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Ways of ending counselling therapy classes

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1. Ensure basic emotional needs are met outside of the therapy room
Everyone has basic needs for attention and intimacy. If you don’t actively encourage and help
your client to meet these needs outside of their therapy with you, then they’ll feel dependent on you. If you’re someone’s only real source of human contact and attention, then of course they’ll feel as if they can’t stop seeing you. But don’t confuse this with ‘successful therapy’.
Clean therapy happens when the therapist:
- understands that the role of the therapist is to help the client with specific problems and not to meet their basic needs on an ongoing basis
- helps the clients be clear about what these needs are and how to meet them effectively in their own life.

2. Draw their attention back to their original therapy goals
This is why it’s so important to be clear with someone from the beginning by establishing very
clear and measurable goals. If nobody knows when therapy has been successful (because no
clear goals were ever defined), then nobody knows when it’s supposed to finish. Imagine a
builder doing this to you when working on your house.

3. Make it clear from the beginning that therapy will be finite
Of course, you can’t always tell exactly how many sessions a person will need to get over a
depression, or to successfully stop drinking, but you can give them an indication. So I might
say:
Many people can be helped within a few sessions and often times feel better even after a single
session. (Remember the power of the placebo effect!)
If they ask what happens if they don’t feel better, I might suggest that if after four or five
sessions they feel they haven’t benefitted (above and beyond enjoying the companionship of
therapy), then I will refer them onto someone else.
If someone wants to pay me to be a professional ear every couple of months, that’s fine – as
long as neither of us think that anything else is happening and I’m clear with the client that
this is what we are doing. You don’t need to throw someone out in the cold, but what you do
need to do is ensure the outside is ‘warm enough’ for them.

Titany answered the question on September 13, 2021 at 12:06

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Ways of ending counselling therapy classes

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