The Things We Carry: Endings, Beginnings and the Space Between

Endings & Beginnings by Ben Payne

We like beginnings. There is something clean about them. A new job, a new relationship, a new home, a new year. They offer us the possibility that life might be rearranged, that whatever has become stuck might loosen, that we might somehow become different simply by crossing a threshold. Endings are harder. They ask something less glamorous of us. They ask us to acknowledge that what has mattered cannot always remain, and that moving forward often requires us to lose something without necessarily ceasing to love it.

Perhaps this is why we are so fond of the language of closure. We speak of needing closure after relationships, bereavements, jobs and periods of our lives, as though emotional experience is a door we can gently pull shut behind us. I have never been entirely convinced by this. In my experience, personally and as a therapist, the things that matter rarely close so neatly. They change shape. They become memories, habits, internal conversations, griefs, freedoms, wounds and resources. Sometimes we discover years later that we are still carrying something we thought we had left behind.

The psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott offers an unusually tender way of thinking about this. Much of his work concerned the movement from dependence towards independence: how we begin life completely reliant upon another person and gradually develop the capacity to exist as a separate self. Yet Winnicott’s independence was never the heroic self-sufficiency our culture so often celebrates. He understood that human beings remain dependent upon other people and their environments throughout life. What changes is our capacity to carry within ourselves something of what we have previously needed from outside (Winnicott, 1965). His developmental sequence — absolute dependence, relative dependence and towards independence, is telling. Independence is approached rather than finally conquered.

This becomes particularly beautiful in his 1958 paper The Capacity to Be Alone. Winnicott proposes an apparent contradiction: our ability to be alone develops through the experience of being alone while another person is reliably present. The child who can become absorbed in play while a trusted parent remains somewhere nearby is beginning to discover something important. I can disappear into myself without you disappearing from me. I can become separate without the relationship being destroyed. Over time, the supportive environment is increasingly carried internally, allowing actual solitude to become possible (Winnicott, 1958).

I find this profoundly relevant to psychotherapy because therapy is, in one sense, always preparing for its own ending.

This does not mean that we begin therapy preoccupied with goodbye, nor that the relationship between therapist and client is merely instrumental. Quite the opposite. In relational work, the relationship matters precisely because it is real. Two people meet repeatedly and something particular develops between them. There are moments of recognition and misunderstanding, closeness and distance, frustration and repair. The client does not simply bring their relational world into the room; therapist and client create another relationship together, one influenced by everything that has gone before but not entirely determined by it.

I am interested in what happens within that relationship at several levels simultaneously: the story being told, the body telling another story beneath it, the old relational patterns finding new actors, the parts of ourselves that long for connection and those that distrust it. We may consciously be talking about the ending of a marriage while something much older is moving beneath the conversation: the child who learned that people leave, the adolescent who discovered that needing someone could be dangerous, the adult who learned to leave first rather than risk being left.

This is why endings are rarely only about what is ending now.

Every goodbye arrives carrying other goodbyes.

And every beginning carries something of what preceded it.

Winnicott helps us resist the temptation to treat psychological development as the elimination of dependence. Instead, we might understand maturity as an increasing ability to remain ourselves within connection and separation. I can need you without disappearing into you. I can be angry with you without destroying you. I can survive your absence without pretending your presence meant nothing. And perhaps, eventually, I can leave you while retaining something of what occurred between us.

There is something here that feels important beyond the therapy room. We encounter endings constantly: relationships end, children leave home, bodies age, careers change, friendships drift, homes are sold, people die. Sometimes we choose these endings and sometimes they arrive without our permission. Yet we are often remarkably impatient with the psychological territory between an ending and whatever comes next. We want the new chapter. We want transformation. We want to know who we are becoming.

But there is often a period when we simply do not know.

Therapeutically, I have become increasingly interested in this uncertain space. Sometimes the work is not to help someone move forward but to accompany them while they remain, for a time, in the place where the old identity no longer quite fits and the new one has not yet formed. The temptation is to fill that space quickly, with another relationship, another job, another plan, another version of ourselves. Yet perhaps some beginnings require us first to tolerate not beginning.

Winnicott’s wider thinking about transitional experience offers a useful way of understanding this territory. Development does not happen through abrupt replacement: dependence one day, independence the next. It happens through intermediate spaces in which inner and outer worlds overlap, where something can be both found and created, present and absent. His collected writings from this period repeatedly return to the importance of the facilitating environment in allowing maturation to unfold rather than forcing it into existence (Winnicott, 1965).

Perhaps this is what a good ending also requires: an environment in which we are not hurried out of one experience simply because another is waiting.

There are endings in my own life that I once thought I needed to resolve. I understand them differently now. Some have become part of the architecture of who I am. People I no longer know have shaped how I love. Places I no longer inhabit remain somewhere within my understanding of home. Work that has ended continues to inform what I value and what I will no longer tolerate. Relationships have left behind both tenderness and scar tissue. None of this feels like closure. It feels more like integration.

This is perhaps what I take most from Winnicott. The purpose of a meaningful relationship is not that we eventually become untouched by its absence. Nor is psychological maturity demonstrated by needing nobody. Rather, through being held sufficiently well, recognised sufficiently often, disappointed and repaired with, we gradually acquire a greater capacity to hold ourselves.

Then an ending becomes something other than disappearance.

We leave carrying something.

Perhaps the most meaningful beginnings are not the ones where we completely reinvent ourselves. Perhaps they are the ones where we realise we can move into what comes next while still carrying what has shaped us: what we have loved, lost, survived and learned. We do not have to stay where we were for those experiences to remain part of us.

References

Winnicott, D.W. (1958) ‘The capacity to be alone’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, pp. 416–420.

Winnicott, D.W. (1965) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.