Here we go Again

My Complicated Relationship with The End.

Sex and The City (2003)

As the year winds down — that strange stretch of time where everything feels both too full and not quite finished — I’ve been thinking a lot about endings. Not the dramatic, cinematic ones, but the quiet, ordinary endings we avoid, postpone, or slip out of sideways. Maybe it’s the calendar turning over, or the collective instinct to “wrap things up,” but endings feel especially loud right now.

The High of Hello

I’ve never been good with endings. People think just because I’m a therapist who has years of training, experience, and qualifications under my belt that I have preternatural abilities to handle every situation flawlessly. Surprise, surprise, I’m not, I don’t.

I’ve ghosted jobs, relationships, projects, and conversations when they get just a little too uncomfortable. Not because I’m being petty or vindictive or malicious, there’s just something in me that finds endings unbearable. The awkwardness of goodbye, the slow dying of momentum, the quiet after the storm. It’s so tempting to just… slip away, start something new, find fresh contact.

Finding that new thing feels amazing, almost intoxicating. I’ve moved on to something different, wriggled and writhed away from the awkwardness of that old job, relationship, or whatever I felt was holding me back. But the thing about the endings we leave incomplete is that they don’t actually go away. They hover quietly in the background, half-finished, like open browser tabs you never close. You tell yourself you’ll come back to them later, when it feels easier, but in truth, they start to drain your battery, lingering in your mind and body like background noise: a low hum of what’s unresolved.

Gestalt 101: The Loop You Didn’t Know You Were In

Over time those one-sided “endings” can show up as tension, irritability, or a strange sense of unease. Those anxiety-ridden recurring dreams about that friend you ghosted after an argument, or the ex you blocked but whose Instagram you still lurk at on occasion? Yeah, that’s unfinished business; you might be in denial but your subconscious (annoyingly) has a mind of its own.

In Gestalt, that term – unfinished business – is what we refer to when a cycle of experience – a Gestalt – is left uncompleted. When this natural rhythm of awareness, contact, satisfaction, and withdrawal is interrupted, energy gets stuck. We can’t fully assimilate the experience, and so it lingers, looping in the background.

Like I said, I’m no different. I see the incomplete cycle in myself as well as my clients. A lot of us get gold stars in that first part of the cycle: the activation, the reaching, the pursuit of contact. We go after new ideas, relationships, projects, experiences, stimulation — the “contact hits.” It’s exciting. It makes us feel alive.

But near the end? It’s a big fat fail. The letting go and slowing down to assimilate and extract satisfaction, this part of the cycle feels less glamorous. It’s a bit like going cold turkey. That stimulation, whether it’s emotional, physical, mental, sexual, isn’t there anymore. This period of post-contact is expansive yet uncertain, and quite often it feels unbearable. So, it’s understandable a lot of us want to avoid it.

Avoidance: The Emotional Junk Food Diet

But avoiding endings, ghosting, cutting people off abruptly is a lot like not eating your vegetables. Yes, you dodge the bitter aftertaste. But it’s unhealthy, chronically harmful, and childish. Unhealthy because we’re not digesting the experience, it gets stuck, maybe even replaying in a loop, often in our subconscious. It’s chronically harmful because over time, that unfinished business can fester both inside our minds and bodies, and out in the real world. In many cases, there is someone out there whom we loved and cared for at one point, that we cut off complete contact with. That loss of access, comfort, and care can often outweigh whatever transgression, argument, or awkward situation made you cut off contact in the first place. It’s childish because it reflects a lack of ability to use our words, to really articulate our own feelings about a situation, hear someone else’s perspective, and come to an understanding.

I once worked with someone who kept finding herself in the same kind of relationship — intense, fast-moving, intoxicating, and then, suddenly, gone. Each time, she’d swear she was over it, jump straight into something new, and for a few months feel wildly alive again.

When she started seeing me for regular sessions, we unpacked why she had the urge to operate in relationships that way. She never allowed herself time to grieve all of the previous endings. Over time, they accumulated, and the rush of “something new” became less appealing each time. She also noticed how each new relationship carried a faint echo of the last — the same emotional choreography playing out with different faces. Her psyche wasn’t being self-destructive; it was trying to complete something. She went into each new relationship with the hope that “this one would be different” but kept deploying the same behaviour as before.

What we realised is that she was operating out of fear. Fear of the loneliness, loss, the truth that sometimes love ends for no reason other than it’s time. When she stopped running from those facts and really sat in the feeling of heartbreak, that craving for a new, shiny relationship stopped. She had begun the grueling process of completion.

And then there was the client who ended therapy abruptly after a misunderstanding between us — it felt too awkward, too exposing to face. Months later, he reached out again, describing how that rupture had stayed with him. “It’s like it never properly ended,” he said. Sitting together again, naming what had been unfinished, and really staying with the discomfort of that — it changed something. The charge dissolved. He felt freer. The unfinished experience could finally rest. And I noticed something in me settle too — a quiet relief at having honoured the work we’d begun.

Maybe that’s why endings feel so present at this time of year. There is a natural contraction — a turning inward — where what’s unprocessed starts to knock a little louder. December has a way of gathering all the loose threads we ignored in July and placing them gently (or not so gently) in our laps. The year itself asks for closure, even if we aren’t ready to give it.

A Terrible Treatment Plan 

Rushing past endings doesn’t stop the hurt, in fact, it can prolong it. Your brain takes a different route to process those emotions, almost like microdosing pain. We trade a sharp, clean wound for a dull, ongoing ache. It’s called ripping the plaster off for a reason. Even worse, that pain can manifest itself in us repeating the same patterns — in jobs, relationships, even in parent-child dynamics. We recreate that unfinished experience, quietly longing for satisfaction but often not getting it.

In Gestalt, endings are sacred. They’re the moments when the psyche exhales, when the energy of experience can return to the ground. The truth? Endings hurt like hell. They ask us to confront absence, to feel the ache of what’s no longer here. There’s a gap where someone’s love, a daily routine, even small but significant rituals used to be. But with the right mindset and emotional tools, we can learn to fill that space with something new, often something more fulfilling or something that fits better for the space and time you’re at in your life. So perhaps the invitation — for me, and maybe for you — is to practice the art of staying with endings. To pause before reaching for the next thing. To sit, even briefly, in the awkward quiet of completion.

A Gentle Guide to Not Running Away

Here are a few gentle ways I try (and often fail, but still try) to do this:

• Name the ending. Say it out loud. “This is over.” It sounds simple, but your brain loves clarity.

• Mark it somehow. Write, walk, light a candle, make a small ritual — something that says, I acknowledge this is complete.

• Notice what arises. Grief, relief, confusion, guilt, longing — all are part of the closing process. Stay with these feelings and allow yourself to feel them. Fully.

• Wait before moving on. Let the dust settle. Give your nervous system time to rest before pursuing the next hit of contact.

Here’s to the sacred art of endings. To sitting in the quiet after the noise. To letting things finish, so that something real can begin. And perhaps, as this year comes to its own close, to giving ourselves one small, honest ending — or at least the courage to stop running from one.