Life has acquainted me in the past with ends. I have torn enough pages off the calendar to have marked the passing of close relatives, to have waved goodbye to workplaces and work colleagues, to have shared dinner with them and thanked them for the mantel clock. I have sold and left behind houses full of memories and left the cities where my children were born, but until I became a counselling student, I had never negotiated or fine tuned any of these experiences into an ‘ending’. Endings though, are the stock in trade of the counsellor.

During the course we have scrutinised the dynamics of ending the therapeutic relationship, discussed the impact of separation for client and practitioner and, some weeks ago, opened the sensitive debate about how we would manage this for ourselves. What did we want from our ending? How were we going to manage?

Ultimately our last teaching day turned into a smorgasbord of ending options. We gathered in sub-groups as peer supervisors, as ‘skills groups’, as review partners, and said our nuanced goodbyes, not so much wearing different hats, more wearing the same hat at different angles. We then gathered in our final circle for what felt like a grand finale of feelings aired and shared.

All of this fairly formalised leave-taking was punctuated, though, by trappings and rituals familiar from that former life. We posed for group photos, snapped by a generous spirited and amused passer-by (thanks Jeff); we ate cake and drank coffee and hung about the student lounge discussing our plans for the long holiday; and, when the final circle dispersed, it was only for as long as it took to find out who knew the way to the restaurant we had booked 
for lunch.

Inevitably, as is the way of these things – ends, as distinct from endings – lunch was less formal, less predictable, a bit loose: the seating plan evolved, people mingled; some of us had trains to catch, others settled in for the long haul. In places, even the boundaries, at one time sacrosanct, became bleary. Were we colleagues or friends now? Tutor and student or just counselling buddies? It could be argued that this was an object lesson in being centred on the person; each individual choosing the appropriate pace to travel at and mode to travel in, and at which point to leave.

Lunch developed into pudding. Pudding was followed by coffee, then a significant fraction of the whole group, still not ready to part ways, walked on to the pub. The die hard core (or leftovers, depending on your view) sipped their martinis long enough to endure a desultory performance from their national football team before embracing in the street and going their separate ways.

It is laudable and useful to acknowledge the problems and pain attached to the end of anything. It is good – and this is counselling mantra – to face such things honestly and head-on, but there is also something charming and human in the way that endings can become ragged at the edges. Our several attempts at our own ending (and we really knew what was coming) seemed to reflect what it might be like for the client. The truth is that although the final session of counselling does mark the end of the therapeutic relationship, the end of the weekly or fortnightly ritual, the emotional aches and pains that launched the relationship in the first place will not have evaporated but may have been reduced or adjusted. The client must carry this adjustment back into ‘real life’, use his/her own devices, lean on the pre-existing support group, and yes, remember how the adjustment was made possible. Similarly, as we walked away from the pub, trailing a little melancholy perhaps, we also carried mobile numbers and promises to keep in touch.

We started as study colleagues but have strayed into the border country between the professional and the personal, and in many ways, we are conscious that this period of time must accommodate an adjustment in approach. For now we face the new challenge as fledgling graduates in search of further placement or employment. In facing that challenge, we will phone one another, use each other for support and advice, and admit that despite all signs to the contrary, despite calling a halt to the weekly trip to university, what we are looking at is hardly an ending at all but bears all the hallmarks of beginning.

Some details have been changed to protect identities.