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Life may be thought of an ongoing series of hellos and good-byes, of beginnings and endings.
It “begins with our first hello at birth and ends with our last good-bye at death”.
Psychologists naturally have empirically investigated these beginnings and endings of life, but they have devoted a great deal more energy to the former.
In fact, the experience of ending life was essentially ignored by researchers until Kubuler-Ross’s(1967) groundbreaking conception.
Still, for a variety of reasons, the study of the beginnings of life continues to be much more vigorously pursued than that of life’s ending.
One reason is that we may find it more personally agreeable, even uplifting, to study hellos or beginnings than to investigate endings.
Psychotherapy, too, has a beginning and an ending.
And researchers have devoted a great deal of time to studying the beginning of counseling, while neglecting its ending phase.
In fact, most of the articles on termination begin by discussing how infrequently the process is addressed.
This is so despite the fact that there appears to be agreement among observers that termination is a highly significant topic and that how termination is handled by the therapist probably affects the entire treatment, including the gains made by the client.
Effectively handled termination, it often maintained, can consolidate gains as well as help clients work through issues (some universal) concerning ending.
Conversely, mishandled terminations (which includes ignoring the process) may sabotage the gains that emerge during therapy and deepen clients’ conflicts about endings.
If there is relatively little theoretical work on the termination process, there is even less empirical research.
The likely culprit for the meager amount of research is the great complexity of termination.
Literally, termination includes everything in treatment that has preceded it.
To this, one way add the complexity of how the so-called termination phase of counseling is defined.
It is difficult to ascertain what is meant by a termination phase and what the boundaries of this phase are.
Another reason for the lack of empirical attention to termination is because, just as with studying the ending of life, investigating the ending of the treatment relationship is emotionally conflictual and is likely to emote issues around separations and ending in the researchers.
Ending of relationships are more difficult for most of us to examine than are beginnings.
Although the empirical neglect of the topic of therapy termination continues to this day, there has been a gradual accretion of research during the past two decades.
Qualitative and quantitative studies have been conducted that examine the characteristics of the termination phase, client and therapist reactions to ending, and qualities within the participants that influence how they deal with and react to termination.
This small body of research is clearly in its infancy, but enough findings have accumulated to offer some provisional guidance to the practitioner.PR
