When you’ve decided that you want to stop therapy, you may find that your therapist seems to want to dig around into this topic rather more than you might expect. They may not immediately respond by terminating all future sessions, but instead enquire after the reasons behind your desire, suggest an additional session (or two) to bring things to a close, or potentially even offer their view that just now may not be the best time for you to end the therapy.
On the face of it, their seeming reluctance to deal with the break up can be a bit perplexing. After all, you’re paying for a service and you shouldn’t have to explain anything if you want to stop doing that. You wouldn’t have to reveal your deepest motivations to, say, your barber if you decided to stop coming for a haircut, so why should you have to do this in therapy?
Ending well in therapy
It’s easy to interpret this as your therapist being reluctant to give up on the precious source of regular income that you bring as a client. And while there often is, of course, a financial element to the therapeutic relationship, generally speaking it is not this, but clinical reasons which underlie your therapist’s questions about why you want to leave.
In the best of situations, clients will come to end their therapy because the issues that first brought them into the work no longer feel like they have the same charge. You might be feeling better, are showing signs of having developed an ‘internal therapist’ of sorts, have found support elsewhere and/or no longer feel like time (and money) spent in therapy is the priority that it once was. There may also be more practical reasons for ending, like moving away or changes in life circumstances that mean it no longer works for you.
In these situations, therapy is likely to come to a gradual and natural close. It is still a good idea to spend a session or two exploring in therapy all that might emerge in the context of ending, especially where the therapeutic relationship has been a long-standing and/or significant one for you. Ending the work together can bring up all sorts of emotions that might not have featured prominently in the therapy beforehand, including bringing to mind previous experiences of personal and relationship losses.
The sudden desire to leave
In cases where the desire to end appears more suddenly, your therapist is likely to suggest spending some time talking about why you wish to end. The reason that we do this is because there are times when clients’ feelings of urgency to stop therapy are, in and of themselves, part of the work in therapy.
Let me illustrate with a personal example. Before entering my own therapy, I’d historically struggled to assert myself in situations, especially where others with stronger views were able to do so more confidently. Instead of expressing my disagreement, or asking things to be done differently, I would often agree to what others wanted while keeping my quiet frustration to myself. Needless to say, over a prolonged period, this pattern did not do me much good.
This same pattern turned up early in therapy, so that when the therapist did something I didn’t like, I stayed silent about it, but instead quietly withdrew and decided I wanted to leave. Exploring with my therapist why I wanted to end allowed us to see what pattern I was unknowingly acting out. Crucially, it also gave me the opportunity to do something different and to practice the uncomfortable act of saying my piece in a setting where I knew it would be well received.
This was my particular flavour of this, but there might be all sorts of assumptions, patterns or fears of which we might not, as clients, even be aware and which are pushing our desire to leave. Sometimes it can be that the work is moving too quickly, that we don’t feel that the therapist understands us, that we’re not addressing the thing that really has us worried, or that we’re moving into territory where we do not yet feel ready to tread. It might also be that the therapist has messed up somehow and said, done, or acted in some way that has made some of the above feelings worse.
Wanting to end: an opportunity for growth
Part of the work of therapy is to help you uncover such things and together explore whether you wish to deal with them in your usual way, or whether something else might work better for you in your current circumstances. While we most certainly don’t look to provoke them, the times when you have a strong emotional reaction to the therapist or to something that’s happened in therapy can also provide some of the most fruitful ground for exploration and growth. This opportunity would be missed were the therapy simply to end instead.
If you're interested in counselling and psychotherapy sessions in the Oxford area, please contact me today to book an initial session.
