Best Friends Therapy: Why a Southern Charm Moment Reveals Something Psychologists Already Know
When the term “best friends therapy” came up in a recent episode of Southern Charm, viewers laughed, cringed, or nodded in recognition. The idea of two friends sitting on a therapist’s couch to work through their dynamics felt both unconventional and oddly intuitive.
But here’s the thing:
There is real psychological merit to this idea.
While romantic partners have long benefited from structured relational therapy models—such as Gottman Method Couples Therapy and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)—there is nothing stopping best friends from using the same evidence-based frameworks to strengthen their bond, improve communication, and heal long-standing relational patterns.
In fact, for people with interpersonal difficulties, attachment wounds, or fraught relational histories, best friends therapy can act as a powerful stepping stone toward more secure and satisfying relationships across their life.
Let’s break down why.
Why Best Friends Therapy Makes Sense
Friendships—especially close, long-term ones—are often just as emotionally significant as romantic relationships. They involve:
Vulnerability
Shared history
Unspoken expectations
Misunderstandings
Hurt feelings
Repair processes (or lack thereof)
Yet while couples commonly seek help to navigate those complexities, friends rarely do—even when their dynamics mirror the intensity of a partnership.
Therapy offers structure, language, and guided understanding that friends can use to reconnect or repair in a way they may never have learned to do on their own.
1. Using Psychological Tools to Build Friendship Strength
Strengthening the friendship system
Enhancing fondness and admiration
Improving communication and conflict management
Building rituals of connection
Deepening shared meaning
If this sounds applicable to best friends, it’s because it is.
Many Gottman interventions translate beautifully into a friendship context:
💬 “I Statements” & Softened Start-Up
Friends often struggle with bluntness or avoidance. Learning how to raise issues softly prevents defensiveness.
📚 Love Maps → Friendship Maps
Mapping each other’s inner worlds—stressors, preferences, dreams—helps restore closeness.
🔍 Managing Perpetual Issues
Some conflicts aren’t solvable. Gottman calls these “perpetual problems,” and learning to dialogue around them rather than fight about them can change the friendship entirely.
👏 Repair Attempts
Therapy teaches friends how to recognise and respond to small bids for reconnection—a key skill many adults never learned.
2. EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) Helps Friends Understand Their Attachment Cycle
Emotionally Focused Therapy isn’t just for couples.
Most relational distress is rooted in attachment patterns established long before the current friendship. When friends argue, pull away, chase, shut down, or become critical, they aren’t just reacting to this moment—they’re reacting to old neural templates of safety and connection.
EFT helps friends:
Name their attachment needs
Understand their triggers
See the emotional pattern they co-create
Replace reactive cycles with secure communication
Build safety through vulnerability
This is powerful for friendships where one person feels abandoned easily, and the other feels overwhelmed or criticised. The therapist becomes a guide for both people to understand:
“What is the cycle? What is each of us protecting? And how do we come back to each other safely?”
3. Best Friends Therapy Can Be a Stepping Stone for People With Interpersonal Difficulties
For individuals with:
Anxious attachment
Avoidant attachment
Trauma histories
Relational PTSD
Social anxiety
Schema-driven patterns
A history of painful or unstable relationships
friendship therapy can serve as a low-stakes, high-reward environment for relational healing.
Why?
Because friendships often carry less pressure or threat than romantic relationships or family relationships. This allows people to:
Practice vulnerability
Learn how to regulate during conflict
Understand their triggers
Repair in real time
Experiment with new behaviours
Rewire old attachment patterns
Best friends therapy makes relational learning accessible, gentle, and less confronting. It provides in-session practice for the skills that will ripple into:
Romantic relationships
Family dynamics
Workplace interactions
Future friendships
Instead of waiting for a crisis, friends can proactively strengthen their bond while simultaneously healing parts of themselves.
4. It’s Also a Beautiful Way to Honour the Importance of Friendship
Our culture often centres romantic love as the primary relationship worth “working on.” But for many, friendships are:
Longer lasting
More stable
Emotionally foundational
Deeply impactful on wellbeing
Taking a friendship seriously enough to seek help isn’t dramatic—it’s deeply healthy.
Therapy helps friends:
Restore trust
Navigate transitions
Address resentment or misunderstandings
Create new boundaries
Learn how to stay connected through life changes
Honour the significance of their relationship
It sends the message:
“This relationship matters enough to protect, repair, and invest in.”
Final Thoughts: Southern Charm May Have Sparked It, But Psychology Has Been Here All Along
“Best friends therapy” might sound like reality-TV fodder, but beneath the catchiness lies a meaningful truth:
Friendships deserve care, skill, and intentional repair just as much as romantic relationships.
Whether you’re navigating a rough patch, trying to break unhelpful relational patterns, or simply wanting to deepen your connection, working with a therapist can help both people learn, grow, and transform—not only the friendship but every other relationship in their lives.
In a world where many adults struggle with loneliness, conflict, anxiety, and disconnection, taking your friendship to therapy isn’t dramatic.
It’s wise.
It’s proactive.
It’s healing.
And it may be exactly the stepping stone people need to build a lifetime of more secure and fulfilling relationships.
