Goodbyes in Life and Psychotherapy: Finding Meaning in Endings
Saying goodbye is something we do every day, often casually and with the full intention of seeing each other again. But beneath the casual "au revoirs", most of us carry a few significant goodbyes that stand out in our personal landscape—usually related to bereavements, relationship breakdowns, or major life changes.
These major losses are paid homage to and fully felt, sometimes with professional support. But what of the goodbyes that go unsaid? What about the frequent, smaller shifts in our life patterns and their accompanying endings? What could we gain from pausing a moment to acknowledge them?
Goodbyes in the Therapy Room
Goodbyes are an integral and vital part of psychotherapy. The most obvious milestone is the ending of therapy itself—a goodbye not just to a process, but to a person.
When you sit with a therapist for 50 minutes each week, trusting them with your deepest wounds, the relationship becomes intimate and potentially transformative. In normal circumstances, the ending of this bond is planned for, openly discussed, and acknowledged.
However, during the course of therapy, we also encounter older, hidden losses that haven't yet been grieved. These often involve natural transitions, such as:
Ending a relationship
Changing jobs
Moving house
Leaving school or university
Changing our "social tribe" or friend group
Because these shifts are frequently desirable or necessary, we minimize the pain. Familiar phrases like "It was good while it lasted" or "All good things come to an end" pay lip service to comfort while completely discounting the underlying sting. Denying this pain obscures what was truly valuable about what we miss.
The Power of Acknowledgment
In Marie Kondo's well-known tidying method, she suggests that when we struggle to throw away clothes we once loved but no longer wear, we should take a moment to thank the item for what it gave us, and then say goodbye.
In this small gesture lies the secret to respectful goodbyes. Whether in the therapy room or the outside world, a healthy ending requires acknowledgment, grieving, and gratitude.
When pondering what it means to say goodbye, we can capture the internal process through four profound statements:
1. "I will miss you"
These words refer to an intimacy that is difficult to verbalize. When we say them, we are acknowledging the loss of what that person or role was for us in a specific context—missing them as a mentor, a colleague, a confidant, or a coffee buddy. It affirms that we exist in relationships and are unavoidably shaped by them. While it highlights an absence, it also celebrates the gift of what they gave us. If "grief is the price we pay for love," then felt loss is simply the risk we take for rewarding attachments.
2. "I will treasure this"
Gratitude is the flip side of loss. This statement shifts our focus from what is absent to what endures within us. It creates an emotional and mental placeholder for the experience, building a "continuing bond" that stays with us long after the physical presence has gone.
3. "I am changed by this"
Finding meaning in an experience requires us to understand its impact. How are we different? What will we do differently now ? As the novelist Milan Kundera noted, the addition of experiences and people is the exact process by which we build our sense of self. What we say goodbye to becomes a permanent part of our identity.
4. "I wish it could have been different"
Regret is often seen as a pointless mental activity that produces pain without purpose. But appropriate regret, in measured doses, is a valuable source of learning. From the question "What do I wish had been different?" comes "What will I do differently next time?" This step requires immense self-compassion, allowing us to reflect on our dashed hopes in a non-judgmental, self-soothing manner.
Drawing the Work to a Close
We are meaning-making creatures. Spending time understanding what each passing experience contributes to our unique identity is a vital exercise. By taking the time to fully say goodbye, we stop skipping past the sadness and instead honor the richness of the chapters we leave behind.