Learning to Stay with the Ending: A Therapist on Burnout and Spiritual Recovery

Why I Struggle with Therapy Endings

One of the parts of being a therapist that I have glazed over is learning how to be patient in the ending of things. It happens all the time, and yet I still find myself rushing to the good part because I want to help people so bad. I want people to know that someone cares, to connect with the truth. That everything they are is so worthy of love, of support, of care. That everybody who told them they were too much, too broken, too different was trying to dim their light. That they don’t deserve to feel this way anymore. They deserve to experience all the goodness they have given every person in their life that took advantage of them.

Without fail, every time I rush to the good part (cue the song), the therapy gets wonky. I stop trusting the process. I trip over ending the session. I feel embarrassed and my doubts in myself, the imposter syndrome, start creeping in. The longer I stay in this mode of being, the worse I feel. And sometimes I stay in it long enough that burnout creeps in and pulls me away from the work I love most.

How Fundamentalism Shaped My Pace

It’s a little bit of that ADHD and a mixture of being a human recovering from fundamentalism. Fundamentalism doesn't prepare you for the slow work of healing. It teaches crisis and conversion, urgency and rescue. It maps everything onto a timeline racing toward judgment or redemption. There is no theology of staying with what is ending, of letting things be incomplete, of trusting that transformation happens in ordinary time.

So I rush. I try to save. I perform certainty when what is needed is presence.
And when I do that, I recreate the very pressure that so many clients are trying to unlearn.

What My Clients Teach Me About Slow Endings

As I continue in my career, my clients keep teaching me the value of each step, especially the end. It’s ironic that I want to skip to the ending sometimes, because when I do, I miss the ending that is happening right here, right now. When I notice that each moment holds a beginning and an ending, I remember to release my expectation of how or when my clients heal. My patience begins to sprout.

And suddenly, I see that the healing is happening in every moment.

Endings Are Where the Work Settles

What I forget is that endings are not the place where the work stops. They are the place where the work settles. They are the slow exhale after the heavy lift. They hold the threads of everything that came before, and if I rush them, I miss the meaning that surfaces when I have a chance to look at everything woven together. Endings help both of us notice what changed. Not the dramatic breakthrough, but the shift in the way someone sits, or breathes, or lets their shoulders drop two inches lower than a moment ago.

Slowing Down When I Want to Speed Up

When I stay with the ending, I remember that therapy is not a sprint toward insight. It is a steady collection of moments where people learn to be with themselves without judgment. I am not responsible for forcing that to happen. I am responsible for making enough room for it to happen.

And sometimes that room looks like slowing down. Letting silence hang. Not tying the perfect bow on a session. Trusting that my client will carry the work out the door even if the final minutes feel unfinished.

What Imperfect Endings Teach Me

Endings are rarely clean. They can be awkward, uneven, quiet, emotional, or nothing at all. But the more I allow them to be what they are, the more grounded I become. I show up as a person who also lives with uncertainty instead of a therapist pretending to have arrived.

Maybe that is the point. Healing happens in the imperfect moments, in the pauses, in the endings that don’t look like endings. The patience I practice with my clients becomes the patience I learn to offer myself.

Learning to Linger

So, I am learning to linger.
To breathe.
To trust that the ending has its own wisdom.

And in that trust, I notice something simple and true.
The ending is more complex than the good part I keep trying to rush toward.
The ending is already here, woven through each moment.
And that is enough.