Goodbyes in Therapy, Group or Individual

   Unless unusually fortunate, our parents couldn’t teach these intimacy skills because their parents didn’t have the skills – they couldn’t teach what they didn’t get from their parents.  Lacking experience, safety and​ good support, people usually avoid feeling and saying these things in everyday life​ because the depth of intimacy and vulnerability is so unfamiliar and scary.  [See Brene Brown on Vulnerability, an essential skill for happiness.]    So most people have​ little or no experience​ really feeling & saying ​the heartfelt things that would be said and need to be said for genuine intimacy.  

    It’s also true that all important goodbyes are connected through their similar feelings – love, sadness, anger and scare [in the Gestalt model: appreciations, resentments and regrets].  Past important goodbyes​, both said and especially unsaid, come naturally consciously and unconsciously to awareness, further complicating and intensifying goodbyes, whether in everyday life or in therapy.

   Unfortunately o​ur culture tends to avoid deeply experiencing and talking about important​ feelings in relationships.​  Practicing actually feeling and putting these very human feelings into words greatly facilitates deeper, more satisfying and sustaining intimacy in all future relationships.   Goodbyes​ in therapy are a kind of final therapeutic exercise, an opportunity to put into practice all the therapeutic experiences which have led to “graduating” from Group therapy.  

I welcome your comments,  Dr Bob

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