Posted by bell_75 on September 17, 2004, at 7:42:05
Blargh. My eyes are sore and abit puffy but otherwise I'm good. I know I've been abit absent from here lately and I'm sorry for that but I've had good reason. None of which are probably interesting at all.
Anywho, I posted awhile ago about my nervousness about terminating and sparked the thread about a new term for termination and i think some of us agreed on a few alternatives, one being "conclusion". In that thread I was asked to keep you posted about how it went and..well..that day came today.
I'm feeling so drained, mixed and abit bittersweet. It was an emotional experience but all in all a very happy one.
Wow! It was just a liberating experience aknowledging how far I've come and some of the things we talked about. Sure, I'm not 100% but I'm okay with that. I'm alot better than I was before I started therapy anyways.
I'm not going to say terminating was an easy thing today because it wasn't...it was hard. Really hard. Just like therapy has been all along because we dont go along there to do something thats easy. I needed to sort out my problems and to do that I had to endure alot of emotional pain and basically at stages I was fighting for my life. I was wanting to end my life and at the same time trying to find a way to stop wanting to end it.
Today, I'm less suicidal. And I'm proud of that.
Emphasis being "less" because I cant say im completely but then again as my therapist says that everyone has a thought about it now and then but its just a thought and to not let it worry you so much.
Anywho, back to today. He said some really nice things and i think he knew it was tough for me to be ending therapy because ive been going there for a year and a half and thats a big chunk of my life. Considering I was 18 when i started going and 20 when i left. I've done alot of growing in that period of time. I shook his hand when i said goodbye and it was nice. I was just comforted by that. Its weird to have sat opposite to someone for so long and to not have touched them at all.
He told me that he believe in me and therapy was just started now as I left. Oh my god! I'm welling up in tears now just writing that.
I was expecting emotion, but this much?
I'm going to miss that part of my life so much and I wont deny that I'll miss him. I will. You become used to being around someone then all of a sudden its a "See ya". However, i did have time to prepare for it.
I even got homework to do...FOR ETERNITY! Wow. thats the longest homework I've ever got. And that sort of made me feel better about the whole process because I felt like therapy was still continuing even if i wasnt going to be coming back. My homework is to write down my core beliefs which are negative about myself and whenever I find evidence against one of them to write it down every single time till I can change that core belief. The 3 we wrote down together today were "I'm worthless", "I'm undesirable" and "I'm incompetent". And I will definately keep doing that homework. I wont let him down.
Also he said I can come back if i really need to and that if I call and say I need to come back he'll ask me first what I've done then see after that if I need to come in.
I feel prepared yet scared at the same time about life after therapy.
Thanks for making that transition a little bit easier, guys. I hope I can still contribute now as others have after their therapy has ended.I feel so weird saying that.
Therapy is concluded.
poster:bell_75
thread:391864
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040911/msgs/391864.html