Saying a real Good-bye

Have you ever had the experience of saying good-bye to someone – I mean a real good-bye – and instead you just say “Let’s stay in touch, okay?” or “I promise I’ll be back soon.” We do this all the time, don’t we? We avoid saying good-bye, and instead dilute the experience by changing it to “See you later.” We don’t want to leave, or be left. But what I have discovered is that when we avoid a real good-bye, we are robbing ourselves of a very valuable emotional experience: a healthy good-bye. There are too many unhealthy good-byes in this messy world, aren’t there? We get dumped by romantic partners, friends and family members die, we get in huge fights and don’t talk to people for a while. As a therapist, I have my fair share of real good-byes. And it’s clear that they are real good-byes; this is a relationship that only exists within very specific confines, and once they are severed, the relationship ends.

Recently, I had a patient move to a different state, and we knew our time together was coming to an end. We had been working together for almost two years, and had spent a lot of time talking about how she pushes people in her life away. She came from a broken home and struggled to attach to anyone, so it was no surprise that she resisted the idea that she was attached to me, or that I actually cared about her. So, leading up to our last session, I often checked in with her, asking how she was feeling about our relationship ending. I told her I felt sad about the thought of not working with her. She consistently told me she felt fine about it. She said she was confident she would thrive in her life with the work we had done, and find a new therapist eventually. During our last session, I asked her again, “How are you feeling about this,” I said, gesturing at the space between us. “I don’t think I can let you get away with not saying good-bye to me.” I was teasing her a little bit. I smiled. She looked at the clock. 15 minutes left.

“I feel good about where we are leaving things,” she said. “I am going to meet with the therapist you referred me to, and maybe if I ever need to call you in the future, I can.”

“Absolutely, you can.” I told her. And yet, I really wasn’t going to let her get away with this. “You can call me any time. And still, you’re really leaving. And I’m really sad that I won’t see you every week. So for my own wellbeing, I’m not going to say ‘let’s talk soon,’ is that okay? I think I need to honor what we’ve been through together and say good-bye.”

She never did say the words themselves. Her eyes glistened and she thanked me. She gave me a hug.

It is safer not to say a real good-bye. Diluting it means diluting all the stuff that goes with good-bye. I love you. I’ll miss you. I’m sad. This is a loss and I’ll have to grieve it. And sometimes we need to stay safe. Sometimes it’s worth it to risk feeling something harder in order to honor the end of something in a more real way. And it’s totally up to us.