When Your Therapist is Away: Coping Strategies

Therapy is an intensely personal process. Therapists know all kinds of particular things about their clients. Clients engaged in the therapy process may come to rely or even depend on their therapists. What are clients to do when their therapists are absent, then, either temporarily or permanently? Clients may miss their therapists, or at the least, miss their regular therapy times. Developing coping skills for these times is crucial to pursuit of ongoing health and healing.

The coping skills clients need to practice when missing a therapist depend, in part, on the duration of the therapist’s absence. Are their therapists out for a sick day, on vacation, or taking a leave of absence? In these cases, separation is likely temporary. If the leave is planned, clients and therapists can talk about and plan for absences before they occur (Braman, 2023). Therapists and clients may be able to develop tools such as healthy distraction to help cope with the temporary attachment disruptions. Clients can review coping skills already learned and see how they have grown (Erickson, 2023). During longer absences, clients might rely on “back-up” therapists, or use app-based exercises (such as in mindfulness), for support. This helps the clients process the attachment rupture while looking forward to repairing the relationships to the therapists when the therapists return from leave.

In some cases, though, therapist-client relationships end. Therapists resign or move. Clients end therapy or move out of state (therapists can see clients only in the states in which they hold professional licenses). Hopefully, therapists and clients get to have goodbye sessions. In some cases, however, these do not occur. In these circumstances, clients may experience what professionals call disenfranchised grief, a type of grief not readily accepted or understood by the larger culture (Braman, 2023). This grief calls for tender self-care and attention. Clients need to acknowledge their feelings of loss to begin processing them (Phillips, 2023; Prince 2019). They may need to find a new therapist or support group to help them through their grief. Grieving and missing therapists is not all bad, though.

Missing therapists can reveal growth that happened in the therapeutic relationship. The end of the relationships does not mean that clients lose what they have learned. Rather, clients can carry with them the person of the therapist as internalized constructs (Toussiant, 2019; Viederman, 2021; Young, 2007). “’Good therapy [should keep] on giving,’” as one client told the therapist. It keeps on giving as clients reflect on and practice what they learned in therapy. While clients may miss their therapists, they are always able to connect to the knowledge their therapists gave them, for it now resides within them as a resource.

Clients missing their therapists can and should grieve, either in the short term, or for the long-term. If clients find themselves feeling stuck, they can reach out to new therapists for help. The biggest thing to do, though, is to cultivate acceptance. Missing a therapist most likely means the clients did good work with their therapists, and missing the therapists may be a part of recognizing what valuable work that was and is.