I noticed long ago that at a certain stage of the next round of personal therapy, I stopped discussing personal things with my friends. Yesterday, a random phrase from Yalom’s book “When Nietzsche Wept” closed the circle of my long thoughts regarding friendship. Psychologist replaced girlfriends As I already said, there was a period when the psychologist covered all my needs for support, debate, and even in simple communication, so much so that discussing personal with friends it broke away as a value. At all. Not because they lost trust or because I have grown spiritually and mentally, but they are cognitively simple and are not able to understand and help because of this. No, that’s not why. It’s just that the psychologist covered the need 100%, doing it professionally. What need? Yes, there are many: it’s stupid to speak out, get support, be accepted in any feelings and ideas. At the same time, the psychologist did not bring her own into my picture of the world, but more often, on the contrary, expanded my ideas about good and evil, blurring the boundaries of attitudes to which I had become attached since childhood. Is it closed? Probably, from the outside it looks like closedness. But this is not so: I did not become bottled up, but rather stopped fulfilling many of my needs through my friends. At the same time, she retained empathy and was ready to listen to them, very rarely talking about “personal things” to herself. In general, I am very open - I illustrate my practice with personal examples, showing my own “imperfection.” Why be friends? One day the question arose: why do I need friends in this situation? What and how to be friends? The search for a new format has begun. I caught myself enjoying pleasure and joy at certain moments of communication. I intuitively understood what I was now friends about, but I could not put it into words. And here it is, a book find: “He should see them more often. There was something purifying about reasoning in the realm of perfect abstraction.” Here it is, reasoning in the realm of pure abstraction. For this, I need friendship now. Not everyone needs it and not everyone can give it. And in that space I make friends in the old fashioned way, for example, with Lenka. After all, there is nothing worse than imposing a format that suits me personally on everyone. But in new dyads I am looking for precisely this abstraction, and not revelations. What might this look like? The word “betrayal” or “sex” or “longing” is heard and a pattern of lengthy discussions is woven without reference to personal stories, although it is possible with them. But this is not necessary at all, and it is certainly not about gossip in the spirit of “but the Ignatievs have a child from a neighbor.” If it hurts, on the other hand, no matter how strong the self-reliance is inside, there will be a circumstance/news that will shake it. Then we remember the format of close friendship, when we want to talk, cry, become little for a while.