Self-Analysis: What Happens When Therapy Is Over?

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It has to happen. Eventually, therapy—whether cognitive behavioral, psychoanalytic, or anything in between—will come to an end. Then, you’re on your own: You have to figure out for yourself what you’re feeling and what you might need to do about it, especially when your feelings turn dark.

Hopefully, you have your therapist’s voice in your head; it may even have begun to sound like your own. Presumably, if all went well, you’ve learned enough to address your issues when they come up. And they will. Inevitably.

Therapy can be transformational. Psychoanalysis was for me. But therapy doesn’t magically exorcise the pain you brought there, nor the anger, fear, self-loathing, depression, aggression, anxiety, or any of the many other feelings that may have caused it. In my experience, therapy alleviates that pain by arming you with understanding, providing support, and identifying resources that diminish its once overwhelming power. Then you get to continue the process... on your own.

By the end of my nearly decade-long psychoanalysis, I couldn’t wait to be done. As reliant as I’d been on my analyst, I was ready to move on. There’s something exhilarating about being on your own without an intermediary between you and the world, or a constant commentator on your life.

The task was not so daunting now that my former terrors had been reduced to “common unhappiness,” to use Freud’s formulation. For over a year, I felt like an injured bird who’d been nursed back to health and tossed into the air to fly. And fly I did, until my friend Michael died suddenly. That’s when I understood that staying afloat would require continual self-analysis.

Feeling numb in the first months after Michael’s death seemed pretty normal. But a bit later, feeling as disoriented as I was by it did not seem normal. I hadn’t even seen Michael in a year, though I’d talked with him just two weeks before the heart attack that killed him.

Spending time sifting through my memories of him, I began to see how we were more like family than friends. That may have been because we’d met before we’d turned 20 and found in each other the security and support we both needed as we each took one tentative and sometimes calamitous step after another into our adult lives. We shared how we were both secretly dazed by the social class we’d risen to through academia. We shared our secrets. We really knew one another. Not the kind of knowing you need to talk about.

Without him, I suddenly felt unreasonably alone. I began to sink into desolation, a familiar, haunted feeling I would have brought to my analyst. By now, though, I knew she would have pointed out a lifetime’s pattern of certain attachments I deemed salvational, believing that without them I would die. That’s who I was when I met Michael and for years after, when he had twice rushed in to “save” me. But I didn’t need saving any longer.

This was where self-analysis took me. Once there, the desolation dissolved, and I came face to face with my grief at losing Michael. Just that, nothing more.

Given the techniques of my therapy, for me, self-analysis means going back to the origin of my feelings to understand and contain them when they threaten to sink me into depression. What I was unprepared for, though, is how I’d need to bring self-analysis to bear not only on life’s grave difficulties, but upon difficulties too seemingly insignificant to think twice about.

Recently, my husband and I were set to adopt a dog when the people running the rescue changed their minds. I was crushed, and whatever was crushing me was not to be reasoned away. By the third day of incongruous bleakness—especially compared to my husband’s “Who cares? There are other orphan dogs out there” — I stopped fighting the feeling and examined it the way I would have in therapy.

Feeling foolish about being so upset, I didn’t have the empathy for myself that my analyst would have had for me. But I stayed with the process until, out of some corner of my psyche, came an image that lit up my brain. It was of me as a 4-year-old standing at the door of a neighbor girl who wouldn’t let me in to play, although she’d said I could come. That memory had appeared more than once in my analysis, depicting my mother not being there or just unequipped to “make it better.”

My first reaction was not this again. My second was to see the connection between that original rejection and the people who had enthusiastically invited us to adopt the dog and then rejected us. In itself, that childhood rejection was minor. But in therapy, I had learned that it expressed how alone I’d felt in my family.

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Now I could see how this truly insignificant rejection had delivered me back into the memory of that pain. When I made the connection, I soon became myself again. And I had gotten there on my own.

My particular form of self-analysis is an adaptation of the psychoanalytic thinking I learned to do in the kind of therapy I chose. It’s what works for me (I tried other therapies that didn’t). By now, I’ve so integrated that orientation into my life that its premises are woven into nearly all of my responses to difficulty, loss, and darkness descending. Now I depend on it. I believe that ongoing self-analysis is how I remain at ease in my life.