Hi I'm OK! Welcome! Sorry your post didn't get much response last time! I for one have been very busy and it's hard to keep up! Plus, no offense intended, your topic is a little daunting... I don't think most of us like thinking about ending therapy!!!!

It is a good question though, however hard it may be to think about, and I will attempt an answer!

In simple terms, the answer my T gave me was "to make the unconscious, conscious." If that isn’t a therapist answer, I don’t know what is! But after I got past the ridiculousness of the VAGUE response and applied it, I understood it a lot more. Think about it… what drives us to therapy in the first place? Poor relational patterns, self-abuse, victimization, addictions, depression, anxiety… you-name-it. We often can’t find a way to stop doing what we don’t want to do or how to have more control over our automatic responses. Why can’t we just stop or just get over it? Because we aren’t aware of why we are doing it in the first place… think of it like a leak. You KNOW there’s a problem because the floor’s all wet and things are starting to mildew, but if you don’t know where the leak is, or haven’t wanted to acknowledge the leak really exists, then you can’t fix it! So, when we go into therapy, we know we’re leaking, but we don’t know where from or what caused the leak.

So I think the end goal is to find the leak(s), find what caused the leak(s), let the stagnant water pour our and dry up, repair the broken pipe to the best of our ability and learn how to prevent getting another leak in the same place. Once we know why we do things, it becomes a choice to do them or not. We can see other options and then we learn to believe that we are worth the other options. Example: I tend to shut down when someone gets angry with me. I freeze. I stop engaging and talking and communicating altogether. Well, I’m married, and occasionally, I piss my husband off and his natural reaction is to confront the issue. Well, he would confront me about… whatever, small stuff, like me not doing something I said I would do… and I would shut down completely. I would lock myself in the bathroom and cry- not even kidding. Of course he was terribly confused… and so was I. It was an automatic response for me to act this way. In talking to my T and exploring this issue further, I realized a few things. First of all, when my mother was angry with me I actually felt like (she conveyed) that she didn’t love me. It was impossible to be mad at someone and love them at the same time. So when he was expressing anger toward me, it triggered my fears that he wasn’t going to love me. Also, my mother was dangerous and irrational when she was angry. She was mean and uncaring and verbally abusive. Doing anything OTHER than shutting down and hiding wasn’t safe. I was still acting toward my husband how I had learned to act with my mother growing up. Well, in talking with my T and my husband, I have a dialogue about it now, and can CHOOSE what to do BEFORE I react- something I didn’t know was possible before.

quote:

Is it that we can now meet our inner childhood needs by providing them to ourselves?; or
Is it that we accept the failings of our parents but can move on – no longer blaming them?; or
Is it as basic as being kind to ourselves?

I think all of these things are goals in therapy. As is experiencing and moving on from grief- at least for me. But I think feeling and understanding what operates on the subconscious level is what allows us to do all of these things- it is the key to accepting ourselves and loving ourselves and filling in the gaping holes our parents left in us.

Well, I hope this helps. Let me know if I made absolutely NO sense and I will try again! Thanks, by the way, for your persistence in asking your question. It tells me that you are a good advocate for yourself- or are learning to be- and that is a very good thing. It's very hard, especially for those of us who have self-esteem issues, to consider ourselves worthy of a voice. I'm glad you took the risk of being brave here!

-CT

CT,

As usual, you have an articulate response. I like the leak analogy. Also, the emphasis on making the unconscious conscious, is an accurate take on the goal of therapy.

Im OK,

Welcome to the forum.
Originally, I didn't respond to this question, because it seemed to be so big, and because I'm not anywhere near ending, so I'm not sure I really know. Plus, I needed a little time to think about it.

I think for me, an end goal of therapy is that I can live as healthily as is possible. This means being aware of my choices and not repeating unhealthy patterns. It means being conscious of what's going on inside of me.

Another goal is to know what my life mission is, and to know that I have the capacity to fulfill it and nothing is going to stop me. This is a new thought for me, and I haven't completely developed it, so I can't really explain it. It doesn't necessarily have to do with my career or where I live or whatever, but with how I live my life, every choice that I make, knowing myself. It has to do with all aspects of me: spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical. Does this make any sense? To know this about yourself and to be confident that you can fulfill it requires you to be healthy.

Anyway, those are some of the thoughts that I had about the end goal of therapy since I read your question the other day.

catgirl

hello I'm OK,

sorry if your initial post was ignored, I'm glad you tried again and stuck around as this forum is such a wonderful one to be involved in!

I'm also nowhere near ending therapy - barely started in fact. The end goal: not so sure if that's really anything so concrete with me. You mention a few things and I guess that's sort of part of it. Ultimately I think I want to simply (ha, what a misleading word!) be able to experience life as it is, myself and other people as we really are. Just being a human being I guess without any frills or incompleteness. What that might look like I'm not too sure, it feels very hard and sometimes impossible to do.

SB

quote:

What is the end goal of therapy??

Is it that we can now meet our inner childhood needs by providing them to ourselves?; or
Is it that we accept the failings of our parents but can move on – no longer blaming them?; or
Is it as basic as being kind to ourselves?

Hi I'm OK,
Welcome to the forums, I'm so sorry I didn't see the earlier post! Life has been insane lately for me and I'm just starting to get back to normal so my posting has been few and far between, but my apologies for not replying before. It's always scary the first time you post and I'm glad you were brave enough to venture in again.

It is a tough question and one I've been thinking about a lot lately (when it doesn't get too scary). I've been in therapy for a long time (20 + years) and have actually left three times. I went through three different runs with my first therapist with breaks of a few years in between until she retired around 3 years ago. I've been working with my present T a little over two years individually, (worked with him longer in couples counseling).

The most important thing that my present T told me near the beginning of our work was that I was welcome to come to therapy as long as I wanted to, that he would never ask me to leave. It was incredibly important to me to have that reassurance because that meant that getting well didn't mean I had to leave. In our work together, my T and I figured out that I have disorganized attachment and my T became my attachment figure and I have experienced a deep level of dependency on him for awhile and there was a time in the beginning where the thought of not having him there was just terrifying. The fact that I can now contemplate a time when I'll be ready to go is a real sign of how far I've come.

Bottom line, I think we leave therapy when we're ready to leave, much the same way that children leave home when they grow up and are ready to be on their own. I would answer yes to all your questions. For me, the process has been a combination of learning things from my T about regulating my emotions and not being overwhelmed by them so that instead of just reacting, as CT described so well above, you realize that you have options. But its also been about facing what I didn't have, finally feeling and processing a lot of emotions that had been stored away and grieving over what happened to me and what I wasn't given.

So its a weird combination of getting from my T what he can give now and mourning what I can no longer get. Digging down through the stored emotions has helped to dig out many of my false beliefs that I was operating on, some of which were about NOT getting close to anyone because that's how you got hurt. In the self esteem department, I actually ended up digging out a memory of being told by my father that I was so unattractive that no one else would ever want me so that I stayed handy to abuse, pulling that out into the light of day broke its power over me, I actually posted on it, if I can dig up the link, I'll post it later.

What I'm really trying to say is that its a messy, circular, slow process, but you move forward in such tiny increments that it doesn't feel like you're moving, until one day you look back and can see just how very far you've come. And then you realize that you've only shifted a very small difference but it makes all the difference in the world. I told my T that it feels like I've gone a journey of 10,000 miles to go half an inch. But what an important half an inch.

For the longest time, I thought that recovery meant I would never feel bad again, that I would never feel pain or hurt, but what I've learned instead is that I can handle the inevitable hurt and pain that come my way. Which also allows me to experience the joy and love because I'm not expending all my energy avoiding things in an attempt to avoid pain. We're never done. I'm not trying to reach an endpoint, I'm trying to learn to flow, to know that there is good and bad and both are a part of life and can be embraced. And that instead of pain being an inevitable part of love, love is the answer to the pain we encounter along the way.

I know that answer was all over the place, but it's something that is so hard to articulate. Please feel free to ask any questions, especially if anything didn't make sense.

AG

quote:

Originally posted by Chronically Transferred:
In simple terms, the answer my T gave me was "to make the unconscious, conscious."

Which, by the way, might be the most difficult and painful thing you've ever done. Sometimes therapists don't mention this detail.

quote:

Originally posted by Chronically Transferred:
If that isn’t a therapist answer, I don’t know what is! But after I got past the ridiculousness of the VAGUE response and applied it, I understood it a lot more.

So true, especially the "the ridiculousness of the VAGUE" part. I think my initial response was, "ok, that sounds kind of hard...how long does this generally take?"

I would echo what CT says, especially the leak analogy. That's it in a nutshell.

Russ

Russ