Endings are hard, but facing them helps us to heal | Counselling and therapy

TThis is my last column for you. I am shocked and delighted that I have been able to continue for almost two years to say such controversial and true things as: the Oedipal complex is real and we all have one; Psychodynamic psychotherapy is an effective and vital mental health treatment and we must fight for it in the NHS; and Midnight Run is the best movie of all time. It’s been a joy and an honor, and now that we’re here, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of endings.

Because they are important. Sometimes, not having any more time can allow you to feel and say what was impossible before. They can spark an intimacy, truth, and heartbreak that some find overwhelming. It is not uncommon for patients to talk about giving up, or skipping the last session – calling it a waste of time, wanting to leave the room before the end.

But ending is one of the most crucial experiences of good psychotherapy; an opportunity to experience loss and grieve. A chance to feel the disappointment and rage of unfulfilled wishes and met and unfulfilled needs. To put into words the true feelings of abandonment and gratitude, ignorance and despair that accompany the end of something that was important, that we want to hold on to. When we struggle with these feelings since childhood, spend our adult lives unconsciously killing them with addictions or repeating them in unsatisfying relationship dynamics or making them go away, ending therapy offers different possibilities. When you skip the ending, you are robbing yourself. I know all this – but I also understand the urge to leave the room.

My father died when my daughter was nine weeks old. I wondered if I would write a column about it, but I was always hesitant to do so. Now, maybe because it’s my last one, I’m ready.

At the hospital, when we found out he didn’t have much time left, my father told me he was sorry for wasting everyone’s time. It was an electric moment for me. I said we shouldn’t waste this time. What I had learned while writing my book, about growing up over the course of a lifetime, was that this very last chapter of his might well be one of the most significant. That we were extremely lucky to have this time and that he needed to think about how he wanted to use it, what conversations he needed to have.

The reason we were able to have this conversation, the reason I was able to be at his bedside, was because of something my psychoanalyst said. I didn’t want to go to the hospital. I just wanted to be home with my baby, feed him, change diapers, nap. I didn’t want to leave the house – much less into a room where infants weren’t allowed. But my psychoanalyst was talking about the reality that everyone could see except me, because I couldn’t bear to turn to her: “Your father is dying. » It was unbearable until it was said, and that was what I needed to hear to get into the room.

After that, it was possible, somehow, that my father’s bed would be moved out of the ward, where babies were not allowed, to the courtyard, where I could take my newborn with his grandfather. She cried, he sang to her. He made his last phone calls. I fed her on a bench next to her bed. The sun was shining and the air was crisp and cool, shadows dappled on his blankets. We didn’t say much; it was a different type of conversation. This memory is painful and beautiful and one of my most precious moments with my father. It was a gift.

We were lucky; my father had a good death. He had moved to a hospice and I was standing by his bed with my daughter, my mother and our rabbi. As the rabbi spoke his gentle prayers, the familiar Hebrew words seemed to calm my father’s labored breathing into a soft, easy rhythm, and lull my daughter to sleep in my arms. I knew death was near and fear filled my mind: “Will it hurt my child to be so close to death so early in life? Should I leave the room?”

In response, I felt a deep emotional understanding that I think had developed in me over years of desperately running away from my feelings, followed by years of recognizing it in psychoanalysis. The deal was: no, this won’t hurt her or me, this is happening to all of us now and we have to stay in the room. I knew it would be a peaceful death, an important moment in our lives, and that being present could shape it in profound ways we would never know. I didn’t need to protect her from this ending or the feelings that came from it – it would all become a part of her – and me.

Standing in that room helped me realize that even though this start to motherhood was difficult, it was mine. My end – and my beginning. This is what I had to write in my last column, and I can only do it because I know my time is limited and I want to say what matters most. Do not leave the room. This is why I continue to fight for sustained psychodynamic psychotherapy within the NHS. Because I know it can help us stay in the room, whether that room is a psychotherapy consulting room, or your mind, or your own life.

That series was called How to Build a Better Life, but I think what I wrote about, and it’s also what I learned as a patient in psychoanalysis and as a psychotherapist working with patients, and losing my father and becoming a mother and writing for you, is not so much how to build a better life. It’s about how to truly come alive in the life we ​​find ourselves in, so that our time is not wasted.

Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood.