Ghosting Your Therapist? 5 Benefits of Saying Goodbye
5 things you gain when you choose to say goodbye instead of ghosting:
1. Practice Saying Goodbye
It’s difficult to say goodbye and it’s human nature to want to avoid difficult feelings. You may not have seen positive goodbyes modeled by adults growing up and you may not know how to say goodbye as an adult.
Saying goodbye when you have decided to leave therapy is an excellent opportunity to practice a healthy goodbye. Having the ability to say goodbye is a sign of emotional maturity.
2. Gaining Self-Awareness
If you find yourself struggling to say goodbye, get curious about what is coming up for you.
Some common things that could be coming up are:
Worry about hurting your therapist’s feelings
Being hurt or angry at your therapist and struggling with confrontation/ expressing feelings
Being ambivalent about leaving; you aren’t as interested in therapy anymore, but you are afraid of definitively closing the door.
Understanding more about what is scary or off-putting about saying goodbye gives you valuable information about yourself.
How you are in relationships inevitably shows up in the relationship with your therapist. Challenging yourself to wonder about this aspect of yourself stands to benefit you in the many relationships and many goodbyes in your future.
3. Corrective Experience
Part of what makes therapy healing is the corrective experience. For example, Highly Sensitive People and people who experienced Childhood Emotional Neglect, often enter into adulthood expecting their feelings to be invalidated or dismissed. Perhaps it hasn’t been the norm for important people in your life to be open to hearing that your feelings are hurt or that you’re angry with them.
Having your therapist respect, care, and want to understand is a corrective experience. It doesn’t take away previous invalidation or neglect, but it adds a different outcome. It helps you understand what it feels like to be respected and understood and to see that it is possible in relationships.
4. Reflection
When therapy is coming to an end, it is enormously helpful for you to reflect with your therapist about what you have worked on. Where did you begin, what were the initial goal and where are you today?
Reflecting together on the work helps to cement your progress. It respects all of the time and effort you put into therapy. You can gain perspective on your work thus far as well as gain insight into how you hope to grow in the future.
5. Clarity
Ending the relationship with a goodbye provides clarity for both you and the therapist which equals peace of mind long term. It’s finished business. When we haven’t said goodbye, we’re more likely to ruminate. Our brain takes us back, again and again, to unfinished business. It’s a relief to have clarity.
If you’ve left therapy without saying goodbye, it’s always okay to reach out no matter how long it's been– whether you are reaching out just to say goodbye or if you wish to resume your work.
It’s recommended to have at least one session at the end of therapy, sometimes called a ‘termination session’. When you’ve worked together longer, it can be useful to have more time to bring your work to a close together. It’s okay to bring up moving on when it’s on your mind. Your therapist can work with you to determine what makes sense for your unique situation.
While you may not have much experience saying goodbye, your therapist does. Therapists routinely say goodbye as clients move on, which can be difficult because we care about our clients and wonder how they are doing long after our last session together. You don’t owe your therapist a goodbye, but you miss out on a valuable layer of the work if you decide to ghost.