My T told me a year and a half before she was going to retire and kind of sketched out how she saw things going (what vacations she thought she'd be taking in that time, etc.). She was going to renew her license the next year (June 2004-2005) but not the year after that so the end of June, 2005, we'd be finished.

Knowing so long in advance was very helpful to me because it gave me all that time to "get use to" it. I could "practice" being unhappy and waxing and waning about what July 2005 would bring. One thing that helped me was I was paying out of pocket, $800 a month and only working to support my habit :-) So, when I finished with therapy, I could stop working too! I had plenty of time to figure out things to "bridge the gap" between a couple months before terminating and a couple months after. I bought my husband a 2004 Christmas present of a trip to Switzerland in September 2005; I bought only the plane tickets and we'd have to "plan" the actual trip, what we wanted to do :-) I engineered moving from our house of 20 years to a new place and, of course, I was going to quit my job and my husband was getting ready to retire (March 2006) and there was plenty going on before and after so I was "busy" and termination was just part of it. I did have some trouble so I signed up with a good online therapist I knew of and did some e-mailing with him a few times a week for a couple months between quitting therapy, my job, moving, and going to Switzerland. In the Spring of 2005 I found a woman's group and joined that (that didn't work out, they were mostly single women looking for men/companions :-)

I use to have to drive 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 hours each way to therapy on a weekday and I certainly didn't miss that drive, especially the drive home. I do miss my T occasionally but not because I "need" her but just because there are things I'd like to talk over with her, because I valued her point of view and take on things. It still amazes me that I don't have all the "noise" in my head anymore, am not continually distracted by my "issues" so that I can't attend to whatever I feel like attending to. I use to spend a lot of time with my symptoms and use to wonder what I would "do" if I didn't have to spend my time the way I did. Now I don't have any symptoms and can barely remember what it was like before; kind of like a really bad nightmare and now I've awakened.