When Friendship Needs Therapy: Couples Skills for Every Close Relationship
Updated: 2 days ago
Most people think of couples therapy as something you do with a romantic partner. But some of the most painful and complicated relationships in our lives aren’t romantic at all. They’re friendships that have quietly soured. Business partnerships under strain. Creative collaborations where the dynamic has shifted and nobody knows how to talk about it.
A relationship is a relationship is a relationship. The same patterns that show up between romantic partners, the power imbalances, the unspoken resentments, the slow drift toward disconnection, show up in every close relationship. And the same tools that help couples find their way through can work just as well here.
The friendship that stopped working
A client came to me struggling with a close friendship that had started to feel increasingly one-sided. Her friend lacked curiosity about her life, rarely asked how she was doing, and when she did, didn’t really listen to the answer. Plans were always on the friend’s terms. Support, when my client needed it, wasn’t there.
What emerged in our work together was something she hadn’t seen coming. The dynamic she was describing, the one where she made herself smaller, waited to be noticed, and felt vaguely anxious in the other person’s presence, was familiar. She had grown up with a mother who was unable to offer real empathy or curiosity. She had unconsciously recreated that relationship in her adult friendship, drawn to someone who felt familiar in ways she couldn’t initially name.
Once she understood the pattern, she had a choice. She could walk away, or she could try to address it directly. She chose to try. I referred both of them to work with a therapist together, the same way a couple might, to look honestly at the dynamic and decide what they both wanted from the friendship going forward. It didn’t save the friendship. But it gave my client clarity, and it gave both of them a way to end it with more understanding and less damage than it might otherwise have caused.
That kind of process is more available than most people realize. You don’t have to be in a romantic relationship to benefit from this kind of work. This is what therapy for friendships can make possible, clarity about the dynamic, and a way through it that doesn’t have to end in silence or damage.
The business partner who became a stranger
Los Angeles is full of creative partnerships. Writing teams, producing partners, directors and their DPs, collaborative artists who have been making work together for years. These relationships can be as intimate and as complicated as any marriage. You share a vision, a creative identity, sometimes a livelihood. And when something goes wrong there’s often no framework for addressing it.
What I see is that business partners and creative collaborators tend to let things accumulate. A decision that felt wrong. A credit dispute that never got resolved. A sense that the balance of work or recognition has shifted. Because there’s no established language for “this isn’t working” that doesn’t sound like a firing or a breakup, people say nothing. The resentment builds. The collaboration suffers. Sometimes it ends badly when it didn’t have to.
What couples therapy actually offers
The Gottman Method is built around a few core ideas. That conflict is normal and not the problem. That what damages relationships is how conflict gets handled, or doesn’t. That underneath most arguments is an unmet need that hasn’t been clearly expressed. That the foundation of any lasting relationship is friendship, genuine curiosity about the other person, and the ability to repair after things go wrong.
None of that is specific to romantic relationships. All of it applies to a friendship, a business partnership, a creative collaboration. The tools are the same. The work is the same. What’s different is that we rarely think to apply them outside of the romantic context.
When to pay attention
In any close relationship, romantic or not, there are signs worth noticing. You feel anxious before spending time with this person. You find yourself editing what you say around them. Small things irritate you in ways that feel disproportionate. You’ve stopped bringing up the thing that’s bothering you because it never goes anywhere. You’re not sure the relationship is still equal.
These aren’t signs that the relationship is over. They’re signs that something needs to be addressed. And addressing it, with the right support, is often more possible than it feels.
The question worth asking
Midlife is a natural time to re-evaluate close relationships. Not with cynicism but with honesty. Some friendships and partnerships have run their course and holding onto them costs more than letting go. Others have real roots and real value and are worth the work of getting them back on solid ground.
The question isn’t whether the relationship is worth saving. The question is whether you’ve ever actually tried to address what’s wrong, with clarity, with curiosity, and with the same care you’d bring to a relationship you’d never let yourself lose.
If you’re in a close relationship that isn’t working and you’re not sure what to do about it, that’s exactly the kind of thing I work with. Reach out at tracysondern.com for a free consultation.
Written by Tracy Sondern, LMFT Couples Counseling in Los Feliz, Los Angeles and online throughout California.
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