When our clients leave: The loss we don’t talk about enough
Angelique da Silva MÂ鶹ԭ´´

The other day, a client ended therapy after five years together. Five years of showing up, week after week, through breakthroughs and setbacks, laughter and silence. I had witnessed incredible growth; it was a privilege to see.

But when she left, the loss hit me hard. It wasn’t just a quiet sadness. It stirred up old memories and touched tender places I thought I’d long since resolved.

My own child is now the same age this client was when she began therapy with me –on the verge of leaving home. I am proud of the young man he is becoming, but I can feel the ache of the separation.

Her ending also brought me face-to-face with my own history. At that age, I didn’t simply leave home; I escaped it. The parallels were striking: my client, my child, my younger self, all standing at the same threshold of change. The grief I felt wasn’t just about losing her presence in the therapy room, it was about reliving my own endings and anticipating the one yet to come when my son leaves home.

I’ve had clients leave before, of course. Some endings feel complete, even celebratory. But sometimes, we grow to love our clients deeply, not in a boundary-blurring way, but in that very human way where their presence becomes part of our own weekly rhythm. And when they go, we miss them. We wonder how their story will continue, knowing we may never find out.

We don’t talk about this enough in our profession. Endings are a natural part of therapy, we prepare clients for them, and ourselves too. But that preparation doesn’t mean the ending won’t leave a mark. I’ve been in private practice for six years, and I know this ending will stay with me.

When I spoke about it with my supervisor, she named what I was feeling: ‘We don’t talk often enough about this.’ That gave me permission to sit with my grief rather than quickly packaging it into something ‘professional’.

Supervision has been essential, as has my own therapy. Both give me the space to notice how grief in the present is tangled with grief from the past. Writing this is part of my processing too, it helps me hold the complexity of my feelings without needing to tidy them away.

Being a therapist means living in two worlds: the professional who celebrates a client’s readiness to end, and the human who feels the absence. To acknowledge that is not a weakness. It’s a reminder that our work matters, that it touches both our clients and ourselves.

So, I’m sharing this in the hope that more of us will speak openly about the losses we feel. If we encourage our clients to bring their grief into the light, perhaps we can extend the same grace to ourselves.