“‘Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his.” —Benjamin Franklin
One of the standard values clarification exercises used during my trainings with first responders involves a story with a cast of characters in which each has a moral decision to make regarding how they interact with the main character. In short, the character is a woman, who, in an attempt to cross shark-infested waters to get to her true love, has to sleep with the boat captain before he will take her across.
One of the characters she turns to before making her decision is her best friend, Ralph. After listening to her story, Ralph responds that he will support her no matter what she chooses. At the end of the presentation, attendees are asked to rate the characters in the story according to their likability. Without fail, most attendees pick Ralph as the most likable person. Reasons include, “He was nonjudgmental,” He was going to be there for her,” and “That’s what true friends do.”
The discussion and debate that follows is my favorite part of the two-day training. I stir the pot by asking, “Does anyone remember the commercial line, ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk?’” I press on with, “Do friends really stand by while people they care about make bad decisions?” And, finally, “Wouldn’t you want your friend to talk you out of something you will regret later?”
Away from the two-day training, I find the question of what constitutes a “true friend” turning up in my counseling sessions, consultations with workers, crisis interventions, and causal relationships. Referring to the values clarification exercise, I refer to the stance of “I won’t tell you what to do but I’m there for you either way” as being Ralphed.
Being Ralphed feels right on the surface. Most people want to believe that their friends will stick by them regardless of what choices they make. I’ve encountered countless clients who could point to at least one person in their lives who supported them no matter what they did or were going to do. It’s this apparently nonjudgmental approach that wins over most people.
However, being Ralphed also has a darker side. I call this the “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner” phenomenon. This is the person who dives headlong into another abusive relationship because no one thought to tell her that her partner was a known scoundrel, or when a struggling addict, whose friends never confronted his drug use, realizes that they were not friends but spectators to his train wreck.
As a therapist who has spent decades trying to help others find their way through the dense forest of what friendship means, I understand the nature of Ralphing and why it is so often the default mode. Feeling judged does not set a warm tone in a relationship, and the sage quote about giving advice, “The fool won’t heed it and the wise don’t need it,” has a loud ring of truth. Finally, there is the question, “What if I tell them what to do, and it backfires?”
It is a strange developmental phenomenon that so many of us start off not only seeking the advice of others but desperately needing it to make sure that we don’t touch hot stoves, stick our fingers into electric outlets, wear white to someone else’s wedding, etc. However, at some point, the desire/need to make one’s own decisions—consequences be damned—takes over. This can lead to valuable teaching moments—i.e., hot stoves should still never be touched—but it can also lead to serious emotional and psychological injuries. Many of the clients I’ve worked with can look back on days of pain and suffering and lament, “If only I had known.”
Therapists, trained to avoid giving advice, have a subtle workaround to assist clients whose decision-making processes are offline as a result of excessive stress, depression, anxiety, trauma, or even brain injury. This bolstering someone’s else cognitive processes is called ego-lending.
Ego-lending, as defined by the National Institutes of Health, is “a therapist’s functioning as an ‘auxiliary ego’ for the patient.” In the non-psychotherapeutic world, this is known as “Dude, what were you thinking?” This is a powerful tool and has helped me countless times not become a spectator of a client’s destructive path by pulling them back from the edge of impulsive decisions.
More of an art form than a science, ego-lending uses “feedback” as opposed to “advice” to assist clients with decisions that could have profound negative impacts on their lives. Prompts include, “I wonder if that will have the desired outcome.” “What are you hoping to achieve here?” and even, “Others who’ve made similar decisions have come to regret them.” In this way, the therapist is able to weigh in on the process of decision-making while allowing the client to take ownership of the final choice. The therapist’s commitment to be there for the client regardless of the choice is wired into the nature of the therapeutic relationship.
The author Arnold Glasgow once wrote, “A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.” While one could endlessly debate whether allowing someone to learn from their mistakes is better than helping them avoid them, or whether one has the right to judge whether someone’s life is “going down,” what is certain is true friendships are not static but endlessly evolving. This evolution is the give-and-take between supporting and advising, a dance in which both partners agree that whoever leads is not as important as the joy of dancing itself, even through difficult times.
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