The Good Ear: Friends as Therapists

I had just set out on an afternoon walk, my head spinning from some stressful project. A good walk, I’ve found, can often soothe a troubled mind.

I was three steps from my front door when my cell phone rang. It was my friend Randi.

We met as journalists decades ago when she took some amazing photographs for stories I wrote about San Francisco and Northern California. We still work together. Randi will jump on a plane at a moments notice and once flew from San Francisco to Tokyo on her own dime to photograph a newspaper story I was writing there. 

She’s enthusiastic, always sunny and sometimes a wee bit crazy. Her husband calls her an agent of chaos and I can’t disagree. It’s why we’re friends.

“Hey Glionna,” she said. 

Randi was heading off for a shoot in West Africa and wanted to check in.

Within nanoseconds, I was spilling my guts about my self-doubt and exaggerated torment, my analysis-paralysis.

She listened and urged me on in a supportive way. And then, when I was done, she offered advice about my rather pedestrian problem that made me nod my head with marvel, nearly stopping me in my tracks. 

Everything she said was simply spot on. It was advice that I either hadn’t thought of or, even if I had, didn’t trust my own instincts enough to follow through on. But coming from an old friend who knows me and my foibles, it all made sense. I was over-thinking, over-worrying.

Before I knew it, nearly an hour had passed and I’d walked several miles. I had crossed streets and passed dog-walkers lost in thought.

Finally, before we hung up, I thanked Randi profusely and wished her well on her trip.

After a few more steps, I thought: Maybe she should send me a bill. 

Because I’ve just been to a therapy session.

*

Years ago, I turned to a colleague at work and asked the kind of gee-whizz question that my father always used to like to spring:

“If a renowned psychiatrist became your neighbor and offered you free therapy, would you take it?”

He paused for a moment.

“No.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I get all the emotional support I need from my friends.”

I realized then that he had just uttered a simple truth, something I like to call the therapy of friendship.

Don't get me wrong: there are challenges in life — from a death to painful divorce — for which true professional help is a solution second to none. But there are also times you just need a slight course correction, from someone whose main qualification is that they know you so well, often as well as you know yourself.

Spouses and partners often play this role. But some issues require a bit of distance.

One of my oldest friends has talked me off so many ledges that I can never repay him. I once told him that if I ever committed a murder, or had gotten myself into so much trouble that there seemed to be no escape, he was the one I would call. Like a lawyer. Or a priest.

And that remains true today.

The best friends are good listeners. But where the rubber meets the road is when any consigliere feels free to comfortably speak their mind, to approach a truth that can seem like a gift from the gods.

The best do it gently, of course, lovingly, knowing that one day soon they too will need advice.

For me, it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. A stranger can offer sympathy, but it takes a true friend to empathize, to be able to walk in your shoes.

*

I choose friends whose faults, like my own, are as wide as the Mississippi River. These are the waters where I feel most comfortable swimming.

Ed is a fellow journalist who’s young enough to be my son. We spend hours on the phone talking about writing, life's victories and those little daily defeats, always feeling free to own up to our own boneheaded moves, open with our fears about plunging headlong into the chasm of a future we know nothing about. 

Ed lives in Seattle and I am in San Francisco, but during those conspiratorial hours on the phone, it’s almost though I can reach out and touch him; the connection is real.

Ed is wise beyond his years, with bulls-eye insight, and I only hope I give as good advice as I get. He lived with me briefly a few years ago in Las Vegas and on Friday evenings, when the work day was done, we’d sit in my living room over beers or a joint and unload.

Breaking it down, is what we called it. High as a desert kite one Friday, I told Ed that I felt like I was gazing down from on high onto the foibles on my week, like a genie or some whacked-out levitating sultan.

From that day on, we call our talks Sitting in the Sultan’s Chairs.

Ed told me the other day that along with his kin back in Chicago, he considered me to be family. Together we had come to share a bond so thick it felt like blood. I feel the same way.

The other day, we both shared our malaise of the moment: One often felt like quitting, the other couldn’t step far enough back from the hurly-burly to see the path ahead. 

Cell phones in hand, we offered each other a friendly tow-truck haul out of the mud, a fresh way to think about things. Did I want to hear Ed’d advice? Did he want to hear mine?

Maybe, maybe not.

But if we’re honest with ourselves, the advice offered in both directions was true and heartfelt. Something that only a real friend, one of the family, could offer.