One of the biggest myths we have been led to believe is that we need closure from someone before we can move on.
We wait for the apology that never comes, we hope for the conversation that explains everything, we imagine that if they would just tell us why they did what they did, we could finally be at peace, unfortunately life rarely works that way.
Many relationships and situations end without a satisfying explanation. Friendships fade away or a loved one dies before important words are spoken. Someone may behave in a hurtful way and genuinely believe they did nothing wrong. If our peace depends on others giving us closure, we hand them control over our emotional future.
Recent neuroscience offers a hopeful perspective, our brains naturally dislike unfinished stories, they constantly search for certainty and answers because uncertainty feels uncomfortable. We often mistake that discomfort for evidence that we still need something from the other person.
In reality, what we do need is not external closure but internal resolution. There is an important difference, external closure depends on somebody else changing their behaviour while internal resolution depends on us changing our relationship with what happened.
That does not mean pretending the hurt never occurred and it does not mean excusing bad behaviour or forgetting painful experiences. What it does mean is that accepting that we may never receive the answers we want and deciding that our wellbeing will no longer be dependent on receiving them is the way forward.
When we become stuck asking “Why did that happen?” we often remain trapped in a question that may never be answered. A far more helpful question is “Given what happened, how do I want to live from here?” and that shift in emphasis changes everything.
We cannot control another person’s honesty, insight, or willingness to apologise. We can though, choose what we think, where we direct our attention and the actions we decide to take every day. Any time we choose to revisit a perceived injustice, we strengthen unsatisfying neural pathways.
Every time we choose to focus on building a meaningful life, we build and strengthen satisfying ones. Our brain gradually becomes better at whatever we repeatedly practise, unfortunately it does this even when it is negative unproductive thoughts.
Real resolution comes when we stop waiting for someone else to unlock the prison door and realise we were never truly locked in, the key was in our pocket all along. Sometimes that may mean ceasing to grieve for what never was, sometimes it means accepting that another person’s behaviour tells us more about them than it does about us.
At other times it may mean choosing to let go even when there is no reconciliation or negotiated resolution.
None of those choices erase the past, they simply stop the past from controlling the future.
The truly liberating moment is not when someone finally gives us closure, because that isn’t really possible, it is when we realise we no longer depend on it. That is when we stop living in yesterday and begin investing our energy in today. The life we create from that moment forward will always matter more than the explanation that was never really adequate or didn’t come at all.
