Quote:
Originally Posted by Psychdyke
I had a therapist abruptly terminate me once. Over email, nonetheless. I'm leaving out large portions of the story for anonymity purposes, but basically I had developed a sort of negative maternal transference towards her that she was clearly not trained to deal with. It took several days of heartache and crying to convince myself that I needed proper closure with this therapist. To ask her the hard questions I needed answers to about what had happened with our relationship and to show her how deeply the termination had hurt me. It took about half a dozen unanswered emails begging for a final session that convinced her to meet with me.
It was awkward. It was tough. We both shed some tears and we both said what we needed to say. The experience was extremely therapeutic for me and, I'll wager a guess, enlightening for her as a therapist.
I realized how I had contributed to the termination and decided these were aspects of myself that I would need to continue to work on if I wanted more healthy, successful relationships in the future. I thanked her for all she had done for me. While I wanted to keep her in my life because I actually enjoyed her as a person, I knew that that was not possible and our professional relationship had come to an end.
A final meeting for closure will only work if the therapist is open minded about it and not defensive.
Similarly to ex lovers, the best way to get over a therapist is to get a new one. You will quickly get over your old obsession and probably start a new one if you're still experiencing attachment issues. I still think about my old therapist and feel longing for her. But I have accepted that people come and go in our lives and the best thing to do is hold them in your heart with memories of what they did do for you. Grieve what you have lost, but pick yourself back up again. Because your therapist was only human and full of his/her own faults. You deserve better and you will find someone who loves you as intensely as you love them, if you keep yourself open to it and not stuck on past relationships.
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Psychdyke, I think having a final session like you did is the right thing, and agree T has to be open to it. My T is not open to it. We did have a phone conversation that allowed for some processing, but for me it only scratched the surface plus it was done begrudgingly.
I think when there is strong attachment, termination needs to be planned out carefully. The quotes below talk about this. And one of the things that needs to be anticipated is that it might take months before the client finds a new T who can help. That is my case. Trying to move on but when there is a painful rupture it is much harder.
"An attachment relationship is one that permeates or ‘penetrates’ (Hinde 1979) every aspect of a person’s life in ways that mark it off from others. The more that this is true for a therapeutic relationship, the greater the significance of its ending."
"Attenuated therapy (winding down from intensive work to fortnightly or monthly sessions for a while), or offering an occasional limited series of sessions if a crisis arises in the client’s life, are other examples of helping the client to maintain a live sense of an available attachment figure."