Loving What I Leave

The Decision

Early February, 2011. I am planning a trip to a family wedding in California in May. I also want a long vacation both at home and at our Colorado cabin. Frustrated at working out my vacation time (too many weeks for someone in private practice), I become unaccountably angry when a long-term client asks if I am going to take my usual August vacation (she means August only). I think but don’t say, “Why are you asking me about my summer plans?” “What business is it of yours?” My higher Self reminds me, “Well, she’s your client and has a right to know your plans.”

I find myself being vague with clients when they ask me my plans. I know they are anxious. My vacations and time away from my 26-year clinical psychology practice have been longer of late. Last year Amy, exasperated, asked if I were even coming back from vacation. She mailed me several anxious dreams about looking for me and not being able to find me. Though we worked through the therapeutic aspects of her fears, I knew she had a point in fact. I feel uncertain about how long I will work; clients are picking up on my uncertainty. “Not so good,” I tell myself. “They deserve better.” I have tried to adopt the model of mutuality and authenticity taught at the Jean Baker Miller Center at Wellesley. Now I face a challenge to my authenticity. The vulnerability of my clients has to be protected, at the same time that I recognize my own legitimate right to maintain my own privacy. I am ambivalent and I don’t want to talk to my clients about my ambivalence.

I seek counsel with my doctor friend Pat, who, while younger than I am, has worked out her own careful downsizing steps. She muses that my life kayak seems to have begun its plunge through the rapids, and there’s no turning back. I feel exhilarated as I imagine braving that unexplored chute. Suddenly, over the weekend, I discover that I’ve already made my decision. I won’t plan my work life around the wedding or my desire for a long vacation, nervously counting the weeks I should not be away. It’s way too late in my work life for a sabbatical. No, I will close my practice. I feel buoyant as a great sense of relief washes over me as I rest easily in a calm spot in the river of my decision.

I know that endings often slam into us like a rudely closed door—the sudden death of a beloved other, a disease that will lead to death or drastic limitation, getting fired, facing infertility, going bankrupt, or losing our home in the mortgage crisis. Sometimes we choose an ending—retirement, a move to another job, leaving a relationship, or selling a house. I can hardly believe that I am choosing to stop doing work that I have loved—a profession that I chose and crafted as a second career. I (usually) love providing psychotherapy. In the face of my new discovery, I find tentative solace in Lucille Clifton’s poem (1987), “i am running into a new year . . . and it will be hard to let go/of what I said to myself/about myself . . . .” For 30 years I have called myself a psychotherapist.

Feb. 12: I write a desultory, distant, first draft letter informing my clients, present and past, of my plans to close my practice in 3 months. Out of sheer embarrassment I won’t include it here. My husband Gary reads it and says he can tell I am “far away,” and I am. I want this part to be over. I feel “de-realized,” strangely hovering over my life as I watch it go past. I’m not letting myself feel anything after feeling so much with my clients and for them, through the years. Self-protection has set in. If I feel all my love and respect for them, I can’t leave. My first draft carries all the warmth of a sales-rep informing customers that she’s been transferred. I try again:

Feb. 14, 2011

Dear Friends,

I started my practice of psychotherapy as a well-chosen second career in 1985. I have been in my current location in the historic Higgins building since 1986. This quiet, lovely space has sheltered and held our work together. We have explored your stories, held deep and rich exchanges that enlivened our time together, and found the way to healing transformations. I have felt heartened and privileged to work, laugh and cry with you over the years. I could not have been guided to a better way for me to use my calling toward healing and wholeness. The time has come, however, for me to announce the closing of my practice of psychotherapy on May 18, three months from now. I have made this decision after much reflection, guidance and discernment, and as you might imagine, it has not been an easy one. (details and practicalities follow . . . )

I want you to know that I am healthy and at peace with my decision to move into this “third chapter” of my life, hoping to remain active, creative, and to use my gifts well, even if in a different way . . . .

I will miss you and think of you. I know myself well enough at this time in my life to be certain that the love and caring I feel for each of you reside permanently in my heart and soul.

Warmly,

Joyce

***

Why Do I Need to Stop?

I need to stop to decide what else I really want to do. My sometimes stuffed-full life often has taken me into areas where I am half-prepared. My current decision reminds me of an encounter during one of my trips to Costa Rica, where I led a retreat with my friend Gayle, a fluent Spanish speaker. I’d always meant to learn Spanish but hadn’t found or made the time. We had wandered into a small shop for lunch, owned by a Caribbean woman with five teen-age sons whom she managed along with our hamburger order. Speaking Spanish, Gayle bragged about me to our gregarious new friend. The woman just looked at me after a while and said in Spanish, “if she’s so smart, why can’t she talk?” I have led retreats for women to Spanish-speaking countries for 20 years, tagging along, not learning the language. Dear friends have learned that I am usually too busy to join them for lunch or getaways. I love to teach but often feel “almost prepared” for whatever I teach, not going into the classroom with a sense of “teaching from the overflow of what I know.” I want time to prepare for what else I love to do.

I need to stop because my persona defines too much of who I am. “The persona is a solidifying of personality, half-consciously sculpted for everyday life in the workplace and the street.” (Rowland, 2010, p. 17) I live in a small town; I go nowhere without seeing my clients. I crave the anonymity of a big city and of travel. My introverted Self loves moving through a place where I am completely unknown. I take some of my best vacations by myself, knowing no one, in safe places, to be sure, like 26 years at a fitness resort in Mexico. In exhaustion, once I cried that I “dress myself up as Joyce Hocker and send her off to work.” My closet holds primarily career clothes, workout clothes, and hang-around-at-home clothes. I’d have to scramble for something attractive to wear to a casual party. I long for my private life, which vanished when I started studying psychology in 1978 and lost my academic summers. Private practice, the description of my profession, describes the experience of the client, not the therapist. They receive the privacy they deserve; I feel exposed to too much scrutiny as I go about my nonwork life. I want my privacy, too.

I need to stop because grief colonized my psyche in 2004 and 2005. Grief sapped much of my vitality, and my desire to work into my 80s. I made a serious mistake back then when I denied myself significant time off, to begin to integrate my losses. I used to say, half jokingly, “I have a bad boss.” I thought I needed to rush back to work every time I was away to care for three dying family members. While I often urged clients to take time off during major crises, I never even thought about taking a sabbatical for my own personal needs. One year I was on the plane 17 times just for personal, not business, reasons. Many of my clients did not know that I was grieving, just that I had “family emergencies.” I would cancel a half day here or there when I could not face going to the office, but I did not treat myself the way I counseled all my clients to treat themselves—with tender mercies befitting one who grieves.

I need to stop because I have already slowed down, and slowing down isn’t enough. I stopped taking new clients 2 years ago. There’s no fluff in my practice, only dear and hardworking people who use their time in sessions well. And still I am exhausted at the end of a week. It’s not them, it’s me.

I need to stop because the weight of my clients’ stories piles up faster than I can recover and find my own center. Just now, writing in our family cabin in Colorado, I log on to an old computer to see if it still works. I see that 3 years ago I received emails from several clients almost every day. The fact that these messages exist reveals more about my porous boundaries than their psychological states. Through the years, with the advent of email, I allowed some clients to write between sessions. My mind, as well as my in-box, became ever more full of client stories and concerns. Thankfully, I am not able to open the messages at this late date, but the titles are enough to jog my memory. “Lab scan,” “processing our session,” “my mother is driving me nuts,” “I thought you could help me with this dream,” “my vacation plans,” “workout success!” and “Saw Bill and Sharon today.” If I need any evidence of how I allowed the life stories of others to occupy too much space in my own interior, vacation life, here it is. I withdrew email correspondence expectations with the people I had given my address to. A colleague helped me disentangle from this constant onslaught of information, which I probably should never have invited. I see now that I was caretaking rather than insisting that my clients had within themselves what they needed to get through my vacation. Even though I did not write back to my clients, the mundane and significant stories of my clients moved to the foreground instead of remaining in the background to my life. As my Oklahoma friend, Gayle, says, “girl, you’re letting those people rent too much space in your brain.” They (and I) got through that recalibrating of boundaries phase and once again I had my in-box free for friends and family, relying on my emergency pager for real emergencies.

I need to stop because I recover from the work of connection, remembering, and meaning-making more slowly than I did in the early years of my practice. As an introvert, this quiet working life plus my own life brings me all the drama, heartache, healing, and hilarity I need. Leaving the academy to pursue this second career, I carefully set up my new work life 26 years ago. Office hours by appointment, no one knocks on the door except errant UPS people, the phone doesn’t ring, and I don’t grade papers. But that does not mean I neatly leave work at the office. I did finally learn to leave my worry and anxiety behind, saying to myself, “all I can do is be fully present when I am with each person. The rest is up to them.” That worked most of the time; with a busy practice, however, often someone was in a genuine crisis. That’s partly why they sought me out. I find now that my Feeling function, using Myers-Briggs language, seems to have developed an autoimmune disorder. I “feel connected” all the time. I am seldom off-duty in my emotional life. My one extroversion point, which along with Feeling connects me to the world outside, appears frayed. I need to rest from others’ stories, I need to care from a distance, and I need time to drift. As I write this, I have been following Mary Oliver’s advice in “The Summer Day,” (1990) when she counsels, after a day of intense but purposeless wandering, “Tell me what else should I have done?/Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?/Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

***

The Termination Phase

Feb. 23: A Test. I’ve been back for a few weeks from a women’s retreat I led north of Puerta Vallarta in January. I haven’t recently checked my account at the bank, since my bookkeeper takes care of my business finances once a month. I have been using my business account to stash cash so I have a cushion when I stop work. Anita at the bank asks if I want my balance and I casually say, “no, it doesn’t matter, things are pretty routine since Sally handles it.” Anita looks concerned, pointing out, “I notice something strange here.” Turning her screen around so I can see it, I see 20 withdrawals of the same amount each day from Aguas Calientes. “Didn’t you get back quite a while ago?” Anita queries. “Yes, the end of January.” Egads, that’s about 20 days ago! Someone has drained about US$14,000 from my business account. I am stunned. My friends at the bank assure me they will do everything they can to get my money back. But I go home for the weekend not knowing whether this will happen. I cry for a while, talk with my husband, noticing that I don’t think, “Oh, I should change my mind about stopping work.” My analyst Anne says that when we make a big decision, the “hounds of Hell” come after us. This particular hound is sitting in front of an ATM in Aguas Calientes, I think, and he has a lot of my money. Shaken, I realize that good planning might go awry, and that I’m not in control. Bad things can happen to people who plan well. The bank and Visa returned my money because I’d done things right and informed them when I would be traveling and when not to authorize the card for charges. Whew! Even more important, I learned that panic over money did not make me want to change my decision.

I read in a recent research report that the process of ending therapy usually is not the traumatic struggle suggested by early psychoanalytic literature, which describes a lengthy process characterized by a series of difficult interactions (for the client), (Cobb, 2006; Fortune, Pearlingi, & Rochelle, 1992). Rather, termination might better be seen as a continuation of the therapy process, especially if the therapist is experienced and the process has gone well (Cobb, 2006, p. 66). I feel relieved on my clients’ behalf and on my own. I begin to experience what Cobb also found, that clients have a great desire both to thank their therapist and to hear what the therapist thinks and feels about them. As Rogers and the humanistic psychologists taught more than 50 years ago, warmth and positive regard characterize all good therapy, including termination. I find that I, too, desire warm regard from my clients. I want to know I’ve done a good job. Long ago I was trained not to pull for thanks, notes, or especially, gifts from clients, but the thanks that do come my way feel like a balm to my raw feelings. I’m going through loss, too. As each last session approaches, I plan to tell how I feel about each client, and point out what they have achieved. I am grateful that I can do this with little review except in my own memory and a check of the chart to see when they started. They do live in my heart and mind. But it’s not always easy for me to let go. I am voluntarily giving up my identity as a therapist and I find no handbook to help me, except the hard lessons I learned as I grieved deaths in my family. Each good-bye feels like a death of sorts. I will not be part of their joys, celebrations, sorrows, and recovery.

I run into a doctor in town at a play and tell her of my decision. She looks surprised, and only half joking, counters, “Wait, we’re not all healed yet!” Then she tells of her own relief at taking up an administrative position and not “tending my practice” any more. She speaks about not having to “carry all the stories,” (language I have used), and how “stories began to just burst out of me” when she was able to stop. While she teaches her medical students about the responsibility to carry the stories of the people they treat, and how they must take the stories seriously as part of treatment, we both agree that the time has come to give the narratives back to the clients/patients, transformed, we hope, by our holding them for a while. We both feel sad, but clear. I am relieved to know that other helpers go through the same feelings.

I feel very excited about my new life. I feel frightened, as well. When I ask myself why, I imagine a lack of structure, and a change in the role I have enjoyed in the community. I am accustomed to the client schedule as the framework of my life. I push against it, rely on it to hold me up, organize my days around my Daytimer, and hide out in the familiar routines. I wonder if I will feel disoriented, bored, and empty. I wonder if I won’t even know who I am. My analyst Anne reminds me that if I won’t tolerate any boredom, I won’t learn anything new.

***

Good-bye . . . Without Leaving Yet

I am prepared for distress or sorrow that my clients may feel in their closing sessions. Now that I am allowing myself to feel the full range of my own emotions, I am experiencing my own grief as well. I love these people and each good-bye is hard for me as well. Some examples of these challenges follow.

Mar. 7. Two years after Marie’s mother’s death, we talk about “holding on and letting go.” Marie relates to the loss of her mother and two sisters with a sense of weighty guilt and responsibility. She is heartbroken, sad, and wishing she had done more to help at the end of their lives. She did everything I might have thought of in her position, but that’s not a helpful comment, I know. As we talk, I can hear her guilty responsibility turning to sorrow. I feel my own. I have made this journey. I still feel guilty sorrow about my father’s death, 6-plus years later. Marie’s story advances my healing, as my story moves her forward in our delicate dance of growth and understanding.

Jessica writes a poem about me and herself, after reading my retirement letter: “I so envy/her clear crisp turning of the page,/toward her third chapter, /while my first chapter is still/in shitty first draft form/scattered about/on the backs of envelopes, bills and stray paper.” I share with Jessica Lucille Clifton’s lines, “i am running into a new year/and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me.” She is leaving behind an era in her life. We both tear up and say, “Oh, yes.” Loving something and leaving feels like a human activity. I tell her that it took me about 3 years to reach what she experiences as clarity; since she is already writing her first draft, she is well on her way. I don’t worry much about my personal self-disclosure at this point; authentic connection seems to be the most healing form of communication. We are people experiencing losses together.

My head and heart feel full. These might be the best 6 weeks of therapy in my life. I seem to be getting it right, following my intuition with a sure internal compass, speaking easily, listening well. As they say, “hanging does tend to focus the mind.” And heart. At every choice point, I go for broke. I love what I leave.

***

Mar. 8: I didn’t expect my own dark humor. Today I find myself making up alternate words to Eva Cassidy’s version of “How Can I Keep From Singing?” I usually relate to this song with a full heart—Quaker prisoners in a dungeon wrote this hymn as they waited out their fate. I play it at retreats to inspire us all toward courage. But today my takeoff version sounds like, “How can I keep from screaming?” It’s been a tough week, with a lot of drama and sorrow from clients. I feel myself pulling back some in sessions, even though I don’t want to. My shadow self keeps coming up with unseemly lyrics that help me keep my distance. Even with what I think is great therapy going on, still, at the end of the week, I find myself humming Andrea Bocelli’s version of “Time to Say Goodbye.” Later, when I’m in front of the fireplace with cat in lap and wine in hand, I think of my late sister and how she would have made me a CD compilation of songs to help me through this transition. I imagine the disc as I open it, “My Baby Sent Me a Letter,” “It’s Too Late Baby, It’s Too Late Now,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” “Standing on the Gone Side of Leaving.” I seem to be decompensating. I worry that you, dear reader, will think, “Oh my God. Does my therapist think that?” Let me assure you, it’s only me!

Early April: Sheila says she understands my retirement decision. She does, because she is planning her own retirement. As we talk, I think of the years I’ve known her. I’ve accompanied her as she recovered from an empty marriage and came out with her lover. I’ve coached this attorney in communication skills so relentlessly that today, 20 years later, all I have to do is say, “I’m going to remind you of your communication skills.” She replies, laughing, “That’s why I called you.” She accepts my analysis of her difficult business situation. I suggest a verbal script that might help her. She laughs at me, saying, “Nah, that sounds like you. I could never pull it off. I don’t do all that empathy bullshit.”

Me. “I was just trying”

She. “I know. That’s your job. What I could say is . . . .”

I see that she has her own inner therapist intact. Sheila will be more than fine. She is off to her own next chapter, confident, spunky as ever. She just bought a house in North Carolina. I try to quell my jealousy. When I ask her if she wants to make an appointment to summarize all the work we’ve done, she equivocates. She doesn’t want to say good-bye, but I respect her decision. She’s done her work and I have, too.

Mac comes in for a last session. He tells me that he had a feeling of dread when he saw my letter, knowing what it was. Then he told himself that we have spent a lot of time together, and that he is healthy and whole after recovering from prostate cancer. We have known each other since 1984 when he was a communication student in my conflict resolution class, a quiet, unassuming young man in the back row who turned in an A+ paper. Decades later, after a difficult divorce, Mac told me he had fallen in love with a married woman in another state. I said immediately, “I am so happy for you,” before inquiring about the likelihood of her being available for him. He asked me to tell him again why I’d said that. He had been shy about telling me. I told him that I simply wanted him to have the sexual joy that had been missing in his marriage. He tells me today, “I want to hear that again, so I can take it away with me.” He leaves with a thank you, a hug, and a remembered verbal talisman in his pocket.

A graduate student, Shelby, 24, comes in for the last time. During the first year we met I felt like the mother of a sullen, balky, acting-out teenager. I told my colleague that I’m too old to be listening to discourses on hooking up, her low-life boyfriends (I guess I do feel like a mother), and endless stories about a bad work situation. I felt under used. But Shelby kept coming. In the 3rd year she said, “I guess I’d better tell you what’s really happening in my life.” She told me about her disappointment with her alcoholic father, her betrayal by a high school coach who listened to gossip and took the side of a girl who was bullying Shelby, and the school administrators who let verbal and physical bullying go on unabated. She had decided all men were untrustworthy, thus her choice of boyfriends who fit that template. This worked, more or less well, until she needed to relate to male professors. She told me all the truth and got to work. I learned again that I never know what is at the deep heart’s core until someone tells me. She transformed her life from sullen victim to a young woman with a life of promise. During those first awkward years when we were lurching, not dancing, I did not intuit that I would know her deeply and feel love, respect, and loss.

Mar. 17: Voice Mail message from a client who’s also a therapist: “Well, I went home and told Jackie that if she wanted to revisit the decision not to treat our old cat (who had leukemia) with chemo, I am open to talking over the decision again. However, if she wants to process her own feelings of guilt and sorrow that have more to do with her father’s death, I’m not the right person to talk to. She should talk with her therapist, because I’m having a lot of grief myself. I said this in a mild and pleasant way. ” She continued to tell me there was a long pause, then a big grin from her partner who said, “Did you have a session with Joyce today?” They laughed and acknowledged my ongoing influence on their relationship.

Mid April: Joanna comes in for a last session. I really don’t want to say good-bye to her; I made an exception and accepted her as a client last summer even though I was not taking new people. I’ve known her for years in the community; a mutual friend told me she was in a big crisis. Our work has been intense, no holds barred. Today she announces, “Saw my doctor today. No more meds!! Oh, and exercise 150 minutes a week. He told me to get on with my life and I asked him if he’d been talking to Joyce. Who’s that? The doctor asked?” I spend a lot of time urging people to exercise.

Last summer Joanna was waiting in my room next door. When I came to get her, she looked grey. Leaning back in my teal wing chair she said weakly, “I just need to go home. I’m sick.” But she also said, “I knew I would be all right if I could just get here.” This kind of double message makes any therapist ask more questions. I determined that she probably was having a heart attack, called her doctor and was instructed to get her to the hospital as fast as possible, which turned out to be by driving her to the ER myself. As Joanna was quickly cared for, I noticed that the nurse wanted to know more—a client being taken to the hospital by her psychologist must be suspect. “Has she done this kind of thing often?” the nurse asked. At this point I am thinking, “have a heart attack? I don’t think so.” Then I realized that the nurse was asking routine questions about her psychological state, which was excellent, but heartbroken, that is, before the heart attack. She’d come in to tell me that her brother was dying of cancer.

Almost a year later we decide that “heartbroken” was a true diagnosis, since part of her main aorta collapsed and died. Together we celebrate that she did not die. She’s fallen in love and thinks she should wait longer because she is still grieving for her brother. I don’t have time to work this through with her over several sessions, so I say, “You really aren’t in charge. Your heart has a life of its own. You learned that last July!” She looks reflective, and relieved.

I am enjoying taking off my carefully crafted persona, slipping aside from the projections as healer. Continuing to relish not playing by the rules (“don’t take up your client’s time with your own issues”) I tell Joanna a dream that guides my life as a therapist.

Decades ago I dreamed, “I am floating down a huge river, maybe the Columbia. I realize a concrete spillway looms immediately downstream, and I’m floating fast. If I can’t make it over to the side, I will fall over and die. I can’t make it. At the last minute I decide to jump, preferring to choose my death rather than being swept over, out of control. I land gently in a pool of deep, calm water. Quickly, I climb out, run up the river and tell everyone that when they reach the precipice they must jump, that they will not die.” Joanna and I sit quietly. “That’s important, she says.” “Yes,” I reply. Joanna says good-bye, rubbing her heart, unconsciously. I touch my own heart and we hold the gesture there together until her hands drop to her lap. We’re done.

***

Moving Out

March: I ask around on my floor to see if anyone would like to sublet my waiting room. I’m keeping my consultation office for other work. My last day is May 16. I am thinking that it would be perfect if someone wants the space on June 1. Right away, Britney, a young attorney around the corner, contacts me with interest in the space. Great! But she wants to begin April 1. We negotiate April 8. My fantasy of a tidy exit evaporates as I agree to sign the lease over to her. For the last month my clients will come directly to my consultation door. My friendly banker downstairs helps me list furniture on Ebay (this is a small town), and I tack up a sign over the water fountain detailing furniture I’m selling. Immediately a young woman in the building sees my sign. A young couple comes in and wants everything I listed—my teal wingback chairs, lamps and my Queen Anne tables that I used to have in my home in a more formal phase. I have donated about twelve boxes of books to the library and moved the rest home to my study. Someone else in the building buys my framed prints of Japanese art. I keep the cream and green Persian rug and the Iris-themed stained glass lamp, along with my collection of iris art.

In early April my husband helps me move everything I have not sold. Very little remains. We stand in the empty room where we conducted couples therapy for 15 years together. I remember more than 30 small groups, howls of laughter and quiet tears. Music I brought in to make a point echoes in the stillness in my mind—Emmylou’s “You’ll Never Be the Sun/But you will be the light” and Guy Clark’s “The Cape.” I remember looks of anxiety, despair, hope, irritation, depression, and false cheerfulness on the faces of clients as they waited for their appointments. Sometimes I would find people writing in their journal, saying, Just a minute, I have to get this down.” My rooms face the “interior light well” of the gracious 1898 building. I always took that as a metaphor for what we were doing—bringing in the light. I close the door. Good-bye to all that the room contained for 26 years.

Death is like this, if we are fortunate. We pass on to others what we have valued, we say good-bye, we let go of what is no longer needed. We need less room as we come to the end. We vacate our premises until we have nothing left to lose. I have helped clear out six homes after deaths. I have few illusions that I own anything material.

May 10: I see flowers left in front of what used to be my waiting room next door. The “Heroines,” a women’s group that lasted 15 years, sent them. With tears I take them home. I no longer have the waiting room where we met so many times.

***

Monday morning, I find out more about letting go. The young attorney and her partner excitedly show me the new colors they are considering. Modernist aqua, lime, and brown patches smear part of my soft peach walls. The leaf-pattern wallpaper border three quarters of the way up the extra-tall ceiling is gone. Delightedly they say:

“We want to brighten up the room. What do you think? And we’re going to take out the carpet and have maple flooring laid down, and paint the ceiling white. Do you like it? Which color do you like?”

I think, but don’t say, “Well, I liked it quite a lot the way it was and I think the colors are ghastly,” but I find a way to encourage the young entrepreneurs. They are happy. I feel like the senior citizen who’s been moved to assisted living.

Writing this story, I see how the act of composing a narrative—even offering up competing narratives—helps us feel less vulnerable, and gives us a sense of choice and agency. Narrative permits us to feel some measure of control (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2009, p. 76). In writing my story I recognize again that I chose my course of action, that some of my clients in fact are hurting because of my decision, and that I can and must live with these different realities. Undoubtedly, I will look back with some regret mixed with relief at what I chose to end. I beg what I love, the process of psychotherapy, and I leave, to forgive me. I don’t feel the need for forgiveness from my clients, only their acceptance and if possible, understanding. Really, the process of forgiveness is my own. I forgive myself for leaving what I love. I honor myself for knowing when it is time.

August, 2011. I loved my clients and wish them well, but the truth is I have said good-bye. I gave my best most of the time and know for sure that their lives are their own. I do miss the deep daily conversations very much, but I have let go, more quickly than I imagined, of the people themselves. I remember them and as I told many, I hold them in my heart. But I no longer have to hold the threads of their stories. I’ve cut from the loom the tapestries we wove together, returning those woven pieces to them, to enrich their psyches. I no longer need to keep the warp and woof of the loom threaded, in a room set apart for their stories. I’ve moved home, where I will keep the loom ready for new patterns that will rise from my own imagination.