There are relationships in our lives that are difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced them. I think the relationship with a good therapist can be one of those.A therapist knows things about us that many other people don’t. They have sat with us through some of our hardest moments. They may have watched us cry, wrestle, get angry, make progress, go backward two steps, and then move forward again. They know pieces of our story that we do not tell many people.
And then, sometimes, we have to say goodbye.
I recently had to say goodbye to a therapist I trusted deeply. The ending wasn’t because therapy had gone badly. In many ways, that made saying goodbye harder. She was leaving the practice where I had been seeing her, and I had to face the reality that this relationship, at least in the form I had known it, was ending.
There is grief for me in that. And the strange thing is, I can’t process my grief with her—which is exactly what I long to do. Because she knows me so well. She would be able to help me make sense of what I’m feeling and help me figure out what steps I might take next to get through it.
Except she is the person I am grieving.
We often think about therapy as something clinical: You make an appointment. You talk for an hour. Your insurance gets billed. You go home.
But when therapy is good, something much more profound happens in that room. Trust develops. Someone learns your story. They remember where you have been. They recognize your patterns. Sometimes they see growth in you before you can see it yourself.
And when that relationship ends, I think part of saying goodbye is looking back.
Who was I when I first walked into that therapist’s office? What was I carrying? What have I learned since then? What can I do now that I couldn’t do before? What truths have become part of me rather than something my therapist has to remind me of?
For me, I started seeing this therapist when I was experiencing chronic pain. She understood—she deals with chronic pain of her own. And I wanted a therapist who knew chronic pain AND knew the Lord, because my faith in Jesus is an integral part of who I am. I wanted a counselor who would intuitively understand that part of me without having to explain my faith, my worldview, or why those things affected the decisions I made. This therapist loves the Lord, too, so we had that in common.
Over time, we moved from discussing how to serve the Lord while dealing with pain to issues around aging, family, relationships, and communication patterns.
She taught me that “courage is doing something scared.” And her faith in me helped me push past some fears and have difficult conversations. I did them scared, with lots of prayer that God would be my courage and strength.
And He was. He is.
I was sharing with a friend recently that the two therapists I’ve had whom I consider really “good” had something important in common. I could spill all these jumbled pieces out in front of them, and somehow they could take those pieces, make sense of them, and give them back to me with some order and structure. Suddenly, I could understand myself a little better.
That is a remarkable gift.
And maybe that is why saying goodbye to a good therapist really does involve grief. You aren’t just losing an appointment on your calendar. You are losing a particular person who knew how to sit with the jumbled pieces of your life and help you make sense of them.
So that loss deserves to be acknowledged.
I think one of the things I am learning through this experience is that ending therapy well means allowing yourself to feel whatever the ending brings. Gratitude and sadness can exist at the same time. You can know that something has been very good and still grieve that it is changing.
But maybe there is another gift hidden in the goodbye.
It gives us an opportunity to recognize that the work we did in therapy doesn’t belong to the therapist.
It belongs to us.
The insights we gained are ours. The healthier patterns we practiced are ours. The boundaries we learned to set are ours. The hard truths we finally faced are ours. The courage we learned to practice is something we can keep practicing.
A good therapist may have helped us discover those things, but we get to carry them with us when we leave.
For those of us living with a mental health diagnosis—or loving someone who does—there can be another concern: What happens if I need help again?
Ending with one therapist doesn’t mean we will never need therapy again. It doesn’t mean we’ve graduated from needing support. It simply means that this particular season and this particular therapeutic relationship have come to an end.
And perhaps part of ending well is knowing that asking for help again someday will not erase the progress we have made.
But I also know I am not walking into whatever comes next alone. The therapist who has walked beside me may no longer be there in the same role, but God is. He was with me before I walked into her office, He was present in the work we did together, and He will be with me in whatever comes next.
And there are other kinds of support along the way, too. Therapy is one important part of the mental health journey, but it doesn’t have to be the only one. Peer support, like what we find in Fresh Hope groups, gives us a place to be known, encouraged, and reminded that we don’t have to navigate our mental health journeys alone.
So if you are approaching your last appointment with a therapist who has mattered to you, don’t feel as though you have to treat it like just another appointment.
Talk about the ending.
Say what the relationship has meant to you. Talk about what you have learned. Ask what your therapist has seen change in you. Talk about what you want to carry forward. And if you’re sad, let yourself be sad.
Goodbyes are sometimes painful precisely because something has been good.
And maybe the goal isn’t to leave without sadness.
Maybe the goal is to leave knowing that what happened in that room mattered—that we carry what we learned with us, and that the God who met us there will be with us in whatever comes next.
Peggy has been involved with Fresh Hope as a Group Facilitator for over 8 years and as the Hope Coach Trainer for over 6 years. She can be reached at peggy@freshhope.us.
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