![\"Youth](\"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/sitting-on-sofa-looking-to-side-e1468430507149-300x381.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ending a therapy session is a hostile act.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ending a therapy session is a hostile act.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
This was said to me by my<\/em> therapist once after we discussed how, regardless of whether I had a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153good\u00e2\u20ac\u009d session or a frustrating one, I usually felt annoyed at the end. Either I was upset it was over and afraid of losing momentum, or I was upset we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get to the heart of what I wanted to talk about. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d question whether anything really changed because of the therapy session, and I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t recognize the importance of the feelings that arose at the end of a session or what that ending was doing to me.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that annoyance inevitably dissolved by the start of the next session. A whole other week had passed, and other things had come up. Feelings (as they are wont to do) had come and gone.\u00c2\u00a0It was difficult to find a way to process that fleeting end-of-session feeling.<\/p>\n [fat_widget_right]<\/p>\n I tried several ways to hold on to the feeling I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have at the end of a session because I believed it was important. With one previous therapist, I got permission to record our sessions and then listen to the recording on the way to my next session. (I stole this idea from Irvin Yalom.) The idea was to connect each session to the previous one. This technique didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t last. It was too much of a commitment: spending a whole other chunk of time rehashing the previous week. Also, it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take into consideration what I was feeling at the time of the new session, which was just as valid.<\/p>\n Another tactic I tried was to jot down notes as I left therapy. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d write down any insights I thought I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d want to return to or ideas I thought about as the session ended. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d try to record associations I made later that day or that week. This helped a little (sometimes I still do this).<\/p>\n Doing that had reminded me of how I used to go to a coffee shop near my therapist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s office and journal for a while before meeting with her. That journaling<\/a> became agenda writing: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d compile a list of all the stuff I wanted to make sure we spoke about.<\/p>\n Gosh, I was working hard. And sometimes we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d get to a lot of that agenda. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d really get somewhere and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d settle in to how I was feeling and \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Time\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s up.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153More to say next week.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n She could end at 45 minutes, but I had to keep living my life. I had to go back out into the world and manage and deal and, well, I wanted to be finished. Complete. My therapist hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t done her job because I needed to come back next week, right?<\/span><\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all the time we have.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Or my favorite:<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To be continued.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Those phrases would annoy me so much. They made me feel that, to my therapist, I was only 45 minutes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 worth of purging. She could end at 45 minutes, but I had to keep living my life. I had to go back out into the world and manage and deal and, well, I wanted to be finished. Complete. My therapist hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t done her job because I needed to come back next week, right?<\/p>\n It took a long time for me to realize this was anger<\/a>.<\/p>\n It took a while to express it as anger.<\/p>\n It took quite some time (and another therapist\u00e2\u20ac\u201da man this time) to relate that anger at being \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cut off\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to all the other shames and endings and cut-offs in my life.<\/p>\n The end of a therapy<\/a> session can provide a lot of important fuel because it brings the feeling toward the therapist. This happens when the person in therapy feels safe enough to let the therapist \u00e2\u20ac\u0153have it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It happens when the person trusts that the therapist isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to become defensive or punitive for expressing feelings they have spent weeks talking about.<\/p>\n This is the relational part of many types of therapy. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bringing real-world emotion<\/a> into the therapy room where it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most potent, where it can be held and fully expressed.<\/p>\n Written into the process of therapy is that the caring, patient<\/a>, empathic<\/a> person you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re paying to listen to you and witness your life will tell you time is up. That should<\/em> suck. That should<\/em> make you upset. And you should say all that to your therapist.<\/em> And if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re aware of those feelings at the end of a session, let your therapist know you need help expressing them at the next session.<\/p>\n I do the same thing now. I tell people it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time to end a session and they have all kinds of feelings. Sometimes there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s relief. Often there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s annoyance. Sometimes there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intense anger. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m always glad when they have enough courage<\/a> to tell me how they feel about it.<\/p>\n Sometimes I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m brave enough to tell my therapist as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00e2\u20ac\u0153More next week.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Time’s up.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the dreaded \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To be continued.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The end of a therapy session can inspire difficult feelings, and rightly so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[542],"tags":[31,49],"class_list":["post-32365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-articles","tag-psychotherapy-practice","tag-considering-psychotherapy"],"acf":{"author_show":false,"author_name":"","author_role":"","author_avatar":null,"author_profile_url":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Holding on to Feelings Between Therapy Sessions<\/h2>\n
Talk to Your Therapist About These Feelings<\/h2>\n