Is Your Counselor Your Friend?

A clear training directive in counseling school is the concept that your clients are not your friends. Likewise, the concept of physical contact—say, a hug or a handshake—is largely discouraged. “Just not a good idea,” seems to be the rule of instruction.

I understand the logic. Our clients pay us to help them by offering insights that life has blocked them from seeing or to give them tools they have never obtained or to be the listening post they do not have in their private lives. They are, indeed, not our friends. We should not get too close to them.

Yet seven years into this profession, my third working life after journalism and marketing/communications, my mind keeps disproving what I was taught.

My clients are my friends.

Not in the sense of meeting them outside of session, socializing with them or attending a ballgame together. Not in the sense of getting emotionally entangled and obsessing about their outcomes. Not even in the sense of establishing a long-term therapeutic relationship (because, after all, the therapist’s job is to put himself or herself out of a job).

Research has consistently shown since counseling began that it is not the techniques used that predict success in therapy but rather the strength of the therapeutic relationship. Just as two people trying to become friends are seeking to forge a connection, so, too, are counselor and client.

That means when I say I consider my clients to be friends, I’m talking about being in a shared space with people I like. As someone with 45-plus years of life on the job, I can definitively say it’s a lot easier to work with people you like.

Therefore I try, as my former supervisor and mentor Ron Wachs always advised, to like my clients. That task gets easier and easier for me as I work with them through issues such as trauma, anxiety, depression and grief.

Their lives are usually in a difficult place, and I’m trusted to walk in that holy space with them—often by simply listening, but sometimes, too, by challenging irrational or no-longer-applicable beliefs. If I can toss in an occasional nugget of wisdom that enlightens, well, that’s a bonus for both of us.

In the past couple of years, amid a time of fast-rising prices that have strained budgets and in a society that is more politically divided than at any point in my lifetime, I’ve noticed something else, too.

More of my clients, men and women, often seek assurance when they leave, and where my training told me to avoid physical touch, I now recognize it is therapeutic if it is authentic. And I will return and sometimes even initiate a handshake or a gentle hand or pat on the shoulder. The gratitude I sense coming back tells me it’s the right thing to do.

This is all part what being a counselor is about in 2026. My clients are my non-traditional friends, and I like them.