Dressed in all black, I went to my last therapy session.
Albeit not so unusual for my regular attire, I took this as a memorandum of some sort. However, it didn’t occur to me until I was on my way home, that in the morning as I was about to get dressed, I had actually (or “subconsciously,” as analysts would say) selected from my wardrobe a highly intentional representation of what was to come at 1:00pm this day: the death of my therapy.
In clinical practice, we call this “termination.” It’s a pejorative term, especially if you’re on the receiving end. Consider this: the person whom you trusted to listen to the things you might not say aloud to others and provided you with the support and encouragement to move on (AKA an intense relationship) is terminating you. Potentially, this could be retraumatization. This can make someone regress back to their childlike state. What we so laboriously built up can crumble down in seconds when you terminate. The slightly liberal professors will suggest we call it something else like, “Moving On” or another less-poetic but more-optimistic word or phrase.
My most memorable personal termination was with a client whom I still have fantasies about running into and becoming best friends. He was one year older than me, well-dressed, and very funny. He hated me in the beginning but we helplessly fell for each other. It was a pre-mature termination. I had planned to terminate with him the following week, except that he had relapsed and fell into meth, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, and unprotected (infidelity) sex all at once, and was immediately (but voluntarily) sent to rehab. I cried after he got in the car.
An honorable mention was another client whom had transformed all of my hard, six months of working with her into one successful day-- my last day-- all because I reminded her of her daughter. She was ready to mend her relationship with her daughter “coincidentally” on my last day with her. Sober and dressed to haphazardly get on the bus and go to Bushwick to her daughter’s house, we terminated in the most heroic Social-Workers-Are-Saviors kind of way.
And then there are stories of people who avoid their last sessions. They simply don’t show up. They avoid them because they’re scared of letting go, or fear being left, and fear the acceptance that there is no one to blame for their well-being anymore. It’s all on them.
So then it was pretty cliche of me that I kind of didn’t want to go to my last session.
But, my thought was that I was improving on my own. Really suddenly. Just over the last week. I had an epiphany and I realized how I can and should take care of myself. And it just happened that I was improving on my own at the same time that I was being terminated. I just had a couple (devastating) wake-up calls and sense of urgency to truly live up to the self-care bullshit that I have always paraded around. If I came up with this on my own, at my own pace, then I didn’t need my therapist to tell me these things, and especially not at the last session.
I couldn’t be the cliche patient, really, because I wasn’t at all fearful of losing my therapeutic relationship. So I came to the reluctant conclusion that I needed to be there to show him that I wasn’t scared.
I thought about what I wanted to talk about. Or rather, I thought about if I wanted to be completely honest or not. Do I tell him about my transference issues that I’ve had over the past few months? Or do I keep that to myself since I’ll never see him again anyway?
In the session, I ended up being true to myself and to him, but I also didn’t disclose every detail. Just what I felt he needed to know. And as I told him about my self-improvement since the two weeks we last saw each other, I realized that it’s quite possible that the anticipation and apprehension of the coming termination may have contributed to instilling the imminent change in me simply because this supportive relationship was now ending and I now have to fend for myself. The acceptance that I’m on my own. Is it possible that I went into independent/panic mode because of this anticipatory de-latching, and all these new revelations and changes have simply been a reaction to this expectation? Did I wear all black to attend the funeral of my therapy?
I admit I am a little impressed by my own clinical impression of my behavior.
