"They can invite an intimacy and truthfulness and grief that some find overwhelming. It's not unusual for patients to talk of dropping out, or to skip the final session to call it a waste of time, to want to leave the room before the end. But the ending is one of the most crucial experiences of good psychotherapy; an opportunity to suffer the loss and to mourn."
"But the ending is one of the most crucial experiences of good psychotherapy; an opportunity to suffer the loss and to mourn. A chance to feel the disappointment and rage of wishes not granted and needs met and unmet. When we have been struggling with these feelings since infancy, spending our adulthood unconsciously killing them off with addictions or repeating them in dissatisfying relationship dynamics or scrolling them away, a therapy ending offers different possibilities. When you skip the end, you rob yourself."
Endings often create permission to feel and express truths that previously felt impossible. Endings can invite intimacy, truthfulness, and overwhelming grief. Many patients consider dropping out or skip the final session and call it a waste of time. The ending of psychotherapy provides a crucial opportunity to suffer loss, mourn, and articulate disappointment, rage, abandonment, gratitude, not knowing, and despair. Therapy endings can expose longstanding feelings formed in infancy that adults often avoid through addictions or repetitive relationships or distraction. Facing the ending permits mourning and different possibilities for psychological change. Skipping the final session forfeits those possibilities.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]