– Learning the Importance of Friendships Through Counseling Services in Nashville TN

LEARNING THE IMPORTANCE OF FRIENDSHIPS THROUGH COUNSELING SERVICES IN NASHVILLE TN

It’s rare that someone comes to counseling services in Nashville Tn to deal with the impact of friendships on their life. Friendship is so vitally important to our overall psychological health, but we rarely stop to dwell on this issue. We know that friendships come and go. We have had childhood best friends that we no longer talk to. We have had some of the greatest times in our lives with high school buddies, but we move or change or just believe that growing up means leaving certain pleasures behind. The most powerful impact of friendships on our lives lies in this reality. Friendships are almost never forced or controlling. We know that if a friend starts treating us in an unhealthy manner, we can just leave.   This is the power of friendship: we know that we choose our friends. We feel the reality of the voluntary nature of these relationships. So, we typically treat our friends with respect and dignity.

But, they hurt like hell when they are damaged or end. We don’t acknowledge the impact of this pain, because we are trained to believe that this is “just life.” And because we have experienced the loss of friendships so many times in our lives, we come to expect the loss. But, our hearts don’t operate this way. Our hearts become attached to our friends, we find our security and comfort in our friendships, and love and care deeply for our friends. Whenever we spend time with our friends and share common experiences with them, we allow them into our inner spaces and give them parts of us. It happens so naturally, because we believe we are in charge of these relationships. We understand, without knowing, that we chose this person and so we govern ourselves more authentically. With our life partner, we feel “bound” to them and them to us. We believe they “must” stay. We create a trajectory with them that acknowledges we will somehow be with them always. And if our partner decides to leave, we are aware of the heartbreak and heartache. It hurts like the worst kind of hell and we know it.

But the ending of friendships is also a deep pain that influences and affects our lives. In elementary through high school, and even into college, we build so much of our lives around friends. Friends give us our identity, our connection and our community. We start trending towards romantic relationships, but friendships remain a predominant force through our early 20’s. Our friends teach us how to love, how to forgive, how to care and laugh and play. We are so profoundly influenced by our friends, but we rarely take the time to acknowledge or think about this. As such, we begin to live a life that pretends we don’t need friendships as much. We get “focused on our family” or our career and we push friendship to the fringes. It’s how we’ve seen all of our parents do it, so we believe this must be normal, no matter what our heart might be saying.

HOW DO WE ADDRESS FRIENDSHIP IN COUNSELING SERVICES IN NASHVILLE TN?

A good Nashville counselor can help point out the ways we may have been hurt and harmed by our friends, even without us knowing. Great counselors can help us identify certain heartaches we didn’t even know existed. A heartache unaddressed festers and rots. We don’t like to think about old heartache, because we believe it will hurt too badly. But this is actually the key to the importance of our friends.

I don’t know if anyone will ever come to see me specifically for the loss of a friendship (not including death), but I dream that one day it might happen. We are reluctant to spend the money on counseling for our spouse, much less our friends. But, idealistically, I believe they are both just as important. If you have come at odds with one of your best friends, I believe counseling services in Nashville Tn could be extremely beneficial for you. Please feel free to reach our to a counselor in our community.