Saying Goodbye to Your Therapist

by Carol Campbell, MFT

Saying goodbye to your therapist is the final stage of growth for those who make the most of the experience of psychotherapy. Endings are often fraught with the potential for pain or fear, so the wise therapist is one who treats this transition as being just as important as any other stage of therapy. When the termination of therapy is done effectively, both the therapist and the patient grow emotionally, and have a greater chance of maximizing the meaning of the relationship to both of them.

The most essential point is to look for ways to move toward the difficult feelings, rather than avoid them. Avoiding is what is going on when you only make jokes about not being there anymore, or when you only talk about how grateful you are for the experience. Avoiding is also taking place when you just suddenly announce you are quitting, rather than plan a termination date in the future that you and your therapist agree upon and can work toward together.

If the therapy has done nothing else, one would hope it has taught the patient something about the value of honoring all feelings, not just the happy ones. In fact, I would argue that a patient who is seeking to leave therapy on the grounds that it hurts too much to deal with the difficult feelings arising is not ready for termination. You are ready for termination when you can calmly accept the reality that the world is full of good and bad, and you feel confident to meet whatever is around the bend for you.

Good goodbyes in therapy tend to include several elements: Reviewing what life was like before therapy, acknowledging what has changed for the better, acknowledging what has not yet changed but is at least not stuck anymore, talking about what it was like to be in therapy with this particular therapist, what you will miss, and the nature of your grief at the loss of the connection. It is also important to talk about what it might be like if the patient has reason in the future to want to return for more therapy, and about the frustrations of not being able to turn the therapy relationship into a friendship.

It has been said that there can be no beginning without an ending. Successful therapy will hold that truth in mind from the beginning, and make space for processing the grief and loss that are likely to emerge at the end. Knowing how to fully grieve is a life skill that can enhance your ability to make the most of the time you have left on the planet. Don't shortchange your therapy by bailing on the sad parts of the ending!

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Carol L. Campbell, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for individual adults and couples in Palo Alto, California. She has degrees from Brown University and Santa Clara University and has been licensed since 1991. Carol is a graduate of the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program sponsored at Stanford by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and was a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco from 2010-2011. She is also a clinical member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.