I am experiencing quite a few endings and transitions at present, and I have more to come over the next few months.
My university course is now finished, and my newly-qualified peers and myself are dispersing and moving on to new and multifarious next steps.
I will change supervisor next month, which brings with it both sadness and excitement; I have enjoyed working with my current supervisor, but I am pleased to have found a new supervisor with whom I believe I will be able to continue to develop and grow as a practitioner.
In the next couple of months I will be leaving one of my placements, which of course means endings with clients, and I am mindful of the difficulties this transition might bring for them, as well as managing my own feelings about ending.
I have recently embarked on a new thread to my career, as a content writer for an online educational counselling resource, which is very exciting and challenging, and represents a wonderful opportunity to bring together my twin-passions of psychotherapy and writing.
Lastly (I think!), I will be moving house in the next couple of months. So the landscape of my life and my routine are likely to look quite different by the time I start my research master’s in September.
So how do we manage endings? With regards to my university, I notice in my own process a sense of unreality about finishing the course. This has probably been reinforced by the fact I am returning for the master’s top up, however I will not be seeing peers, engaging with PD and so on; things will be very different and I don’t think my heart has caught up with my head when it comes to the reality of that.
With ending at one of my current placements, I find myself very focused on managing those transitions in a way which is helpful for my clients. While this is undoubtedly an appropriate focus for the therapy room, I need to be aware of the potential emotional impact which these losses are likely to have, probably in part at an unconscious level, and how those processes might become conflated with other change which is occurring in my life. I am in an ongoing process of examining this in supervision and in personal therapy to ensure that my needs in this regard are met outside of my relationships with clients. This isn’t a perfect science of course, but I hope that my awareness of the challenges ahead, and awareness of my patterns in dealing with loss and change will allow me space to navigate this in a way which is as helpful as it can be for all concerned.
I think it is especially useful to look at how we manage change and loss because we will inevitably come face-to-face with loss, grief, feelings of abandonment, difficulty with change and upheaval, and all the feelings which go along with it – from sadness, powerlessness, fear, anger, to excitement and uncertainty – in our work with clients. So our responses to it, how we manage it, our own discomfort and previous experiences are always present and in need of attention in supervision and beyond.
I know from my own experiences as a client that even extended breaks can feel like difficult transitions in the therapeutic relationship, and it may take time for trust and rapport to reestablish after a therapist returns from leave. Are we sufficiently attuned to our clients’ feelings around breaks and changes to the therapeutic frame? I think endeavouring to hear each client, and an openness to therapeutic meta-dialogue are, as ever, vitally important. I would argue that even changes to session time or a room change may represent difficult transitions for some clients, and it’s important to be alert to this, and open to therapeutic discussion.
So as I take these floating thoughts and feelings and try to make sense of them in my own process, I return to my own imminent transitions and uncharted territory ahead. As I reflect on what is to come, I feel rather comforted by reminding myself that many of the relationships, experiences and memories I will carry forward with me into my master’s year were, just a few years ago, uncharted territory too.
A Client First 