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FRIEND THERAPY

Friend therapy  — because some of your most important relationships aren’t romantic​

Friendships can be the most sustaining, complicated, and grief-laden relationships in a person’s life. They can also be the hardest ones to get support around — because therapy has historically been organized around romantic partnerships, family systems, and individual struggle. The relationships between friends, chosen family members, and platonic partners rarely get a room of their own.

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At Express Yourself Therapy, they do. We treat platonic and chosen family relationships as the significant relationships they often are — not as secondary concerns undeserving of their own space in the therapy room. We offer therapy for friendships, chosen family constellations, and platonic relationships that matter — because for many people, especially in LGBTQIA+ communities, friends are the primary family. The relationships you chose deserve the same care and attention as any other.

In person in Manhattan or virtually across New York State. All relationship structures welcome.

WHAT WE HELP WITH

  • Conflict that keeps cycling without resolution

  • A friendship rupture or sudden ending that still doesn’t make sense

  • Processing the grief of a friendship that ended — by choice, by death, or by drift

  • Chosen family dynamics — roles, expectations, conflict, and care

  • Friendships that are changing because of a major life transition (partnership, kids, coming out, relocation)

  • The particular complexity of being friends with an ex

  • Feeling like you’re always the one who gives more — imbalance and resentment

  • Boundaries in friendships — how to set them, how to hold them, how to ask for them​

  • Navigating friendships across difference — race, class, politics, religion, relationship structure

  • Queerplatonic relationships and the challenges of existing without social scripts

  • Friendship and neurodivergence — social exhaustion, masking, and connection

HOW IT WORKS

Friend therapy sessions can be one-on-one — one person coming in to process a friendship or chosen family relationship — or they can include multiple friends or chosen family members in the room together. We’ll talk about the best format on your free consultation call.

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For sessions that include multiple people, we work similarly to the way we approach polycule or chosen family therapy: we hold space for everyone present without taking sides, help slow down the dynamics that keep people stuck, and focus on what each person is actually trying to say beneath the conflict or distance.

For more info, see our F.A.Q's page.

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