The Psychology of Closure
Relationship and friendship is a matter of the heart, emotions and feelings. In some moment when you need someone to share your burden with, your friend is the call-to person. The need for closure doesn’t just apply to relationships. The death of a loved one, the loss of a job, status or a way of life are other examples of painful endings. Letting go of something that was once important can be difficult, and many people seek closure in doing so. But does it actually help? And can you really expect other people to give you closure? Let’s take a look at the evidence.
Strange event might occur, that may cause depression, loneliness, and many heart breaking circumstances. People tend to leave friendship or relationship just because they want closure.
Imagine your partner unexpectedly changes their Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “single” and then refuses to communicate with you. This sounds awfully cruel, completely robbing you of your right to find out why you have been dumped so that you can get some closure and move on. But it is actually becoming so common that Facebook has created new tools to help people manage their Facebook profiles after a breakup and interact with former partners.
The social psychologist Arie Kruglanski coined the phrase “need for closure” in the 1990s, referring to a framework for decision making that aims to find an answer on a given topic that will alleviate confusion and ambiguity.
What the heck is Closure?
When we seek closure we are looking for answers as to the cause of a certain loss in order to resolve the painful feelings it has created. In doing this, we appear to form a mental puzzle of what’s happened — examining each piece and its relationship to the overall puzzle. Closure is achieved when we are satisfied that the puzzle has been assembled to our satisfaction, that the answers have been reached and it is therefore possible to move on..
This might keep you in a moment that you ask yourself different questions:
What was wrong?
Am I at fault?
Did I do something bad?
Did I hurt her/him?
Permit me to tell you, the answer to your riddle is C-L-O-S-U-R-E!
Look at this beautiful occurrence
Rick went out on a Saturday to shop, he met a lady at the mall and they both exchange contact. After leaving the mall, Rick put a call through to the lady and they also had a cool whatsapp chat. But after some time, he noticed her whatsapp display picture stop displaying and her number was not reachable again. He tried with another number, luckily it went through but the lady told him to call her back in just a minute. Guess what happened… the number couldn’t reach the lady again.
Rick woke up every morning for 3weeks asking himself different questions: “what have I said wrong? What warrant this strange attitude? At least I deserve an explanation and many more questionable assumptions.
The answer was not far from him, but the lady was trying to avoid further conversation that may erupt after she explain the “why” behind her attitude. [ most times, ladies or people in general don’t just want to relate or make new friends. So, they have to build up a mechanism that will prevent such things from happening.]
- CLOSURE
You might have had breakups, deserting or feel neglected without any explanation to it or it might be that someone did something bad to you without you knowing the reason why the person did that. You might have tried to confront the person for answers but couldn’t get it.
Grief, anger, hatred, depression, is the order of the day each time that moment crosses you mind.
You may want to know why, so that you can adjust, amend and put things together or in other. You believe when you know “why”, the pain/hurt might end (which is more often to be false).
You are now afraid of going into another relationship or trusting someone else. You are unable to pen your story properly because how it previously ended was unexplained. Therefore, you can’t submit.
Many people wrote long note, explaining their feelings, expecting or not expecting a reply.
Some have sorted after that same closure, aggressively confronting the person they seek answers from.
Know that, these strategies may or may not work out but most of the times, it makes the matter worse.
THE GOODNEWS — What to Do
So what are you to do if someone ghosts you? It is important to remember that you are in charge of obtaining closure — you can’t really get others to do it for you. It’s only you, I mean you, THAT CAN GIVE YOURSELF THE CLOSURE YOU SEEK.
Even if you get someone to share what bothers you with, there’s no way of really knowing that they are being honest or correct in their assessment.
A good starting point is therefore to take responsibility for your own actions and interpret those of others as best you can. If someone doesn’t want to communicate with you, that says something too. You also have to accept that you may never have the perfect answer. But you can nevertheless give yourself some time to be sad, try to figure out what happened and finally learn and move on.
Ultimately, closure is a complicated cognitive process and the key is learning to live with the ambiguity when it cannot be achieved. Sometimes, things go wrong and although it does not feel fair, and it is very hurtful, life goes on.
Get yourself together and live your life to the best, deserving and worthily lived.
Inspired by CorrectBae
#Psychology #Resilience #Break-up
