Posted by pegasus on September 19, 2006, at 13:12:22
In reply to Re: What ethics? » pegasus, posted by gardenergirl on September 19, 2006, at 11:10:25
My understanding from reading *a lot* of literature about therapy terminations recently, is that the ideal situation is to have the client remain in therapy, receiving the "unconditional" positive regard from the therapist until they learn to internalize it and are ready to go on without the external support. At that point the termination becomes about normal saying goodbye stuff, instead of ripping away an external support that the client has come to rely on.
The problem is that so many therapies end for various reasons before the client gets there. So then the ripping away happens. But do you want to avoid letting the client learn how to do it internally, in order to avoid the potential damage of a premature therapy ending? Then you're losing so much of the potential of therapy at all, in my opinion.
My issue with this particular guy is that he wasn't able to let me process my ripping away feelings, possibly because of his own issues while my therapy was ending. He tried to pretend we were doing a normal termination, in which I had already internalized the good stuff. Which caused me a lot of damage. I'll explain my view on that later.
p
poster:pegasus
thread:687097
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060911/msgs/687417.html