Step Into My Sessions: Friendships Beyond School Years - Supporting Adults Who Want Connection
The building blocks of friendship: shared moments, small steps.
Let’s face it – making new friendships in our young adult and adult years can be hard.
For many of our young adults, returning home after college means stepping out of a structured social environment and into a world where friendships don’t happen automatically. Without dorms, classes, or shared routines, they often felt adrift—eager for connection, but unsure how to make it happen as an adult. 🤷🏼♂️
This was the situation for a student with whom I had worked when he was much younger. Now, back from college and looking for work, he had no social connections other than his family. He was eager for friends, but didn’t know what steps to take, and was feeling anxious and lonely. 😔 Let’s look at the course of our work together over a year.
Supporting Growing Relationships
One of the first things we did was make a visual support outlining the steps in developing friends as a young adult. It’s not perfect, but it worked for my adult. They also told me that they had joined a young people’s group at a local church, and he had met a nice guy. 😊🫱🏼🫲🏼
We charted that friendship**:
A great start!! 🎉 Over the next months, we would check in on how things were going. We also worked on conversation, brainstormed job search, and talked about his plans and hopes for the future (using those oh-so-important mental state verbs.)🧠💬
We noticed that his friendship was growing:
Over time, it became clear to me that my adult felt that things were moving slowly – they had hoped to develop a closer relationship faster. These were important discussions about how it can be harder to build a friendship when you only see someone once or twice a week. But his friendship kept growing!🪴 They really enjoyed our assessments and seeing visual “proof” of progress: 📈
Then, new friends appeared!
My adult met a couple through his friendship with Elliot. We were able to add their names and show that they were following the same course. And that his social circle was slowly widening.
Recently, when we took another look, we realized that his friendship with Elliot had lasted a year! 😁 My adult had never had a friendship that lasted that long, so it was a terrific recognition:
Finally, after a year of looking, my adult got a job!
Now we have added a new track to follow. We are differentiating managers from co-workers, and discussing how those relationships are different. It’s a very exciting time as the adult with whom I’ve worked with realizes how much he has achieved! 💪🏼🏅
I’d love to hear if this example has resonated with you. Or, perhaps you have modified my visual in all sorts of creative ways – I’d love to see your work. ✏️
**PS If you'd like the details of text and find these difficult to read (we tried to make them look as good as we could), email me and I will find a way to send how we broke the path down...
