relationship counseling for female friends?

(like the blog? Sign up to follow it on this website or on facebook. Have a question, send me an e-mail at Maigler@3rdcoastcoaching.org or daniel.maigler@live.com)

Question: My best friend and I have been each other's main support for over a decade. Recently I have been trying to make some healthy changes in my life and rather than support me she seems threatened. I have tried talking to her but it end up being a fight and the tension gets worse. I was crying to my fiance about it and he jokingly said she and I need relationship counseling. Do they have that for friends? I think we could really use it.

Answer: No, and Yes. You won't find friendship counseling in the yellow pages, but it would be my guess that 80% of therapists who see couples would agree to see female friends if they had a serious desire to work out issues and improve their relationship. I know I would.

There are two kinds of female friendships. There are the typical friends that you enjoy spending time with, look forward to seeing, that you can trust to talk to about some things. These are the kinds of friendships that men have. Then there is the other kind, the really deep friendship which is like a relationship without the sexual attraction. In these friendships two to three women really belong to one another, there is a bond and women are possessive of it and guard it as jealously as any romantic relationship.

We need a new word for these fryndships that have no parallel in the male world. It is to impress these frynds that women dress in a certain way (not for men), it is over these fryndships that 90% of the drama in the adolescent female world explodes. These are not the kind of relationships that are easily replaced.

If all this is true why don't we recognize the importance of fryndships and market things like relationship counsleing to maintain them? Our world and media (movies, television, even novels and "great literature") has been dominated by men who for the 10,000 years of civilized society have been genearlly uninterested and unaware of these relationshps. It is only very recently that the depth and intensity that female fryndships can achieve has been openly acknowledged (eg Sex in the City).

I have seen female frienships where the bond is stronger than marriage, stronger than family. I have seen the loss of these fryndships as major triggers to clinical depression. Your fiance joked about relationship counseling for you and your friend because male dominated society is ignorant of the true importance of such friendships, but you are not, and my guess is he was only half kidding.

Relationship counseling generally centers around trying to find out what the goals of each individual are, what the goals of the couple are, and see how the needs and desires of both can be met. It is not uncommon for people to discover in relationship counseling that they are better off apart than together, but at least they know they have made an honest effort to save what was a very important relationshp.

I would encourage you to not worry about what people think and instead do everything in your power to save a relationship that is so important to you. I suggest you write her a letter (or e-mail) telling her how important her friendship is and proposing that you find a therapist/mediator who can help you to get things back to where they were. Ideally a therapist will teach you how to communicate your needs and fears to one another openly and not let resentments build up.

Do not let pride and potential embarrasment prevent you from being the first girl on your block to try something new. At the end of the day you have only yourself, and hopefully your frynd, to answer to.