built on consistency, safety, containment, attunement, and room for the client to bring increasingly vulnerable parts of themselves into relationship with another person.

I have found that this specific type of attachment-oriented work benefits from connection, and offering some real pieces of my own humanity and vulnerability fans risk-taking, helps to dismantle power dynamics, and strengthens trust. For example, I do use self disclosure with my clients to support safety and these goals.

However, my humanity will never be the center of the therapy. My clients and their lives remain at the center. But I will be a real human being in the room with them while we do that work. There is nuance here, and we know that humans (even fellow therapists) can struggle to sit with complexity and nuance at times. 

I actually think part of the problem is that we don’t have particularly good language for what the therapeutic relationship is, and partly because there are so many models of therapy and theories of change that trickle up into how the therapist is “supposed” to arrive to sessions.

Therapy isn’t friendship or family. It isn’t mentorship (although sometimes elements of mentorship may find their way into it). And for the sake of utmost clarity, it should never be a romantic or erotic relationship.

It is a professional dynamic, but even there, the phrase “professional relationship” can sometimes sound oddly sterile and incomplete for a relationship that can be profoundly meaningful, deep and connective over many years.

Therapy is its own strange and beautiful category of human relationship.

I may know some of the most intimate things that have ever happened to somebody while knowing surprisingly little about other parts of their life. I may sit with someone through grief, divorce, parenthood, estrangement, falling in love, heartbreak, trauma processing, career changes, risks, and accomplishments, all while knowing exactly what happens inside their nervous systems… while having absolutely no idea what they order at a coffee shop or how their day to day looks.

There is something wonderfully odd about that.

And because I see the therapeutic relationship itself as part of the work, I think quite a bit about how I create that dynamic too.

I will say, there are some boundaries in my practice that are quite firm. I aim to start my sessions on time and end them on time. I show up when I say I am going to show up. My clients know when I am working and when I am not. I try very hard to put my phone away on the weekends, and when I tell clients that I am generally unavailable Friday through Sunday, they know that I will rarely, if ever, be checking my work phone and texting with them during that time.

And I never share anything about my own emotional landscape or humanity that hasn’t been processed in my own work outside of therapy– again, their job is never to care for me; as a therapist my role is to be a securely functioning, regulated nervous system for them at all times.

And I think this consistency and predictability matters, particularly when we are doing attachment work or trauma therapy. I want clients to experience me as somebody whose behavior is consistent; I don’t want them wondering which version of me they are going to get from week to week.

But consistency, to me, is not the same thing as rigidity. I do send clients relevant mental health videos or social media posts between sessions when I come across something that reminds me of the work we’re doing or something that would make them chuckle. I think about my clients as I move through my week. Sometimes a client tells me about their favorite Trader Joe’s snack and then I am wandering through Trader Joe’s a few days later and see it, and if it feels appropriate, I might buy some and add it to my snack drawer I keep for clients. When clients tell me about concerts they loved, movies that meant something to them, television shows they’re obsessed with, books I absolutely have to read, I add it to a growing list of recommendations that have come from clients, and when I have the time, I watch and read some of those things because I think it gives me another little window into who they are.

I like knowing what moves my clients and makes them laugh. I like knowing what music they listen to when they’re devastated or what television show they watch when they need comfort. I think those things create dimensionality and richness in the attachment frame. Because the reality is that I get about fifty minutes a week with most of my clients, and fifty minutes goes by very, very quickly. I do not know the whole of who they are and I never will, but sometimes these small points of connection allow them to feel more fully embraced and seen.

I also try to remember birthdays and momentous occasions. Sometimes I’ll send a happy birthday text, or I’ll check in when I know someone’s birthday is particularly difficult. I would show up to a client’s wedding or graduation (with proper discussion around confidentiality, roles, and boundaries). I try to remember small details about people’s lives in a way that, yes, perhaps a friend might also remember.

Part of the reason I do that is because many of my clients have never been gifted relational experiences that have allowed their brains to develop needed neural pathways around receiving care, nurturing, emotional resonance. For some of my clients I am genuinely the first human in their lives who has consistently shown up and gone the extra mile for them. This helps their brain experientially learn and integrate, and my hope is that it makes it more possible for them to then get that elsewhere: in their relationships, friendships, connections beyond the room. Maybe one day, the felt experiences with me help them build out what’s needed so they no longer need the surrogate care I offer.

Not every therapist conceptualizes their role the way I do.

Some therapists see themselves primarily as teachers. You come in and together you’re going to learn some skills, complete worksheets, understand your cognitive distortions, practice some interventions, and then go back out into your life and experiment with what you’ve learned.

Other therapists work from traditions in which the therapist intentionally offers very little of themselves. They may understand neutrality as clinically meaningful, allowing the client’s projections, expectations, and relational patterns to emerge within the therapeutic relationship without introducing very much information about who the therapist actually is.

There are clinicians who would probably feel uncomfortable practicing the way I practice, and that discomfort may even cause them to project their own biases around what is and isn’t effective. I have seen many a psychoanalytic therapist critique attachment work, EMDR, and more modern, trauma-informed and liberationist therapy approaches. And that’s totally okay.

Those approaches don’t speak particularly well to my own brain (a brain that is neurodivergent/ AuDHD). They don’t resonate with my personality, my decades of lived experience, or what I have come to believe about humanity and human connection after developing thousands of relationships across my life.

But that doesn’t automatically make those therapists wrong, either. Therapists are different people with different cultural backgrounds, lived experiences, personalities, nervous systems, training, modalities, neurodivergence, attachment histories, and yes, countertransference. All of those things influence the way we understand closeness and distance, privacy and disclosure, warmth and neutrality.

I don’t believe there is a binary way of practicing therapy, just like I don’t really believe there is a binary way of approaching… well, pretty much of anything!

There are many ways to create safety.

This is where I think social media ‘hot takes’ about therapy can become particularly grating and honestly, damaging to the field.

There are absolutely ethical boundaries in psychotherapy. The power differential between therapist and client is real, and it matters. Therapists have access to vulnerable information, enormous emotional influence, and a professional responsibility not to exploit the people who come to us for help. There are boundaries I take extremely seriously, and there are things I simply will not do with clients.

But I also think therapists sometimes confuse the statement, “I would never do that with a client,” with the statement, “No ethical therapist would ever do that with a client.” Those are not necessarily the same thing.

When I was a teacher, I had students who worked with me for ten years or more, and when they graduated, sometimes I would take them to Disneyland. Sadly, as much as I would absolutely love to hop on Pirates of the Caribbean with some of my clients, that is not something I am going to offer them. That boundary makes sense to me because therapy is a fundamentally different relational container than the one I had with my students. The same behavior can mean something completely different depending on the relationship in which it occurs.

Similarly, I am not going to have clients come to my home for therapy. If I were to attend a client’s wedding, I would not engage in alcohol and would likely only attend the ceremony. While I do have a public presence online and I write blogs like this one, I am thoughtful about what I share there and what I don’t. Every post has reflection behind it, and while I might share some of my own #therapistoffduty neurodivergent hyperfixations (like my love of crows) on Instagram, I don’t show my family, friends, or partners. All of it has thought and intentionality behind it.

That is my formula and another therapist’s formula may look different.

Something else that feels important to me is that consistency does not necessarily mean doing exactly the same thing with every client.

I have clients who have explicitly asked me not to reach out on their birthdays. I remember that, and I mark it down. There are clients who prefer knowing less about me. There are clients for whom certain kinds of therapist disclosure feel distracting, uncomfortable, or simply unnecessary. I work to respect that.

There are other clients for whom knowing that I am a real person is enormously regulating. They may find small disclosures helpful, or experience a birthday message as deeply meaningful, or appreciate when I send them something between sessions because it communicates: “I remembered what we were talking about. I was thinking about you.”

The question I am asking isn’t simply, “What is my policy?” I am also asking, “Who is this person? What feels safe to them? What is therapeutically useful here? What does this particular nervous system experience as connection, and what does it experience as intrusion?”

That adaptability matters to me, because trauma therapy and attachment-oriented therapy ultimately involve creating enough relational safety for someone to bring forward experiences that have often been hidden, defended against, dissociated from, intellectualized, minimized, or carried alone for a very long time. There simply isn’t one interpersonal formula that is going to create that kind of safety for every human being.

I think sometimes we talk about therapeutic boundaries as though their purpose is to remove intimacy from therapy. I see them almost exactly the opposite way: the boundary is what allows the intimacy of therapy to exist safely.

My clients don’t have to take care of me because I maintain the boundary. They don’t have to become my friends because I maintain the boundary. They don’t have to manage whether I feel appreciated enough, whether our relationship is reciprocal enough, whether they asked enough questions about me this week, or whether I am getting enough out of knowing them.

That leaves an extraordinary amount of room for them.

Within that room, though, I want there to be humanity. I want there to be humor when humor shows up. I want there to be live emotion flowing between us in the room and to be able to celebrate people when something beautiful happens in their lives. I want clients to know when I am moved by them and that I work to remember the small things. 

I don’t think any of that makes us “friends” but rather, two human beings participating in a very particular kind of relationship, one in which I have agreed to hold a specific role, to maintain particular boundaries, and to continually orient my care toward the person who has entrusted me with some of the most vulnerable parts of their life.

And I think clients are allowed to have preferences about what that relationship feels like as well. You may want a therapist who shares very little about themselves and feel safest with someone whose boundaries are extremely structured and whose personal life remains almost completely outside the room. You may want a therapist who is warmer and more expressive, who laughs loudly with you, who remembers your birthday, who tells you when something you’ve said has moved them.

Those differences matter and are part of therapeutic fit.

I don’t believe that every therapist should practice the way I do, and I certainly don’t believe that I am the right therapist for every person. What I do believe is that there is more than one way to create safety within a boundaried therapeutic container.

Boundaries, however they look, allow the intimacy of therapy to exist safely. Boundaries protect the relationship.

All this to say, my clients are not my friends, but that does not make the relationship less real, less human, or less meaningful. If anything, I think therapy gives us access to one of the stranger and more beautiful forms of human connection: a relationship that is deeply caring without requiring reciprocity, intimate without belonging to each other, boundaried without being sterile, and real without needing to become anything other than exactly what it is.