Why endings are important in counselling

To help with an appropriate ending, I find it useful to give the client an opportunity in the last session to reflect on their counselling sessions and to think about the future. Clients who feel sadness at the end of counselling sessions, I find reflection helps them see the positive work they have achieved and recognise how they can cope on their own without the regular sessions of seeing their counsellor.

To help them to reflect and consolidate what has happened throughout our counselling relationship and to assist them to think about the future, I give the clients an ending sheet before our last session. Clients come to our last sessions with these sheets and this session is focused around their answers. This Ending sheet for counselling is welcomed by my clients and I often hear them say how it is helped them see how far they have progressed and how much they have managed to achieved throughout our time together.

Naturally a few clients do not fill in this sheet. With these clients I will reflect to them on our last session to how I feel they have progressed and encourage them to do this by using visual aids. Clients are free to take the ending sheet home with them. A few clients have chosen to rip the form apart and throw it in the bin — i. If clients struggle to think of coping strategies or suffer from low-self esteem, I give the clients a coloured card and they write down 4 or 5 positive statements about themselves so when they next feel low they can look at this card and remind them how they have the resources in themselves to cope.

The client sometime choose to write a letter to themselves on the card. I like your ways of helping, encouraging clients with aftercare, as I feel it is very important that a client feels they have achieved and are validated.

The process of going to counselling, travelling there and to be able to open up deep issues is not easy for many. It can feel exposing and vulnerable, many times we do not realise how much, and after a session they may feel no place to put these often raw emotions. I myself felt that I was going from one extreme to another, feeling suppressed memories in an hour to trying to appear fine after,exhausting.

The importance of having practical coping mechanisms in place are vital if the client likes to, I know I wish I had but will use some of your tools now. This celebration of the therapy can also be part of our own healing too.

See Joyce, A. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, for an in-depth examination of clinical, theoretical, and empirical literature about ending psychotheraputic practice. How much is Enough?

London: Routledge — offers a readable psychoanalytic take. Integrative Psychotherapy: the Art and Science of Relationship. Relational Psychotherapy: A Primer. New York: Brunner-Routledge.

Skip to content Jump to menu. Handout — Chapter 10 — Evaluating Therapy Using Outcome Measures PDF Just as endings are an unavoidable part of everyday life, they are found in every corner of the therapy relationship. Deciding to end Endings can be mutual, forced or unilateral. Stock-taking A key ending process we need to engage is to review and evaluate the therapy. Concluding reflections Endings are often challenging.

Then, when our client is ready to be on their way, we need to let them go… Part of our role as therapists is to help clients face the pain of the goodbye as part of embracing life… And then we are obliged to let go with grace. Related to both these perspectives, a body of research also offers support for the importance of the therapeutic relationship during the termination phase Knox et al. Intrigued by the therapeutic relationship at the end of therapy, Charles J. Following the widely used definition by Bordin , the working alliance was conceptualized in terms of the working bond and the agreement of tasks and goals between the therapist and the client.

Gelso defined the real relationship as the personal bond between the therapist and the client, characterized by the extent to which the therapist and client are genuine with each other and perceive each other realistically, and this conception of the real relationship was used in the study.

How do therapist perceptions of working alliance, real relationship and transference during the termination phase relate to the success of the overall treatment and the effectiveness of the termination phase?

How do therapist perceptions of client sensitivity to loss associate with transference during the termination phase? Our sample consisted of licensed therapists in the U. Therapists participating in the study identified a termination phase of treatment in their work with a client.

The major findings of the study and recommendations for clinical practice are discussed below. How can the results of the study inform therapeutic work? I offer below suggestions to consider during the termination phase. It is important to note here that these suggestions are not direct guidelines emerging from the results of the study; rather they are based on possible interpretations of the findings of this study, as well as on clinical impressions in therapeutic work. These recommendations need to be considered along with a theoretical understanding of individual cases in treatment.

As per therapist reports, the average percentage of time spent on bringing treatment to an end by talking about termination was found to be approximately 17 percent of the total number of sessions, a number similar to the Perhaps this number can provide a rough estimate of the time to be spent on bringing treatment to a close although more research in this realm is certainly needed.

Therapist reports reveal that the role of the alliance is particularly important during the termination phase. In light of this finding, it seems helpful to revisit the alliance and bring it to the forefront of therapeutic work during the termination phase.

It may also help to discuss goals pertaining specifically to the termination phase to strengthen the alliance during the termination phase. For instance, in therapeutic work with a client expressing difficulty with ending relationships, the therapist and client may determine together to work through the end of the therapeutic relationship by providing a space for the client to mourn and express feelings about the ending.

The strength of the personal bond between the therapist and the client during the termination phase also relates to good outcomes. Thus, it would benefit therapists to pay attention to the real relationship during the termination phase.

Therapists can use the following questions to reflect on the strength of the real relationship; is there a real and personal relationship between the client and I, over and above a professional relationship? Am I able to understand and express what I truly feel about my client? Does my client appear to be sharing vulnerable material with me? These are just a few examples of questions that might provide insight into the strength of the real relationship see Gelso, These feelings seem to be both positive and negative, at least in the eyes of the therapist, and not necessarily related to negative outcomes.

Tending to transference, both positive and negative in valence, would likely represent areas of meaningful therapeutic work during termination. To conclude, the termination phase in therapeutic work offers a unique opportunity to reflect on the ending relationship and to process the ending in the context of previous losses. Key implications for therapists include tending to the working alliance, real relationship and transference during the termination phase and evaluating the effectiveness of the termination phase of therapeutic work.

Bhatia, A. June, Ending therapy: The therapeutic relationship during the termination phase. Psychotherapy , 54 , Bordin, E. The generalizability of the psychoanalytic concept of the working alliance. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, 16,