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

One of the parts of being a therapist I’ve had to reckon with is learning how to stay with endings. They happen all the time, and yet I still catch myself wanting to rush past them toward the good part. I want to help so badly. I want people to know they matter. That everything they are is worthy of love, support, and care, especially those who were told they were too much, too broken, or too different.

But without fail, when I rush, the therapy gets wonky.

I stop focusing on what’s actually happening in the room. I stumble through the final minutes of the session. Doubt creeps in, and imposter syndrome follows close behind. If I stay in that mode long enough, burnout isn’t far behind either. It starts pulling me away from the work I love most.

How Fundamentalism Shaped My Pace

Part of this comes from living with ADHD. And part of it comes from recovering from fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism trains the nervous system in urgency. Everything moves toward crisis or conversion, judgment or redemption. Endings meant verdicts—pass or fail, saved or damned. There was no theology of pausing, no permission for incompleteness, no trust that transformation unfolds in ordinary time.

So when I’m not conscious of it, I rush. When old survival strategies surface, I try to rescue. When I get self-conscious about my ADHD symptoms, I perform certainty when what’s actually needed is presence.

And in doing that, I recreate the very pressure so many of my clients are trying to unlearn.

What My Clients Teach Me About Slow Endings

Over time, my clients keep teaching me the value of each step, especially the end. It’s ironic. I want to skip ahead, but when I do, I miss the ending that’s already happening right here.

When I remember that every moment holds both a beginning and an ending, something softens. I release my expectations about how or when healing should occur. My patience grows, not because I force it, but because I stop fighting the process.

And suddenly I can see it clearly. The work is happening in every moment, not just the ones that feel productive or dramatic.

Slowing Down When I Want to Speed Up

What I forget is that endings don't have to be verdicts. They can be pauses. Places where the work settles rather than gets scored.

They’re the slow exhale after the heavy lift. They hold the threads of everything that came before. If I rush them, I miss the meaning that emerges when there’s time to notice what’s been woven together.

Often, the changes aren’t obvious. They show up in subtle shifts. The way someone sits differently. The way their breath deepens. Maybe the way their shoulders drop just a little lower than before.

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, rather than a therapist pretending to have arrived.

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