Good Goodbyes highlights the crucial importance of how the end of therapy is structured and experienced. Bad endings can destroy good therapies. Good endings can consolidate the work accomplished, transform relationships, and foster growth in both patient and therapist.
Within the framework of the therapeutic relationship and a clearly articulated set of goals for therapy, Jack Novick and Kerry Kelly Novick describe how to recognize and respond to termination themes from the very beginning of treatment. Each phase of treatment brings its own challenges, as well as the risk of premature ending by patient or therapist. Each chapter in this book addresses specific danger signals to look out for and helpful techniques to support treatment.
With vivid clinical examples from all diagnostic groups and all stages of development, the Novicks demonstrate how to engage each patient in building the “emotional muscle” needed to master life’s challenges, transform early losses, and integrate new experiences of joy and sadness into the personality.
“Nearly every therapist has watched in helpless agony when the good work of a patient’s therapy is spoiled by a bad ending. In Good Goodbyes, the Novicks help us to minimize the possibility of such painful occurrences. Through an easy-to-follow series of questions and answers, they walk us through the phases of intensive analytic treatment: from evaluation to beginning; from middle to pre-termination; and finally, from the much neglected phases of termination to post-termination. Through vivid and compelling child and adult clinical vignettes, the illuminate the challenges and satisfactions inherent in such work. Moreover, the demonstrate that when a treatment culminates in a ‘good goodbye,’ a patient’s system of self-regulation can be transformed from one that is joyless, constricted and closed to one that is healthy, alive and open.” William B. Meyer, MSW, BCD, Department of Social Work, Duke University Medical Center
“The Novicks have produced an excellent and most original book on termination in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy …. At last we have an approach that conceives termination so fully that it includes the concerns and reasonable preparations for the patient’s self-care after termination.” Henry Krystal, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Michigan State University
“Good Goodbyes is a fitting culmination of the Novicks’ esteemed contributions to the literatures on termination, child and adult psychotherapies, and the ‘two systems’ model of self-regulation. This thorough, practical and wise volume on how to productively approach the ending of psychotherapies will be a great resource for experienced therapists and an invaluable guide to clinicians in training.” James Hansell, Ph.D, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
Good Goodbyes has been translated into German and Italian.