Graduating From Anxiety Therapy at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis
As child therapists, providing teenager therapy and therapy for college students, we recognize that anxiety therapy in St. Louis should have an end point.
We make sure to track our progress each and every week we meet, so that we can have an ongoing conversation. Are we reaching your therapy goals? Are we seeing progress? Are you able to handle the challenges that come your way without seeing a huge dip in the scores?
Read more: Feedback Informed Treatment at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis
There will always be ups and downs, but we want to know, as your St. Louis anxiety therapists, that we’ve made significant progress, that we’ve built up your resiliency, and that you feel ready to take on the challenges that might be headed your way.
Every person has their own needs - and we want to meet them before you wrap up therapy.
Feeling like you need some parent support?
Our parent coaching program is like therapy for parents, helping you come up with a plan for how to handle your needs as you support your child.
At Compassionate Counseling St. Louis, we want to make sure you make clinical progress that LASTS. That’s why we have a research-based 12 session minimum.
For some families we work with, we just meet for our standard 12 sessions. 12 sessions is usually enough time to see progress, to get things on track, and to build some important regulation skills for you or your child. When we start with 12 sessions and then graduate from therapy, we have a conversation about when down the road we would need to start up therapy again.
When we need more anxiety counseling:
For other clients, 12 sessions is a good starting point, but the anxiety or anger they experience, and the behaviors those emotions lead to, is more deeply rooted. We can’t just focus on surface level skills building - we need to dig in a little more.
Adding six sessions: Sometimes, we plan on adding another six sessions and touching base from there. This is a great option for kids and teens who feel almost ready to graduate from therapy, but they’re not quite there yet.
Ongoing therapy: Other times, we just plan on continuing to meet until we’ve met treatment goals, and we’ve maintained good progress on the outcomes. We’re still in touch with you and getting your scores every single week, but we don’t provide an arbitrary cut off to sessions. We still want to help you/your child feel ready to graduate from therapy, it just may take a lot longer. That’s ok, too!
Therapy for trauma, grief, and loss may take more time.
For our kids, teens, and college students who have experienced grief, loss, or trauma, 12 sessions is not nearly enough time to build up the relationship before we dive in.
With our approach here at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis, we want to make sure we have a solid foundation of skills and rapport before we make you or your child open up about these very emotional, vulnerable concerns.
Graduating from anxiety therapy should be an ongoing conversation between you and your therapist.
Past those initial 12 sessions, how will you know you’re ready to finish up? What goals do you need to meet? What skills do you need to have in place?
One of the really great things about tracking our outcomes scores every single week is that we, as your therapist, can walk you through what the data is showing. Are your scores getting better, consistently? When something tough comes up, do we see a huge dip in your scores, or just a small one, which demonstrates your increased resiliency and ability to handle the tough stuff?
When are you ready to finish anxiety counseling?
When you or your child have met treatment goals, when your anxiety feels manageable, when you feel prepared to handle the challenges that come your way, and when you come to therapy each week and start feeling like, “Oh! I’ve got this!” it might be time to finish up counseling.
Talk with your therapist, and figure out the plan to wrap up.
We usually want to know at least 3 or 4 weeks ahead of time so that we can make sure to appropriately close down the therapeutic process, and leave you and your child feeling awesome about doing this on your own.
What if I’m ready to finish therapy before my child is?
When you’re the parent, you have a different perspective on your child’s progress than they do. That’s just how it is! But you also have different information, and you know how best to support your child with their continued progress.
As your anxiety therapists, we want to work with you to figure out the best graduation plan, so that everyone feels ready.
Part of our job is empowering your child to handle their anxiety on their own, and at the same time, we don’t want to pull the supports away before they’re ready.
We can 100% make sure to address and build their readiness to graduate from therapy, when you let us know your concerns about keeping ongoing therapy on the docket.
We’re so excited to celebrate when everyone is on the same page about finishing therapy! We want your child to feel ready, we need the data to show they’re ready, and we want to check in and ensure we’ve accomplished all the goals we set up at the start of therapy. Graduating properly prepared clients from therapy feels AWESOME.
How do we celebrate the end of therapy?
It’s really important to make meaning of our therapeutic relationship. We’re never going to want you to come in and say, “ok, we’re done! bye!” We need to have a final session for you, or for your child, to celebrate all of the work that we’ve done together.
Graduation party:
Our favorite way to celebrate the end of therapy, when we can meet in person, is to have a graduation party for your child.
In the weeks before our planned final session, we’ll ask you/your child to pick out a special treat we can bring to therapy - brownies, or a starbucks frappe for a teen, or a small bag of their favorite flaming hot cheetoes.
We get to play games, talk, and explore what they’ve learned in therapy, and how they can use these skills going forward.
Graduation notebook and journaling activity:
We love to give kids, teens, and college students a graduation notebook when they wrap up with therapy. It’s a small (small!) reminder of all of our work together.
During our final session, we love to have our kids and teens write down answers to a few journal prompts - and we can work on these lists together.
Our first list: What did you learn in therapy?
We process skills that they gained, their takeaways, and what they want to remember from our time together.
Our second list: What are signs to come back to therapy?
Thinking back to the very start of therapy, and our very first session, what’s different from now to then? What would be signs that their brains and bodies are heading back in that direction? Sometimes, we can work on anxiety, and our brains change as they get older and the chemistry shifts. So, how do we know it’s time to come back before our problems get too big?
Art therapy activity:
From Kate Molano, a California-based LMFT, recommends closing out sessions with an art activity:
“I do an activity where I take a piece of paper and fold/ draw 6 equal squares on it. I then have the client draw a picture in each square.
“My usual prompts are: ‘Draw what it was like when you first came to therapy. Draw your favorite thing we did together. Draw something we learned together. Draw something representing how you’ve changed since starting therapy. Draw something you don’t ever want to forget about our time together. Draw what it will be like to say good bye today.
“I love this because it helps them process through the whole therapy journey they had. Some kids prefer to write words down instead of drawing. Main point is to get client processing about their time in therapy and how they’ve grown emotionally.”
The purpose of a graduation session:
Ultimately, we want to make sure we honor the work we’ve done in therapy, we process the skills we’ve gained in therapy, and we leave the door open for therapy in the future.
Some people come to therapy just once. Some people need to come back again and again. Both are ok. We just want to make sure that for you, and your child, counseling feels like a support that’s always available to you.
We always let our families know that, even when we’re done with anxiety therapy in St. Louis, Compassionate Counseling St. Louis is still a resource!
We love to get updates. We love to hear how they’re doing. When we wrap up counseling services, we want to be helpful in the future, too - celebrating everything you’ve already gained, and exploring when it’s time to get more support from us or from someone else down the road.
That’s why graduation sessions are so meaningful.
Kelsey Torgerson Dunn, MSW, LCSW is a child anxiety specialist and the owner of the group therapy practice, Compassionate Counseling St. Louis.
Curious to hear more about our plan for starting and ending counseling for you or your child? Compassionate Counseling St. Louis provides specialized anxiety and anger management therapy for kids, teens, and college students. We work in Clayton, MO and serve kids, teens, and college students throughout St. Louis City, St. Louis County, Ladue, University City, Town and Country, Webster Groves, Creve Coeur, Kirkwood, Richmond Heights, and Brentwood. You can set up your free phone screening to see if we’re a good fit for your needs right on our website.
Thumbnail image provided by: Patrick Buck
This post was originally published June 21, 2020 and updated July 26, 2023.