Love Like it’s Going to End
A client who is in the midst of a painful breakup asked: “How do I ever love again? How do I open my heart up again to the potential of this type of pain? It makes me never want to date or risk that ever again.”
My response back was this:
I had a client who I saw for about a year when he was 16. He mostly dealt with the typical high school angst. Fitting in, bullying, trying to figure out who he was. He showed up and did the work and made progress during the time we worked together. It was hard, at the end of the year, to say goodbye to all of my wonderful adolescent clients who I had grown quite attached to. But that’s how therapy training goes, you move around a lot filling requirements.
About 10 months later, his mom reached out and asked if I was taking new clients at my now private practice and if I could see her son again.
It had been less than a year since I saw him last. In just that 10-ish months, his younger sister, who was all but 15, had been diagnosed with Leukemia and had passed. To be honest, I wasn’t so much concerned about him and his grief as I was about the parents seemingly hiding from their own grief by overly focusing on him and his.
My point in telling my current client this story of a past client, is that when we decide to have children, or get married, or love another —…
