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givepetitpoisachance
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PathStep 6 Compassion hearts18 Forum posts4 Forum upvotes4 Current upvotes4 Age GroupAdult Last activeSeptember, 2020 Member sinceJuly 23, 2020
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Is it normal for a final therapy session to be quite disheartening?
General Support / by givepetitpoisachance
Last post
 October 9th, 2020
...See more I don't know if this is the wrong place to post this. Sorry if it is. So I recently had to stop seeing my therapist, as I just graduated. I knew this would happen, so although it wasn't necessarily a natural ending in the sense of 'finishing' a course of therapy, it was expected. We had our final session, and it was a a little... depressing. Not in the sense that it would be the last time I'll ever see her, or even that this'll be my last therapy session for a while, but in the sense that it was the total opposite of uplifting. Now, I *never* expected, and wouldn't want, for her to give some bullshit motivational speech or whatever. It's not helpful, and she knew I hated that. However, I hadn't anticipated that she would basically spend the session giving me a bit of an ultimatum almost. I'm not very good at articulating, uh, anything, but I'll give it a go. I have depression and anxiety. She's a CBT therapist, and so we mainly did behavioural activation, along with a some questioning of negative/maladaptive/disorted/irrational (whatever you want to call it) thoughts. In our last session, we explored the fact that I tend to always believe that anything good in my life will 100% be shortlived, and that I have to limit any good feelings I have to neutralise myself so that when things inevitably get bad again, it will feel relatively less bad than it would have done if I'd come down from a high. This means that I spend my whole life feeling numb, empty, and bored, but I am slightly protected and safe from huge lows (which I still get, but feel less bad than times I've been surprised by them, if that makes sense). She basically gave me an ultimatum: decide to allow myself to feel good things, or continue on how I am. I explained that both of those felt like terrible options and I don't fancy either, and that it doesn't feel like a choice anyway. She agreed it wasn't a conscious choice, but that it might be something I could work on with a future therapist. And that was about it. I'm definitely not trying to make her look bad in this post, or imply that she's made me feel worse, because she's not a bad therapist and she hasn't made me feel worse. She said all of this in a gentle way. I can see where she was coming from, and what she was trying to do (tough love, motivating me to see another therapist, encouraging me to challenge me thoughts, helping me see there's another way to live), but it's left me feeling a bit shit. Like, I really don't want to live either of those versions of life, and I don't think I have the capacity to even try the other way even if I wanted to. Sorry that this is super rambly and might not make sense. I was just wondering if this is a normal feeling to have post-final therapy session? I haven't found it very motivating so far. Edit: TL;DR: I had my final therapy session. I was given an ultimatum. It was a bit disheartening.
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