The Group: Friendship, Parenthood, and the Ties That Bind
Friendships can be complicated even between two people; but, within a group, that complexity multiplies.
A friendship group is not simply a collection of individuals. It is, in psychodynamic terms, a living system — one with its own emotional logic, its own interior weather. Over time, allegiances form and shift. Unspoken hierarchies emerge. There are those who feel central and those who hover at the edges; those who absorb the group's anxieties and those who, without knowing it, generate them.
Each person holds a role within the group, whether he/she is conscious of it or not. And like any living system, the group is sensitive to change. When one member changes — grows, withdraws, begins to want something different — the whole structure must adjust. That adjustment is rarely without friction.
The Strain of Diverging Lives
Focusing on women, what brings us together is often proximity and shared circumstance: school, work, pregnancy, motherhood, the school gates. What tests, over time, is difference.
As lives move in different directions —relationships, financial realities, relationships to work and ambition — the common ground that once felt solid begins to shift. The group continues to meet, to mark occasions, to perform the rituals of closeness, but something has changed.
Few transitions expose this more sharply than the journey to parenthood — or its absence. For some women, becoming a mother brings a new axis of identity and a deepened sense of connection; for others, the same period is shadowed by longing, loss, or the relentless weight of caring for a child with additional needs. Within a group, these differences sit alongside each other in complicated silence. One woman's joy can become, intention, a measure of someone else’s grief.
Even if the whole group becomes mothers, difference persists. Parenting styles and values — shaped by each woman's own early experiences — create fault lines that are often invisible until they crack. As Winnicott observed through his concept of the 'good enough mother,' motherhood is inherently bound up with anxiety and self-doubt. Our children not only awaken fierce protective instincts but reflect something back at us — how adequate, how sufficient, how seen we feel. Another woman's choices can therefore land as an unconscious challenge to our own, even when no challenge was intended.
What the Group Stirs
The emotional intensity of group friendship is not incidental. Groups recreate something of the dynamics of early life — the original group, the family, with its hierarchies and loyalties, its rivalries and exclusions. The pull between belonging and separation, between being central and being overlooked, between loyalty to the group and the need to grow beyond it — this is not dysfunction. It is the ordinary, complicated business of being in close proximity to people who matter.
Subtle patterns of inclusion and exclusion are inevitable. What matters is whether they can be acknowledged — whether the group has enough trust and flexibility to absorb the changes that individual lives will inevitably bring, or whether difference must be managed in silence, at the cost of genuine connection.
How Therapy Can Help
The pain of group dynamics is among the lonelier experiences a woman can carry, precisely because it is so difficult to discuss. To raise a concern about the group - with any member of it - risks feeling disloyal, paranoid, or like the one making things difficult. The result is that these feelings often go unspoken, accumulating quietly while the group continues to function on the surface.
Therapy offers a space outside the group — a place to put down what has been carried and examine it without fear of consequence. It becomes possible to ask what role you have been playing, whether it still fits, and what the tension you are feeling is actually about.
Often what looks like a conflict about a specific incident — a missed invitation, a thoughtless comment, a sense of exclusion — turns out to be about something older and deeper: a familiar fear of being left out, a pattern of shrinking to keep the peace, a longing to be known more fully than the group currently allows. Understanding this does not dissolve the difficulty, but it can change your relationship to it — and sometimes open the possibility of something more honest.
