Closure

The word closure drives me nuts. Or more to the point, it’s what it means when others say it that annoys me. When I hear the word closure, what I really think I’m hearing is “Are you not over that yet?” or “I don’t really want to listen to your problems” or “Can’t you keep your real feelings to yourself and pretend like the rest of us?”. When we don’t have closure it seems to make others a lot more uncomfortable than it makes us.

I think what we really want around something or someone that has been painful is peace. Some things in life can only be carried, not forgotten about, as this article says so well.

We want to be able to get on with our lives, without whatever it is incapacitating us. This is called integration, not closure. I don’t think things finish as neatly in life as the term closure suggests. When things are incomplete, unfinished and undigested, they can really disturb us, which is why Ivor Browne calls trauma “unexperienced experience”. When we get to digest whatever it is, we get to have peace around it. We might not get closure, but we’re more than ok with that. Because whatever it is/was doesn’t have the same power over our peace of mind anymore. We can live peacefully alongside its remnants, if there are any.