pp. 94-95 "Friendship: A Vessel of Soul-making

In the practice of friendship, we might keep this important aspect of soul in mind: its need for containment. [my highlighting] Our capacity to keep a secret could be important to a friend who may feel free to talk to us in a spirit of confidentiality. It often happens, too, that what goes on among certain friends has to be protected from other friendships. Emily Dikinson's biographer Richard Sewall notes that Emily made a separate world of her various correspondents and friends: 'The letters to Higginson say nothing about Bowles, the letters to Bowles say nothing about Higginson; the letters to Helen Hunt Jackson say nothing about either of them.'

A friend could also offer containment by receiving another's feelings and thoughts without a strong need for interpretation or commentary. Sometimes, of course, we ask friends to offer their opinions and judgments, but even then we expect a high degree of acceptance and recognition of who we are. In friendship, we want to receive and to be received.

In the years of my work as a therapist, many people asked me to be their friend rather than their therapist. 'Couldn't we just meet at a coffee shop,' they would say, or, 'If you talked to me about yourself, this conversation wouldn't be so one-sided.' Clearly there is a difference between being a friend and being a therapist, the latter role lacking the mutuality of friendship. I have come to understand this common distaste for the therapeutic role and the desire for friendship as the soul asking for what it know is best. To the soul, there is hardly anything more healing than friendship. I suspect that a patient's wish for friendship with a therapist is more a correct intuition than a defense." [my highlighting]
- Thomas Moore - Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship