The Ultimate End of Treatment

Abstract

47 1 Director of Training, Long Island Institute of Mental Health, Rego Park, New York. Correspondence should be addressed to Robert S. Pepper, PhD, CGP, 110-50 71st Road, #1E, Forest Hills, NY 11375. E-mail: DrRobertSPepper@aol.com. I found out on New Year’s Eve day that my psychotherapist of 30 years, Rosalind Kaplan, PhD, lay dying in a hospice facility somewhere. If I hadn’t just written a book that I wanted her to have a copy of, I would never have known that her life was nearly at its end. As it turns out, my only link to her now happened through an ironic twist of fate, because when she retired at the end of the 30 years of psychotherapy with me, she insisted that there would be no further contact between us. I was hurt and furious with her for that. She was my psychotherapist for exactly 30 years, from June 1982 to May 2012, which in itself is quite ironic because, in my professional writings, I have been very critical of what I have called “cult therapists” who hold on to their patients for 20 years or more. But, then again, so much of life is filled with irony. And, like a failing marriage, what initially attracted me to her style of therapy in the end infuriated me. She was scrupulous about boundaries. I had come to her from a treatment environment where there were none, so she was a source of stability, sanity, and comfort. For the first six months of treatment, I thought she was incompetent, because she didn’t tell me how to run my life, which was the template of therapy in which I was trained and treated. Despite the realization that this was toxic to me, it was the only type of therapy that I knew. In my treatment with Roz, I had to relearn what therapy was and what my role as a therapist—to myself, to others—should be. So when she told me in November 2011, after 29.5 years of working with her, that she was retiring at the end of the upcoming May, I was appalled. It was in this end-of-treatment phase that her adherence to strict boundaries became a liability. She decided that, once treatment ended, there would be no further contact between us. My feelings were hurt, and I complained that only six months was not enough notice, too short a time, to process a termination after all these years. It felt like a