Therapy Without a Finish Line

Why I’m glad I stayed after I got better

I left therapy today feeling profoundly grateful for the person who has been sitting across from me for the past ten years. She’s been with me through hardship and joy, tragedy and success, births and deaths. She’s also been there through two of my adult relapses of anorexia, both of which nearly brought me down, not because my physical health was ever in immediate danger, but because the shame of finding myself back there felt almost unbearable.

When I first walked into her office ten years ago, I was already in the middle of the first of those relapses. I had chosen to be there, and I wanted her help, but I was terrified to tell her the truth. Hell, I was terrified to admit it to myself.

I thought I was too old to have anorexia again. I was a mother with children who needed me to be well, and perhaps even more shamefully, I was a psychologist. I spent my days helping other people understand themselves, and yet there I was, sitting across from another therapist, coming undone.

Our work in those early years centered largely on helping me recover. I’d only been well for a relatively short time when my family was devastated by the deaths of my sister-in-law, her husband, and their three sons in a plane crash. My therapist walked through that with me too. She was there in the years that followed, as grief rearranged our family and COVID arrived just as we were finding our footing again. Then my fifteen-year-old son had a mental health crisis, and my husband and I made the excruciating decision to send him across the country for treatment. Once he was safely there, I unraveled into my most recent relapse of anorexia.

For the first eight years of therapy, I was managing or recovering from crises unfolding either around me or inside of me.

Eventually, I made it through those crises. For the past couple of years, I’ve been relatively healthy, and my family has been doing well. For the first time in our work together, therapy no longer has an obvious focus or goal. With no immediate crisis, no eating disorder I’m trying to climb out of, and no particular trauma my therapist and I are working to resolve, I’ve found myself wondering more than once whether it was time for me to leave.

As a therapist, I understand perfectly well that reaching a goal doesn’t necessarily mean the work is over. When one of my own patients reaches the goals that originally brought them into my office, we talk about what comes next. Sometimes that means ending therapy, sometimes it means meeting less frequently, and sometimes we discover that the work has changed.

I’ve always understood that from the therapist’s side of the room, but it has been much harder to trust it from the patient’s side. What I did know was that even though I could no longer name exactly what I was working toward, I didn’t feel ready to walk away.

During the years when I was managing one crisis after another or recovering from anorexia, there was always something immediate that needed our attention. Because of that, I didn’t appreciate that something else was happening alongside that work. Week after week, year after year, I brought my therapist the things I felt ashamed of, the feelings I worried were too much, and the thoughts that made me uncomfortable even to put into words, and she met them with curiosity and care.

Over time, I began to believe something I had long understood intellectually: I could let myself be known and still be loved. When I showed her the parts of myself that made me itch with discomfort, she came closer.

My therapist was helping me take off my armor even while we were busy putting out fires. She didn’t do it by convincing me I no longer needed to wear it; she did it by giving me a place where I could test what happened when I removed one piece at a time. Eventually, I became more willing to let the people I loved see the parts of me I had once believed I needed to keep hidden, and I discovered that vulnerability could create the very connection I had spent so much of my life longing for.

The relational work in the therapy room didn’t begin when the crises ended; it had been happening all along. What has changed is that I can receive more of it now that I’m no longer working so hard to protect myself.

Today was a good example. I brought an unfinished essay into therapy that included something I’d never shared with my therapist before: my curiosity about her. That opened a conversation in which I was able to talk to her, in real time, about our relationship, something I couldn’t have done in the earlier years of therapy.

We talked for a while, and I wish I could tell you exactly what she said. The words aren’t what I carried out of the room with me, though. What I remember is the feeling of connection.

I could feel the discomfort of having revealed something I had kept to myself for years, and I could acknowledge how much our relationship means to me. I didn’t need to protect myself from either; I could let myself feel uncomfortable and cared for at the same time.

It’s true that I no longer need therapy in the same way I once did and that I’m no longer in crisis or working toward a particular goal. It’s also true that the work we are doing now feels just as meaningful.