The Friendship Myth That Puts People with Disabilities at Risk
Are Staff Members Friends? Why This Question Matters for People with Disabilities
When I work with people with disabilities, one of the patterns I see most often is the blurring of the line between paid staff and genuine friends.
This isn’t anyone’s fault. The staff I work with genuinely like the individuals they support. But liking someone and being their friend are two separate things — and collapsing that distinction can have real consequences.
What Dave Hingsburger Taught Us
Dave Hingsburger, one of the most important voices in disability advocacy, spent much of his career focused on relationship and sexuality rights for people with disabilities. He returned to this topic again and again: staff are not friends. Staff are not family.
His reasoning was simple: If someone is receiving a paycheck to be there, to care for you, and to interact with you — they are not your friend. Many of the well-intentioned staff I work with get uncomfortable when I bring this up. They reiterate that they are friends with their clients, they care about their clients (I mean, the fact that we just referred to this person as “client”, “customer” or “consumer” should say alot about the relationship you actually have with this person). But caring about someone and being their friend are not the same thing, and teaching that difference is, in my view, an abuse prevention skill.
Here’s why: if a person with a disability is told that a paid staff member is their friend, they are being introduced to a version of friendship that begins with a fundamental power imbalance. And if that becomes the norm, then inequality in a relationship becomes normalized. That’s a dangerous foundation.
A Better Way to Visualize Relationships
I’ll be honest — I’m not a fan of relationship tools that are too rigid or black-and-white. Take the Circles Program, which is widely used to teach relationship literacy. It sorts people into fixed categories: family goes in this circle, strangers go in that one. The problem is that it doesn’t account for nuance. It treats trust as a fixed property of a category, rather than something that shifts and evolves.
That said, visual tools have their place when they’re used alongside other teaching strategies — not as a replacement for conversation and critical thinking.
One visual I’ve found genuinely useful was developed by Judith Snow, Marsha Forest, and Jack Pearpoint. It’s a circle of support model, and what I like about it is that it builds in meaningful distinctions that other tools tend to flatten.
Here’s how it works: the person the map is being created for sits at the center. The closer a circle is to the center, the more trust and intimacy it represents. There are four levels:
- Intimate relationships — people who are deeply involved in your life. This can include romantic partners, close family members, and sometimes caregivers.
- Friends — people you genuinely enjoy spending time with and choose to be around.
- Participation — people who are in the same space as you, doing the same thing. A classmate. A day program peer. Someone you see regularly but haven’t chosen.
- Exchange — people who are paid to be in your life. Doctors, therapists, staff members. You can feel comfortable with these people. You may even like them a lot. But their role is categorically different.
That third circle deserves special attention. In day habs and group settings, we have a habit of putting everyone in the same room and assuming that means they have friends — or even calling them all friends. That’s not friendship. That’s proximity. There’s a real difference between someone you choose to spend time with and someone you simply happen to be near.
The Nuance We Can’t Skip
I want to be honest about something: even this model requires careful conversation, because the lines can genuinely feel blurry.
A friend might be someone I share intimate details with. So is my therapist. A friend might take care of me when I’m sick. So might a paid caregiver. The actions can look identical from the outside.
The distinction that matters is why they’re doing it. A friend is there because they choose to be, because they care about you, and because the relationship exists outside of any financial transaction. A paid staff member — no matter how kind — is there because it’s their job. Both can be meaningful. But they are not the same thing, and people with disabilities deserve to understand that difference clearly.
This isn’t about making people feel bad about their relationships with staff. It’s about making sure they have an accurate map of the world — one that helps them recognize when a relationship is healthy, and when something might be off.
Want to learn more? Check out the resources on the Circle of Support model below. And if you’re in the area, I’d love to see you at my upcoming talk with the TST Learning Network — details below.
