Counseling Among Friends

By Dara Chadwick

March 2025

Good friendships enrich our lives, offering companionship, support and shared history. But when conflict, distance or estrangement develops, friendships may fracture or simply fizzle out. “Best friends forever”? It’s not as simple as that.

Enter friendship counseling, in which platonic friends seek counseling together to save or strengthen their relationship. Though friendship counseling has received some media attention, it remains an emerging practice area for counselors.

“It’s a newer trend, and I absolutely love it,” says Michele Kerulis, EdD, LCPC, clinical associate professor at the Family Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Why Friendships Matter

Strong friendships contribute to a person’s well-being, Kerulis says. “We are social beings, and that human connection with people who just get us is extremely important. A good friend provides the ability to go to a safe place, one where you can be yourself and know that someone is going to be there to support you whether they agree with you or not.”

Yet friendships, and the nature of friendship itself, evolve. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, MD, released “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.” In it, Murthy noted that nearly half of Americans reported having three or fewer close friends in 2021.

Monica P. Band, EdD, LPC, who runs Mindful Healing Counseling Services LLC in Washington, D.C., makes a distinction between online friends and substantive friendships. “If you peel back the layers of the onion, many people will say they’re connected to a lot of people but may not feel there are people in their lives that really understand them,” she says.

“Cancel culture” also plays a role in modern friendships: “I don’t like what you’re saying or thinking so I’m just going to cut you off,” says Victoria Kress, PhD, LPCC-S, ACA Fellow and distinguished professor of counseling at Youngstown State University in Ohio. “But we get better at navigating conflict and challenges by working through them. I want to work with people who care enough about their relationships to try to make them better. Coming to counseling is a vulnerable experience.”

Who Seeks Friendship Counseling

Counselors who’ve worked with friends say younger platonic pairs are more likely to seek help with their relationship. “The rise of self-help in social media, and in media generally, has given rise to this emphasis on ‘we need to talk it out, we need to make sense of it’ in a way that I don’t always see emphasized in older generations,” says Band, adding she has clients ranging from Gen Z to people in their mid-60s. “It’s not that older generations don’t talk about friendship issues, but I think there’s more acceptance and expectation that friends come and go.”

Kerulis says people in their 20s have had more exposure to the idea of counseling and tend to ask for ways to resolve conflicts they’ve had with friends. “Our friends become our chosen family,” she says. “Given that, there are times when you’ll have a rupture in the relationship.”

Conflicts vary and often depend on the interpersonal dynamic between two individuals. Counselors who work with friends can expect to encounter issues related to specific incidents and to small slights that may build over time. For example, one friend may be late all the time, while the other is always punctual. Building annoyance may lead to a rupture in the relationship.

Changes in life circumstances for one friend, such as a new romantic partner, marriage or new baby, may also lead to conflict. Band says she has worked with friends in mediating issues that arise in shared living situations and in financial entanglements, where one friend owes the other money. Friendship break-ups are another reason friends may seek counseling.

“Some friendships have their season and then it’s time to say goodbye,” Kerulis says. “Maybe it’s just one party who feels that way, but you need two people to engage in a friendship. As a counselor, it’s your responsibility to be honest about what you’re seeing in session and bring these dynamics to your clients’ awareness.”

Good friendships require honesty and a commitment to working things out. “Friends often wonder ‘Do I just walk away from this friendship or try to fix it?’” Kerulis says. “They may think ‘This person is not a family member, but I love them like family.’ These situations become confusing because we don’t have a road map for how to navigate these problems.”

Yet working through friendship issues offers opportunities for personal growth, according to Kress. “Many people might say they’ve grown more through their friendships than their romantic relationships,” she says. “We can’t ask our romantic relationships to be our only source of personal growth. People who have a history of struggling in romantic relationships may not hesitate to seek help from a counselor. Friendships are just as important.”

What to Know About Counseling Friends

Clients often experience grief when friendships end or change. “I work with a lot of folks in their 30s and 40s who feel a sense of loss when they move to a different place or change jobs and don’t have access to friends or can’t talk about the same things anymore,” Band says. “You can see how it causes a sense of group identity loss.”

There’s vulnerability in seeking counseling together as friends, Kerulis says. “Clients have to trust their friend to take that tenderly, hear what they’re saying and what’s in their heart,” she says.

Counselors must also recognize the changing nature of friendships in a world of social media and digital presence, according to Band. What someone is doing — or not doing — on social media to move toward shared friendship goals is important to address. These digital behaviors can include blocking on social media, sending messages, adding a person (or not adding them), leaving a message unread and using periods instead of exclamation points.

Social media can also exacerbate feelings of anger and sadness when friendships end or change. “Friends today don’t get a clean break,” she says. “Social media has become an archive of old relationships you can’t get away from. For young people, friendships are engraved in a sort of stone online. They may have a hard time differentiating themselves from some of those avatars.”

Still, friends who seek counseling often find opportunities to grow individually and in their friendship. “All human pain is created in relationships and is healed in relationships,” Kress says. “Central to group and systems counseling is this idea that we heal and grow in connection.” 

Kress adds that a systems approach is critical to working with friends. “That’s where the growth is,” she says. “Systems thinking when counseling friends helps them understand their relationship patterns and dynamics. They’ll learn where their pain points are, how they want to grow and what they want growth to look like. When you’re working with friends, thinking about these system dynamics and helping the clients understand these dynamics contributes to growth in a way that individual counseling might not.”

Currently, there isn’t a best practice protocol on how to work with friends, but counselors can take some notes from couples therapy, according to Band. She typically meets with friends together and has each person share their perspective on why they’re seeking counseling.

“You want to understand what we’re hoping to resolve together with the time we have,” she says. “Shared goals vary depending on the context.”

Kerulis says she works to determine what each individual wants and what the friends hope to resolve by the end of counseling. “Through that conversation, we work out shared goals.”

In some settings, counselors might want to meet with friends individually to assess for risk considerations. “You want to understand the context and assess for safety issues before jumping into friendship [therapy],” Kress says. “You should always assess for any kind of risk, such as suicide or homicide, and identify whether there is an unsafe or abuse dynamic occurring in the friendship.”

Payment Models and Practical Matters

There are several important considerations when providing friendship counseling in your practice. Counselors must know privacy laws in their state, which may be tied to how sessions are paid for. Different states have different rules around privacy. “The person whose third-party provider pays for services is considered to be the client; thus it is that person’s medical record,” Kress says. “The other party may be considered a guest, and both parties should understand, as a part of informed consent, any unique considerations related to the medical record.”

Typically, third-party payers do not cover counseling sessions among friends. “Two people coming in solely for the purpose of resolving an issue that is not a mental health-related issue is not covered by insurance,” Kerulis says. “That’s something people would pay out of pocket for.” She recommends letting clients know your hourly counseling rate. Individuals may then choose to split that rate.

Informed consent is foundational in working with friends, Kress says. This includes describing what a professional counseling relationship entails, how the counselor will be paid, what is confidential and what isn’t. “We discuss payment, privacy and confidentiality and how it will be handled upfront,” Kress says.

Counselors often have specific ways of working with couples or families, and those may mimic how they work with friends, Kerulis says. “I might say, ‘As a counselor, I’m not keeping secrets between the two of you. So if you tell me something in private, that’s fair game for our discussions,’” she says. “We have serious conversations about confidentiality and what it looks like in this situation. Everybody must agree.”

Competency is another consideration for counselors who want to see friends together. While there’s currently no specific certification for counseling platonic friends, knowledge of working with groups, families or couples applies to friendships.

Kerulis advises counselors to have a colleague or supervisor experienced in working with relationships guide you if this is the first time you’re engaging in working with relationships. But if you stay within the bounds of ethical considerations, setting goals and the specific steps you take to achieve those goals are between you and your clients, she says.

Band reminds counselors that friendship is foundational to romantic relationships. If you’ve counseled couples, counseling platonic friends can be a natural leap.

“My perspective is that a counselor doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel with a whole bunch of new tools specifically for friends,” Band says. “Fill in the gaps with additional supervision or education if you feel like there are certain issues you want to work on with friends.”

Marketing friendship counseling services is important to growing your practice in this area. Kress recommends adding the service to your practice website to help clients understand how it can be helpful. She also maximizes opportunities to talk about friendship counseling in the media and on social media.

“People are curious and excited about friendship counseling,” Kress says. “I think most counselors are sitting on tons of opportunity to do this, but they’re shying away from it because they don’t know it’s a thing.”