How to Find Psychological Closure

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Closure is a concept that has entered the popular lexicon. It has been embraced by people, as a key psychological need, typically after problematic events, such as a relationship ending, or a bereavement. The popular view of closure involves a sense of psychological completion, a process of understanding, comprehension, and feeling like an experience has been processed.

Historically, it appears that this concept appears to have initially been derived from the work of a cognitive psychologist on memory for unfinished tasks. Zeigarnik found that people have a better memory for a task if they were interrupted before completing it. Further research has been done to test whether this effect extends to the emotional realm, and it was found that people often regretted and thought about inactions more than actions (i.e., suggesting a lack of closure when a situation was left unfinished). Thus, closure can involve cognitive components (how we think about something), affective elements (how we feel about something), and memory (how we remember something).

Problems with closure

Events that are negative, that involve other people, and are more recent often bring lower levels of closure than positive events, events that do not involve other people, and events where some time has elapsed. Broadly speaking, it is easier to accept positive outcomes or times where we feel like we have had some control over the situation (and the actions of other people are inherently uncontrollable), and we often achieve greater acceptance with time.

While closure appears like a useful phenomenon, it can be problematic. There often appears to be a reliance on a sense of needing closure before being able to process an experience, which can leave people completely psychologically vulnerable to the actions of another person, or the answers they can provide.

In my work with clients, especially with those who stalk other people, this appears to manifest as a need to know why something occurred, such as why a relationship ended. This may sometimes help someone with moving past a difficult event, but I often note that satisfactory explanations cannot always be proffered or that people engage in intrusive and boundary-crossing behaviours to force answers. In some situations, there may not be any answers available at all, and the task might simply be to learn to accept the situation and progress past it, despite a lack of clarity.

Three main tasks in the process of closure

There are three main tasks involved with gaining psychological closure. These involve understanding a situation, processing the difficult feelings about it, and allowing time and distance to elapse so that the situation can be placed in context.

We often focus on trying to understand a situation or may relentlessly seek answers as a way of engaging in experiential avoidance (i.e., trying to avoid difficult feelings/situations). However, the only way to manage difficult emotions is to allow them to be present, sit with them, and allow them time and space. With enough distance and time, most experiences will lose some of their intensity and sting.

To understand a situation, it can be helpful to spend some targeted time thinking about it in a constructive manner, with a view to learning from it. This does not involve ruminating endlessly, and it is helpful to set some clear parameters around this process (e.g., scheduling thinking time for an hour twice a week), to ask other people for feedback, and to ensure that your thought process is tailored at trying to learn and grow, rather than blaming (self or others), defending, or denying the reality (i.e., it shouldn’t have happened this way, maybe if I talk to him again I can convince him to take me back).

Some helpful questions to ask yourself include:

• What happened?
• What was painful about this?
• What was my contribution to it?
• Which aspects of the situation were influenced by someone else?
• What can I do differently next time?
• How might I grow through this?

With emotional processing, the general principles of managing difficult emotions apply. The key task is to ensure that we allow the difficult and natural emotions (i.e., anger, sadness, grief) and express these in some format (crying, talking, drawing, writing) instead of trying to deny, deflect, repress or otherwise avoid. Strong emotions can feel difficult to manage, but it is important to remember that they will usually settle with time.

The process of allowing time and distance might involve simply allowing and acknowledging the pain and noting that it will likely abate over the course of the next 6-12 months. It might involve deciding on a period of no-contact with someone, or blocking yourself from viewing a person’s social media accounts for a time. It might involve changing your geographical situation, such as moving.

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To create distance, it can also be helpful to try and physically contain the experience. Researchers have found that writing about a difficult experience and placing it in a sealed envelope helps people process the experience quicker. It may be helpful to consider whether you can engage in a similar task, or even try to compartmentalise things via mental representations and place a difficult situation in a "box" that you can choose to unpack when you want.

Ultimately, closure involves a sense of psychological completion and acceptance that an event occurred, regardless of how difficult or unpleasant the event was. Closure may involve a process of seeking answers from other people, but should not depend entirely on this. There are a number of ways to come to terms with difficult experiences and to create your own closure.