We begin knowing, in some capacity, that we must end. As this essay will, as the therapy hour will. In writing, I wonder how do we, as therapists and patients, feel about these inevitable endings.
To begin with, I imagine that the ending is a violent intrusion. We come to share our own relationship with endings over time. For some of us, I suppose this violence continues. And for others, this violence comes to be accepted as a rite of time.
What is violent, one could ask. I suppose the violence lies in separation. But if there was violence in the togetherness, I can imagine that endings bring much needed relief. For the purpose of the essay, we will imagine that there is enough health in being together that we would feel some amount of difficulty in separating.
We like what stays the same. I risk sounding simplistic, but I believe that we do not have very complex needs at the start. We would like continuity, for something to continue going on and on, and on and on. When it stays, it asks of us very little, but that we too go on. When something changes, we are required to change too. Endings bring about this very change, that I suppose we all dread.
We would not wish to feel dread for very long, if there is enough health in us. And then I suppose we do all that we can to flatten dread. When we cannot feel too much, I imagine we begin to think. When we have been through one ending, we know there will come another. Do we continue to feel the same about endings, with every ending? Do our feelings about endings change and end too?
Now we “know” that an ending is to come, we may not very much like to take on the labor of feeling. We may end before it ends, we may choose to remember the end as it begins, we cling tightly to the ending happening as it should, we may “accept” the ending.
What is this “it”, I write about? For this essay, it is the therapy hour. But really, it could be anything. I must confess I do not too much about variable-length sessions, as the Lacanians do. I simply cannot fathom holding such control, power, or intuition to be able to facilitate such an experience. Perhaps, there is much to learn.
I have come to believe that even when we “know”, we still do have feelings about what we “know”. Why does it matter, one could ask. To which I would respond, it may not need to matter at all. But you are here, reading this essay, so I imagine there must be some curiosity about endings, and your own feelings about endings.
I think it is far harder to let ourselves in on feelings when we “understand” the inevitability of endings. It is bound to end, why must we write about it, speak about it? I believe our relationship with time and the ending of our time together says much about our capacities to depend, attach, yearn, long, hold and of course, miss.
Much of social media now reveals what a therapist does when the session ends. And perhaps, there is a counterpart that reveals what a patient does on ending. But the truth is, neither of these experiences are known to the other. When the door is closed, the link is left, both the therapist and patient are left with their own imagination of what they have meant to each other.
What ends with the hour, I begin to wonder. How do they feel in the absence of the other? What feelings linger on for the other in their own minds? How do they feel towards the few days before they see each other again? How do they go on being?
To those readers who may not have experienced long-term therapy, it may almost come to sound as romance would. But is it not true that when human beings come to experience each other with such intensity and intimacy, as analysis offers, there is a certain romance that develops. I regard therapeutic love with much reverence.
The hour asks each to give over oneself, both therapist and patient, in the service of understanding themselves and their relationship. The larger work that brackets this is to be some help to the patient. But within this bracket, as the hour ends, there are always two people that are transformed.
And now if it is to be such a transformation, can we not wish for more of it. And one may. With all this “knowing”, we may still defy, deny endings. But we must remember that it is both the therapist and patient who are protected by the ending.
How does an ending offer protection? Much like the gates of a playground. We play because we know we are bound. We live infinitely because perhaps we realise that we will meet death. There is something about the finiteness of the hour that allows infinite possibilities to be. Perhaps in knowing that one needs to leave, one can also leave behind. Whatever is left behind is not merely left, it is picked up and hopefully held in the mind of the other.
So, what ends at the end of the hour is communication between two people present with each other. The communication continues much after the hour has ended. How, you may ask? Well, simply, allowing the other to be missed, to be yearned for, to be thought about.
I suppose this is rather difficult work if the said child has already left the playground. I doubt any child would like to be told to leave, but we are all told to, we are called in. But if a child is watching from the outside, this child knows all too well that the ending is to come. The ending has already occurred. It is possible that we would like to know when it ends to be prepared for it. And if such is the case, it is quite difficult to let the ending happen.
For the therapist and for the patient who track time, something has already ended. Holding time, is always the responsibility of the therapist. But must the patient trust the therapist to carry out this responsibility? One can never be too trustful, for each is a stranger to the other afterall. Some amount of mistrust is bound to be present, I imagine.
How does the patient feel that it is the therapist who holds time? How does the therapist feel that they must hold time? In all of this business of holding and keeping time, what is lost is the joy of becoming immersed in each other’s minds and imaginations. And this is for the therapist to build, carefully and tactfully as a skill. The capacity to immerse oneself and yet keep a watch over the safety of play. The therapist must come to be trusted with time, and this is a long endeavour in itself.
One cannot battle with forces such as time. But perhaps we do attempt to do so, in memory, in preservation, in writing, in remembering. And maybe such is our nature, to defy the natural order of time, loss and yearn for the impossible. I write it so plainly here, but I suppose I would much rather yearn to relate to another, and painfully, continually be taught that it must end. And when it ends, it will. But for the time being, perhaps we are to learn to be with each other. And now, we end.
And yet, we go on.
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