Parting ways

This theme shows how participants prematurely terminated therapy. Three participants enacted an ending, two participants sent an email saying they were not returning, and one participant was congruent about their dissatisfaction.

Sophie described how she left therapy by enacting a planned ending. She recalled, “I had given her some warning. I can’t recall to be perfectly honest, but probably I would have given her four weeks ending [pause] out of courtesy”. She did not make her therapist aware that she was prematurely terminating therapy, and reflected, “I dropped out of therapy. I didn’t work towards an ending”. Interestingly, there are two strands to how she dealt with this. Firstly, she followed what she perceived to be therapy etiquette. Her personal values informed how she dealt with her ending.

Secondly, she tried to protect herself from “being told off”. Even though Sophie exercised her power by performing an ending, this did not obscure the enduring power of the therapist. Her ambivalence towards her therapist is clear in the following extract:

“I remember her face because she’d obviously thought I was giving her a gift but I was just returning the book, and her face sort of lit up with this appreciation of this gift, and again, I think this was me getting my power back, and I thought, ‘no you’re not getting a gift from me because I don’t want to give you anything. I’ll give you back what’s yours and no more and it was very much that’”. (Sophie)

It appears that the therapist had no insight into Sophie’s process, which intensified the performative quality of the ending.

The enactment of an ending was forced on to Caroline. Even though she had previously told her therapist that she wanted to end, her therapist assumed that there was a financial problem. Caroline felt trapped because it was clear that she still had issues to work through and she did not want to hurt her therapist. Caroline described the final session as “excruciating”. She recalled, “and I was just sitting there, ‘oh God roll on, roll on, roll on 20 past 10 and I can go’”. In this extract, Caroline describes how powerless she felt even when she exercised her power. Her repetition of “roll on” indicates just how challenging performing an ending was. As in Sophie’s termination, the therapist seemed unaware that Caroline was dissatisfied.

John enacted his ending differently. He performed perceived therapy etiquette by thanking his therapist and making an excuse to prematurely terminate. He recalled,

“I said, ‘well it’s been very nice but I’m not sure that this type of counselling is for me. I’m going to look for a different kind of therapist. I hope you don’t mind’”.

Like Sophie and Caroline, his perception of his therapist’s power was foregrounded even as he reclaimed his power. He explained further:

“I think I was more trying not to hurt the lady’s feelings, or get her antagonised, or to say that I didn’t really find that I was getting any benefit from it. I was probably being more sensitive to her than she was being to me and my needs. She had all the qualifications and I had nothing”. (John) Alison and Emma emailed their therapists to say they would not be returning. In both cases, this followed a break in the therapy.

The only participant who was congruent with her therapist about her reasons for prematurely terminating therapy was Olivia (therapy 2). She drew on her first experience in therapy to explain why she thought this was important:

“The fact that I walked out [in the first therapy experience] and I felt even worse by the counsellor not contacting me…I thought, ‘well actually if you’re going to stop the sessions you should let the counsellor know and let them know why’, and really, for me, her approach just didn’t suit me”.

(Olivia, therapy 2)

Unfortunately, this was not a positive experience for Olivia. She recalled, “she put it all back on me that it was me that was stopping the process because I was expecting too much from her”.

This was a confusing experience for Olivia:

“I feel if the client actually tells you they’re dropping out it’s a really big thing because for me, when I didn’t tell them, [pause] I think probably it left me, I was probably scared of not telling them. So for a client to say, ‘I’m dropping out because it’s not working for me’ is quite a big thing for a client, isn’t it?”. (Olivia, therapy 2)

This extract shows how this experience created a further loss of trust for Olivia, not only in the therapy but in herself. Her use of “it left me” suggests a state of inner conflict when she did not work through an ending with a therapist. There was an expectation by Olivia that doing something different in her second therapy experience would prevent this from happening again.

The participants described a mixture of feelings when they prematurely terminated therapy. Sophie recalled, “when I did leave and the final session and back in the car and heading home, just the relief of, I don’t have to do that anymore”. For Sophie, therapy had been endured. She reflected, “and when I did drop out of therapy with her, that sense of getting my power back was very, very strong”.

Caroline was also relieved to leave therapy. She recalled, “I was just really, really glad to be away because it did feel like I’d been trapped”. Alison’s feeling of relief was short-lived. She recalled, “it was a relief, but then again I thought, ‘oh God, I’ll have to go through all of that again, telling someone new everything from the start’”.

Emma reported a similar experience. She reflected, “you just walk away chuntering under your breath or feeling dissatisfied that you didn’t get what you had hoped you would get”. The way the therapist dealt with John’s decision to prematurely terminate made him feel relieved and annoyed. His therapist responded in a dismissive way. He recalled, “there was fine [slaps palms on knees] bye. That’s your choice”. John reflected on how he felt about this, “a little bit the wind out of my sails. I thought, ‘well that’s that then, that’s all I mean, I’m the disposable client’”. Olivia was left feeling angry after both of her experiences of PT. She felt

uncared for by the first therapist, and told off by the second therapist. None of the participants indicated that they regretted leaving; in fact John and Emma wish they had done so earlier.