'When is therapy over? Who decides? And on what basis? What happens when psychotherapy goes on either too briefly or too long? In most cases, today's psychotherapy tends to be too brief, too superficial, and does far too little to psychologically prepare the patient for life after therapy. When the patient requires a more "open-ended" therapy, the question becomes one of duration: How long is long? Therapy addiction is not necessarily the patient or client's fault, but rather the responsibility of the psychotherapist. Psychotherapy, like everything else in life, has limitations. Paradoxically, recognizing and accepting this existential fact of limitation can intensify and deepen the patient's growth and development in therapy. For it is during the "termination phase" of therapy that some of the most important working through is accomplished. This termination phase is the final stage of psychotherapy. But many patients – and therapists – avoid it for as long as possible and thus are never forced to confront it. Termination is a sort of death or loss of a deeply valued, supportive, nurturing and intimate human relationship. But so long as patients remain in this somewhat womb-like, often parent-to-child protective bubble, they, at least at some level, are refusing to grow up and venture out alone into the difficult, cold, cruel world. And by permitting the patient to avoid the anxiety, trepidation and sadness of termination, therapists perpetuate a dependency on therapy every bit as addictive as any drug. The question sooner or later arises: Have I attained my goals for therapy? Can I continue to feel good and remain confident without therapy? What if I stop and begin to backslide? Am I strong enough to handle whatever challenges life brings? These are some of the most crucial questions posed in psychotherapy. And the answers can only be found by accepting and anticipating the inevitability of termination and working through whatever anxieties, abandonment issues, sadness and other feelings this evokes during what is sometimes a prolonged, painful, tumultuous but ultimately liberating and empowering termination process.'