Whether you’re a client or a counselor, terminating the relationship is difficult.
Here are some thoughts on how to handle it.
You’re a client who feels ill-suited to or dissatisfied with your counselor
Let’s say you find your counselor, for example, too active, too passive, too fast- or slow paced, not reading you right, not having enough specific expertise to address your problem You’ve gently offered feedback and it hasn’t helped, so you want to terminate the relationship.
It can be tempting to simply not schedule another appointment, saying, “I’ll get back to you about scheduling,” and then not. But honest feedback is of real value so, after you get home, if you feel generous and would like to slightly increase the chances of the counselor being more effective with future clients, you might want to write a note such as,
Dear Joe,
Thank you for our session today. I appreciated that you are a wellspring of knowledge about career issues but I’ve decided not to schedule another appointment because I’m sensing that we’re not a good fit. I tend to be slower, more reflective. You are fast, sometimes coming up with solutions before I even finish a sentence. Your intuitions about me may be spot-on and perhaps your speed is simply a sense of responsibility to help me as quickly and thus as inexpensively as possible but it just doesn’t feel right. I once asked you to slow down and you did so for a minute but soon you were back in gear. If I kept pressing it, I believe it would force you to be someone you’re not.
I, for one, really appreciate benevolently derived feedback and I thought perhaps you might too. If not, I apologize.
Wishing you all the best of course,
Jill Jobseeker
You’re a counselor who feels ill-suited to a client
If you felt that a client might well be better served by another counselor, you might say something like:
I certainly don’t like to turn away clients but ethically, I think you’d be better served by a career counselor who specialized in people in your situation: artsy people who have long been a stay-at-home parent and are having major issues around procrastination. If you like, I can make a referral. Would you like one?
You’re a counselor and don’t want to work with a client
Occasionally, even if a counselor feels s/he could help a client, s/he sufficiently dislikes or disrespects the client that s/he wants to terminate the relationship.
If you feel that way during a career counseling session, you should wait for the end of the session or look for a moment when the client seemed unhappy with you. At that point, you might say something like,
You seem unhappy with me and I’m getting the sense that I can’t be the advocate for you that I need to be. Despite my having stressed the importance of your doing the homework between sessions, you haven’t. And the angry personality you admit you have trouble controlling is coming out toward me so much that I feel it’s keeping me from being as effective as I could be. And simply, personally, I have a hard time being attacked so much when---and I really have reflected on it---your anger does not seem justified. For example, when I said we had to stop for the day last week, you insisted on keeping talking. I patiently listened and when you stopped and I said we really had to stop, you called me rigid. We’re both better off with you finding someone you won’t be as angry with. I’m not a therapist. I’m a career counselor and I’m just not sufficiently equipped to be as helpful to you as I’d like. Would you like a referral to a good therapist?
The takeaway
Of course every client and every counselor is different. But both client and counselor have the right to crisply terminate the relationship while providing an explanation that while honest, where possible, allows the person to save face.
If there isn’t a face-saving way, you might want to err on the side of honesty so the person gets feedback rather than a disingenuous and unhelpful statement such as “I just don’t think we’re a good fit,” and refusing to explain why. True, your candor may evoke an angry response but that may be a price that a good counselor should be willing to pay.
Marty Nemko's bio is in Wikipedia.