Therapy is like that: you think it’s over, but there is always the chance of another beginning. I like my therapy conclusions all to be cadences that clearly feel like endings and yet are not final. Let’s be happy about life going on. Therapy is eternal and takes many forms. Remember the glass vessel, and be gentle with your good-byes.
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I define therapy as “care of the soul.” In this sense therapy happens in all places all the time. And this is real therapy—caring, helpful, generous listening and responding.
My first rule of thumb is that therapy itself never ends. No closure. The client may find another therapist or another way to do therapy in the course of life. So I don’t make a big deal of ending. I don’t worry about closure. In fact, I’d rather end with au revoir than good-bye. Until the next time. I want to invite the client to keep thinking about doing therapy in some form. I have it in my mind and therefore in my words that therapy will definitely continue. I want to seed that idea at a time of ending: this is only a pause.
A passage from the poet Wallace Stevens (1989) has guided me for many years in my understanding of both religion and depth psychology: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (p. 189). These words are not as radical as they may sound at first. You just have to accept that everything we say is colored by the limits of our understanding, our emotional biases, and our hopes and wishes. Imagination shapes everything we say and think. Whenever we tell the stories of our lives, we are all novelists. In his book Healing Fiction, Hillman (1983) went further. He said that therapy offers the opportunity to opt into a better fiction, tell a more advanced story about your life.
From the first moment, I’m aware that therapy is a space separate from ordinary conversation. I listen more acutely than usual. I’m tuned in to levels of communication. I listen for the appearance and sound of the soul rather than the intended communication of my client. I hear overtones and reverberations. It’s not like listening at ordinary times in life. It’s not just focused listening, it’s listening for past voices and spirits and angels, to speak metaphorically.
Unsolvable trauma is unsolvable but it is not unresolvable.
In the next series of sessions, as my project got underway, this notion of finding the clinging was often paramount. What could I do to surprise, unsettle, and enliven my patients’ inner lives? While not necessarily religious, these interventions, when successful, could certainly feel spiritual.