Client Terminations: When You Have the Opportunity to Say Goodbye
We don't always get to choose our endings, or know when they're happening. When we do, we're given a beautiful opportunity to walk through the process mindfully and with intention.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but the theme of loss and endings has been coming up with astonishing frequency lately.
Over the past few months, I’ve had more than one client encounter a difficult or sudden death in their close circle of family or friends.
There have been themes of estrangement from distant or abusive parents; breakups of important relationships; loss or significant change of health status; loss of self and identity through trauma and recognition of trauma.
I’ve had to say goodbye to some long-term clients as I’ve transitioned out of my insurance-based work with a group practice, while some of the folks at my practice have needed to indefinitely pause services because of changes in their financial or living situations.
For me and mine, it’s been much of the same over the past 6 months: the death of an uncle from pancreatic cancer; divorce and the subsequent fallout of two very hurt young parents; strokes, more cancer scares, the frailty and mortality of aging parents; loss of certainty in career and life path; a deepening sense of isolation from once-vibrant communities of support and love.
It’s been lots and lots of change to deal with.
This past Wednesday, I sat in my final group coaching session for Liberated Business, among a cohort of kickass therapists and coaches reflecting on the challenges and growth we’ve all experienced over the past several months (or, in my case, over the past year). We also spent time reflecting back to our fellow cohort members all of the change, growth, and progress we saw in them. We then danced our way out of the Zoom call, each of us left alone in our respective spaces following the end of a monumental experience.
To be honest, I tend to get all flustered and contract into myself upon giving or receiving those types of reflections in a more personal setting. As funny as it sounds for a therapist to say, I get really tight in the chest with that raw, vulnerable feeling of seeing and being seen, especially when it comes to endings and transitions.
I’ve gotten better over time when it comes to freely giving my positive reflections and appreciation for clients when we’re terminating services, and yet receiving the same in any situation still touches on that same tender nerve that knows—really knows—that loss or change is coming (or has already passed) and that such situations give the opportunity to be witnessed in ways otherwise not readily accessible to us in our day to day lives.
Sitting with the depths of loss, grief, and trauma is one of the core components of our work in mental health and social services, and yet there is so little to clinically prepare you for it until it happens. The moment a client comes to session and discloses a major loss or change in their life, you may have the impulse to re-frame the loss, reassure them, bandage over the wound, or jump right to solutions-focused work. There is nothing quite so stirring as encountering the rawness of another’s grief, and the desire to lift the heaviness from them will likely be strong.
Sit with it. Sit with them. Companion them in their loss without seeking to change it, them, or the feeling. It’s meant to be there.
Similarly, when death, loss, change, or transition comes knocking at your door, the desire to turn away may be strong—overwhelming, unbearable, irresistible. Understandably so, our minds and bodies are designed to protect against the worst of our pains, and for a time, these coping mechanisms are needed, necessary, and non-pathological. We all—well, most of us, anyway—turn away from the pain at first. We wince and shield our eyes, pull into ourselves and hold within our chests a hollowness and bursting sensations all at once. We want it to just go away.
However, that impulse to deny, pave over, distract away from, or otherwise leave unacknowledged the pain, rawness, and hollowed-out sensations of grief, loss, and change can leave us untethered as a balloon drifting out over an open sea—or, alternatively, weighed down and stuck in place, as if a knapsack of rocks, concrete, and lead pipes were slung haphazardly across our shoulders.
Even with expected or wanted changes—moving homes, changing your job, having a child or getting married, a client graduating from therapy, raising your fee and getting off insurance panels, starting a business, graduating university—we might find our excitement and hope riding side-by-side with anxiety, vulnerability, fear, resentment, or overwhelm. The change opens us up to a chasm of hope & worry & anticipation & ambiguity. We wonder why we have such strong reactions to things we knew were coming all along—hell, to the very things we wanted in the first place.
Sit with it. Sit with yourself, and let others sit with you, if you can.
This is something I’ve come to learn and, with stubbornness, appreciate over time, through a variety of losses and endings of my own, and through the losses endured by the ones I love.
While I can’t say that I always like or appreciate the changes and loss that enter my life, I can say that the reflection and integration of such losses has been for me a powerful way of continuing to put one foot in front of the other.
Even when it came to my first marriage unraveling in 2014 at the young age of 25, lost to my spouse’s infidelity and his sudden emotional withdrawal—in addition to getting laid off from a new job and losing a grandfather within the same 2-week timespan—I’ve taken a stepwise journey through the acute and long-term impacts of having my world ripped apart and sewn back together.
And I’m here: a child of divorce and divorced myself since February 2015, teetotaling for over 6 years, now properly medicated for persistent yet dutiful anxiety, with a new-ish marriage, a rented home in the middle-of-nowhere Midwestlandia, and an ever-shifting sense of who I am both professionally and personally, contained within an expansive ocean of noise, laughter, protest, and competing digital & internal voices.
Similarly, whether you have a client who is grieving the loss of an important relationship in their life, or the two of you are preparing to end your therapeutic relationship because of a difference in needs, endings are painful. They test the edges of our spirits and lend emotional evidence to the deeply-held narratives we have about our lives, our struggles, and all that we overcome. Even if we know it needs to happen, even if it’s expected, desired, necessary, important, endings can just plain suck. And often, with the unexpected endings—as is the case when endings are sudden and we’re left to put together the pieces, try to understand, reflect, or process on our own—we can end up feeling adrift once again.
Although many endings and changes are beyond our control, there may be times where the ending of a therapeutic relationship is anticipated on both sides—whether you gently settle into the agreement or endure an irreconcilable rupture where one or both parties determine it’s best to move on—and there are things you can do, dear therapist, to companion the process and lend kindness to the ending as it comes.
Let’s talk about it.
Client Terminations: When You Have the Opportunity to Say Goodbye
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