Counselling and Endings
Counselling pays a lot of attention and puts emphasis on endings. Why?
Endings are linked to beginnings. We go through beginnings and endings in small ways all the time. You might have a work contractor come into your office to fix the photocopier: or a person coming to repair an appliance in your home. This is a short business type relationship, but one with a beginning and ending.
One view might be that small beginnings can be treated differently to big endings like coming to the end of a job, relationship, or death of a relative or friend. The short relationship which ends does not need much attention as we are not investing much time or energy into that relationship. It can be discarded easily as we will not see the person again. Bigger endings might involve the issue of change which is implicit in endings: as with every ending there is a new beginning which is not the same, or how would it have ended? Change is recognised as being painful, but necessary for renewal and improvement. Negotiating a different relationship with parents or friends can be a challenge as there is the experience of something ending and being replaced with something different and new. One thing that appears to be universal about endings (and beginnings? – for another week!) is that they produce some sort of difficulty? This can be noticed by the consistent reaction of not paying endings any attention.One reaction might be to ignore endings: pretend that we will not never see the person who fixs the appliance again but in fact talk and act in a way that we will see them again soon. Phrases like “see you later” are commonplace. One explanation is that if we were to take into account every small ending we would be left with a collection of difficult feelings however small which we do not want to deal with. So perhaps small endings and bigger endings are linked? How we react to a small endings shows how we might deal with the bigger endings. Counselling suppports the idea that small endings count and might show how we respond to bigger endings. Counselling pays attention to all endings small and big. If the small endings’ feelings are understood we might have more opportunity to understand the bigger endings managing the feelings that can follow turning our lives upside down.
Counselling and Endings

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
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Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer, and for general information only.