end of session / containment

I've been having some challenges with the end of my sessions lately, and I wondered what everyone's experience has been with the last 10 minutes of their hour and leaving the therapy room.

Do you feel ready to leave when the time comes?

Does your therapist do anything to help you depart?

Do you feel "contained" or like whatever you discussed is kind of "put back" so that it's not haunting you all week?

If not, what do you wish for to help the endings? What do you think could help?

Does your T extend the time? Does that ever help? Does it ever affect the next client?

Looking forward to seeing what kinds of experiences people are having across their different modalities/therapies.

Scallion5

I feel ready to leave when the time comes and feel contained. I think I probably drop bombs late on but I'm still learning to open up. I practice mindfulness which helps a lot. My T is existential / humanistic.

I am always ready to leave. I manage the time myself. I would never leave it up to a therapist to do that. The first one I see is especially awful at containment and at knowing when I am dissociated or upset when I leave. I tried telling her but it was worthless. It worked better for me take over.

She almost always goes over if she doesn't have a meeting or client after (she only sees 10 clients and the rest is running the program and training). Usually it's reminders to use my safety plan, care for myself, go to the ER if I need to.

I usually try to sneak in some reassurance.

Sorry you're having trouble with the end of session. That must be tough. I'm surprised I've had relatively little difficulty with this. Maybe it's because I watch the clock like a hawk, and more or less police myself. The result is that I'm almost always ready to leave when it's time to go.

Session materials feel more or less contained--though I think I'm the one who puts them back in their box, not sure what my T does to help with this. He does give a sevenish minute warning ("we're running up against time") and we can wrap up with something lighter. Chit-chat, sort of. He's also very good at giving some departing words that, for whatever reason, come off very genuine and caring ("it was nice to see you. Take care" etc). He has never extended time, but he's constantly late, so maybe he does with other clients. This is pretty solution-focused therapy, if that makes any difference.

I hope this aspect of your therapy gets better soon. Good luck!

Thanks, my trouble is actually that I try to police the time but my T doesn't really. I consciously avoid difficult topics in the last 15-20 minutes; he raises them (though I've asked him to please not.) Leaves me in a tailspin. Am trying to gauge whether other Ts do this as well or understand how to phrase a request to him to, really, please stop raising new stuff in the last quarter.

what would you do if you manage the time yourself, but then your T kept raising big topics toward the end? how do you tell them to stop being dense?

If the therapist tried
- I would just say I am not going to talk about it with only 10 minutes left. I would keep repeating it if the therapist tried again.

I did read your other post. I agree that your T just seems really bad at time management. This is a tough situation. Session management seems sort of like an art, something that the therapist has to learn to do with experience. The ball is largely on his court, so to speak.

If you're committed to staying with this T because he's good in other ways (or for whatever reason) and can put up with having to teach him how to do his job, I would do what Stopdog recommends and just set very firm, explicit boundaries over and over again. "No, I'm not talking about that with ten minutes left." "I really wish you wouldn't bring up things like that so close to the session end." "I've asked you before to please reserve the last few minutes for winding down." I would think that, eventually, he'd learn.

I suppose the other option is to just devote an entire session to addressing this issue. Bring it up. Don't let him change the subject. Ask him WTF he's doing and make him answer. Just say all the things you said in that other post.

Do you think either one of these things would work?

I've set up an extra session on Monday to do exactly that. I plan to just say I am trying my best to respect his boundaries (no phone calls, no emails), but that I need him to respect mine. I do not want new topics/connections in the last 10-15 minutes. I want to focus that time on wrapping up, and I expect him to learn some strategies to help in closing down a session. (Right now, when I do what SD recommends and say "why raise this with 10 m left?" he goes silent! Just stops talking!)

I don't know if I even want to ask him "why" - to me it doesn't matter. I know what I need in this situation and it isn't to have topics that are hard enough to contain within 50 minutes brought up when there's less than 15, then kicked out. Even that being hard enough, the fact that he is doing it AFTER I've already asked him not to because it hurts me makes it seem like some kind of betrayal or purposeful sadism.

I would just let the therapist not talk -and probably point out that they were being either a big baby or punitive.

My T manages the time well. We always use up the full 50mins (except once we ended 4 mins early). She always is on time to start and end. And I always feel contained. She's good about winding down. I can be bawling in the middle of session and by the end she gets me back to calm. Only once was I unsafe to go home. She let me stay for a whole other session. Of course, I had to pay for it...

I think my T would prefer if I led our sessions a bit more, but I'm not very good at that and I prefer that she asks me open-ended questions as it helps me direct my thoughts a bit more. She is good at wrapping up sessions well, when there's about 10 minutes left she asks if there's anything else I'd like to talk about, this gives me enough time to bring something up if I want to but if I don't she usually recaps the session and gives me some goals for next time.

I hope your session today goes well. Here's a reddit thread that might be of interest; https://www.reddit.com/r/psychothera...ssion_on_time/

I struggled with the same issue for a month or so a few weeks back. We're back on track now, but it was something we had to talk about to fix. I don't know if it will continue to work, but he's been much more mindful about when we talk about what things. We got into something kinda deep at 20 after and then he checked in with me at 35 after to see how I was doing so we could plan from there.

It really helped, and it was IMPORTANT because it was affecting the therapy bc I kept feeling abandoned at the end of each session, not knowing or being able to work with my left-open emotions after that.

My T manages the time well. He didn't always. There were sessions that didn't have any winding down and I went home very overwhelmed. That sucked. He's better at that now. And I'm more aware of the clock nowadays too, that also helps.

I have a behavioral therapist. She typically runs over but does wind down. She's pretty good so I don't complain about the time.

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