title: "Our Time is Up": A Relational Perspective on the Ending of a Single Psychotherapy Session.
abstract: This paper, written from a relational perspective, examines the final minutes of an individual psychotherapy session, and is organized around the topics of boundary negotiation, unwitting self-disclosures, visual challenges, and countertransference. Attending to session-ending material is important because the separation involved lends heightened emotional intensity to the oftensignificant material that appears in the final minutes. This material often serves as a bridge to the psychotherapeutic work to be taken up in subsequent sessions. Session-ending dynamics call upon the therapist to prioritize empathy, validation, and support for the patient suffering from early deprivation; identify and heal narcissistic injury in the patient wishing to be special; judiciously alter the frame when doing so will benefit the patient and not constitute a boundary violation; avoid re-traumatization; admit mistakes; confront blatant denial; advance agency; address uncomfortable topics; set appropriate limits; and deal authentically with uncomfortable countertransference. Numerous clinical examples serve to illustrate these clinical phenomena.
authors.forename: Jerome S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Gans
mesh_terms: D001071:Appointments and Schedules; D003379:Countertransference; D004645:Empathy; D006801:Humans; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011613:Psychotherapy; D012650:Self Disclosure; D013997:Time Factors