Breaking Up With Your Therapist Sucks. Here's How to Do It Right

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Leaving your therapist is a little like breaking up with a partner. It took three months and several futile attempts until I managed to leave mine – my therapist, that is. She’d been a great help and I have absolutely no regrets about the twice monthly sessions we had for over a year, but something in me had changed. I wanted out. Rather than just being honest and open about it, however, what followed was a series of increasingly crap ploys to extricate myself from a relationship that I felt wasn’t working. 

The situation was too confusing: I felt guilty about what I wanted to do, scared of her reaction to it, and growing increasingly attached to her. I found myself cancelling appointments via text, and speaking more than usual at some of the sessions, then drastically less at others. It got to the point where I was writing exactly what I wanted to say ahead of our meetings, but once I was sat in front of her in a big comfortable leather chair with a box of tissues within arm’s reach, I found myself blathering on and on about nothing.

I’m not alone in this. Rachel, whose name has been changed for privacy reasons, has been seeing therapists since she was six. Over the last year, she’s been seeing someone who specialises in hypnosis. While she hasn’t found it entirely unhelpful, it doesn’t quite gel with her individual psychiatric needs. “I’m finding it really hard to tell her that I need something else,” she says. “I’ve been trying for months. I can’t do it, I’m scared and I’m worried.”

The truth is, you’re often making a big deal out of nothing. In my case, it was something that my own mother said that made me take action. “Be honest about your intentions,” she said. “You went to see her for specific reasons. If you don’t want to go anymore, don’t lie to her. If you start lying to your therapist, you can’t get away from that.” Like all mums, mine is always right. So, I decided to break the news on the phone. And I played the optimism card: “It’s a good thing, isn’t it?” I said. “It means that I’m doing well and I don’t need you any more.”

My therapist showed no sign of resistance and the call lasted two and a half minutes. I consider myself very fortunate to have had such a positive experience; I’m grateful to my ex-therapist for making the process painless. But this isn’t always the case. So why is it so hard to break up with a therapist? Why does it make us feel so guilty?

According to Ghislain Rubio de Teran, a counsellor who specialises in relationships and anxiety, the emotional issues at stake in the practitioner-patient relationship are analogous to the ones we experience in romantic or familial ones. “There are three phases in therapy,” he explains. “There’s the initial phase where you meet and form an alliance. Then there’s the phase where you work through the relationship. And then there’s the separation phase. This final one brings up questions about autonomy and attachment.” He adds: “It’s normal to find that difficult. In fact, ending the relationship with a therapist is part of the therapy.”

Some people, myself included, find endings more difficult than others. Adrien, whose name has also been changed for the privacy reasons, started seeing a therapist in 2016. Within a year, and after a tough break-up, he was attending two sessions a week. Then, after an enjoyable summer, he decided to cut back. “I never intended to spend too much time with my therapist and I never wanted to create an overly dependent relationship,” he says. “When I spoke to him about it, he told me that it wasn’t the right time to stop.”

So for several months now, Adrien has been stuck in the relationship, unable to determine whether he should be listening to himself or his therapist. “It’s difficult to know if he thinks it’s genuinely for my own good or if he just doesn’t want to lose a weekly session,” says Adrien.

He goes on to add that the relationship is more complex than a case of a patient wanting to end their treatment with a specific practitioner. “I want to stop, and yet at the same time, I always leave the sessions feeling good,” he says.

There’s an argument to be made that these positive feelings keep people like Adrien attending appointments – even when they’d rather not – stem from the fact that going to therapy is one of the rare times an individual feels completely listened to. As Teran puts it: “You feel accepted as you are because you’re allowed to be vulnerable. That’s incredibly valuable but it can create dependency.” This is where the responsibility of the therapist lies, he says. “They have to guide the patient towards autonomy.” 

Adrien’s situation raises some interesting questions: How do you separate from a therapist who doesn’t think you should? Does a therapist have the right to contradict a patient’s wishes? For Teran, the question and the answer is a moral one. “Morally the code is very clear: The therapist’s job is to encourage autonomy and to respect the patient’s desire to end the relationship.”

So how do you go about freeing yourself without things getting ugly? There’s no easy fix per se – you just need a bit of courage and honesty (easier said than done, obviously). But Teran does have some final advice. “As a patient, you have the right to leave. You’re not there to make the therapist happy. You have to be brave enough to say it and talk about it. And give yourself some time. From the therapist’s end, they can also decide to take a break if the patient is reluctant to continue. It’s a way of testing their autonomy.” So, go on, you’re almost there.