I avoided the topic the entire session.

I had been seeing my therapist Susan (we’ll call her Susan because, confidentiality) for nearly 8 years. I walked up the same flight of stairs to her office that I had been coming to all these years, yet felt an unusual sense of uneasiness. Susan was retiring, this was our very last session. Having a “termination session” to say goodbye was important to me. She had truly changed my life.

I had been in therapy before starting my work with Susan, but she was the first therapist I worked with who really slowed down to sit with me and see how much I was suffering beneath the poise and smile that says “I’m fine!”. I finally felt safe enough to unravel a bit and share, over time, all I had been holding onto for so long. And with patience and gentleness, Susan helped me understand myself from both a compassionate, loving and psychologically-intelligent frame of mind. I started to truly heal.

So on that balmy December day in Houston, I decided I would avoid saying goodbye (I was firmly in denial by the 30 minute mark of our 50 minutes together) and distract us both by bringing up a recent conflict. She humored me until about 10 minutes before the session ended. I started to acknowledge that our time together, today and forever, was over. Instead of words, I just sobbed.

I’m talking ugly cry sobbed, and I gave her a hug. I had no words. I could feel her give me a squeeze and I sensed her tearfulness. Feeling her let me go, physically and metaphorically, felt like a parent dropping their young child off. The parent knows they need to say goodbye, but feeling the loss of connection is painful.

The Importance of Closure

Each of us hold a different relationship with loss, goodbye, and endings. Common experiences I hear related to endings include cutting off, ghosting, avoidance, abandonment, uncertainty or unknowns, anxiety, and sadness. Therapy is an opportunity to create new meanings around these experiences and have some sense of ownership. For many, honoring an ending and saying goodbye can be seen as a skill to develop, because it requires vulnerability and a willingness to tolerate certain emotions. Termination is the word we use in therapy to describe the process of saying goodbye and honoring the work that one has done, as well as the therapeutic relationship. It can also be a marker for next steps, and your therapist may support you in exploring this, as well as how to know you may want to return to therapy.

I’ll think about Susan for the rest of my life, but my brain won’t have to make up stories about the end of our relationship or what our work together meant to each of us. I have the lived experience to carry with me; another gift of therapy.