One Word

She glanced up momentarily as her hands relentlessly picked away at a tissue in her lap, eyes moist and reddened, yet unable to mask an inner resolve as hard as steel.  The counsellor across from her shifted in his chair, and casually folded one leg over the other.  When he spoke, it was with a quiet hope that his voice would not waver.

“There’s one last thing I’d like for us to do.  It’s a visualization, of sorts.  Just a way  for you to have something to take away that will help remind you of the work we’ve done here.”

As he spoke, her awareness drifted back to her fingers as they tore nervously at the tissue.  Knowing that it was all coming to an end, she eventually looked back up at him and nodded, a mix of apprehension and curiosity washing over her.  He took a breath and nodded as well.  Her fingers went still.

“I’d like you to reach into this bag and choose one of the small rocks inside.  It’s going to be your rock, so take a moment and pay attention to how you are making your choice,” he said as he passed her a small ziploc bag full of small, smooth stones.  A look of interest flashed across her face and she began to carefully feel several rocks before selecting two, feeling each in the palm of her hand.  After a moment of thoughful examination, she made her choice.  A roundish one, uniform gray in colour.

“Great.  I’d like you just to hold on to that rock in your hand for a minute.  Now, I’d like you just to take a deep breath and make yourself as comfortable as possible in your chair.  Plant your feet firmly on the ground, and close your eyes, if you’re comfortable.  We’re just going to take a few moments to reflect on what coming here has been like…”

As he spoke, calmly and evenly, thoughts and images of the last several months began to race into her mind.  She saw herself in the waiting room, fidgeting nervously and keenly aware of others’ sideways glances.  The long walk down that hallway to his office, trying to make idle conversation.  The familiar, crippling fear she felt when she first decided to come for help that had never completely gone.  The pain, the panic, the frustration.

“…now, as you’re recalling all of these memories and sitting in that experience, just try to let a word come to mind that seems to fit for you.  Just one word, one that wants to come on its own.  Don’t look too hard.”

Several moments passed as the air in the room thickened.  He watched the thoughtful expression on her face twist up for a moment, then suddenly, a single tear shot down her cheek.  She opened her eyes, and let him know that she had found her word.

“Here is a marker.  Now, if you’d like, you can write your word on the rock, and it will be my gift to you.”

She didn’t hesitate as she reached for the pen and carefully drew onto her rock the word that had so clearly come to mind as she remembered the fear, the anxiety, and the many, many tears.  She turned the rock over to show him what she had wrote, and in clear, purposeful lettering, one word was scrawled:

“Strength.”

I’ll see you around

this sad goodbye bear is going goodbye

“You must have the worst job in the world,” a client once told my supervisor.

I would be quite inclined to disagree, obviously.  However, the context in which these words were spoken lend them a strong element of truth.

There are probably lots, but I’m hard pressed at the moment to think of many jobs outside of the helping professions where you habitually build significant relationships with people, who are more often than not in a state of distress, see them change, grow, improve (or worsen),  hear some of their closest secrets, their worst fears, and at the end of the day, without fail, have to say goodbye.

And I’m quickly discovering that this is one element of being a helper that, for lack of a more descriptive word, sucks.  It’s balls.

It’s one of those things that you read in the intro to counselling textbooks and think that you’ve got a handle on, that you’ll know all the right things to say, that you’ll know how to take care of yourself when a client walks out of your office for the last time visibly trying to hold back tears after you’ve stumbled through saying goodbye.

I feel like there have been a lot of those lessons, the ones where all of a sudden what you read or learned about makes sense in a totally different way once you live it.  And you’re left thinking “ahhhhh… that’s what they were talking about!”  Except it’s just not possible to really know what they were talking about before you experience it.  You think you do.  But you don’t.  I’ll have a post of some of these lessons sometime in the future.

But one has to ask: why do we put ourselves through this painful process of saying goodbye, when it goes against every human impulse to remain connected, to just say, “I’m sure I’ll see you again, somewhere, sometime”?

Because there really is every impulse to say something to that effect.  Something about saying “goodbye” is so final, so definitive, such a reminder of our mortality, that to face it head on can be incredibly anxiety provoking.  Endings are uncomfortable, and experiencing one often brings up memories of endings from our past.

One of the most salient such memories for myself is having to say goodbye to my grandfather on his deathbed.  What could I possibly say that would communicate what I feel?  And how?  I’ll always remember how awkward that moment was, and how really, I couldn’t think of the ‘right’ thing to say.  How, more than anything, I felt embarrassed, and then guilty that this was the strongest thing that I felt.

In the situation I’m in now, at the end of an 8 month practicum, saying goodbye after goodbye after goodbye to the very people I had previously been trying to get to know better, to build a strong therapeutic relationship with, it’s hard not to be reminded of all the times I wish I had done a better job saying goodbye to other people in my life.

But I guess that’s just human nature.  It’s easier to avoid the hard feelings.  To ignore the discomfort.  To say, “I’ll see you around sometime” when we know that we damn sure won’t.

It’s time to reclaim goodbye.