I hear people talk about “closure” a lot – they’ll say something like, I just need to get closure on this.
It seems they see closure as a psychological door that can permanently shut away their emotional pain.
Okay, if closure supposedly shuts away the emotional pain then where does it go?
Nowhere. It remains…behind the door because of a little structure in your brain called the amygdala that helps you process emotions like anger, fear, joy and sadness.
Your amygdala determines which emotional memories are stored and which are not and it also synchronizes to your heartbeat.
It’s believed that the more stressful the situation is, the more likely the emotion associated with it will be stored. Which is why just thinking about a past stressful situation can cause your heart to race.
You want closure because your emotion feels overwhelming and bad, but your body knows better. Your amygdala selectively stores this information which may serve as guidance and intuition for your life.
So, the struggle to get closure is really your struggle to get rid of an emotion that is un-get-rid-able.
Yes, closing off your emotion on a short-term basis can serve as a healthy defense, especially while you deal with the demands of every day life. But if you do this for too long you can give yourself a false sense that you’ve dealt with whatever it is that’s bothering you. And all the effort you put into closing off your emotion can actually increase your stress – like holding a beach ball under the water.
I encourage my clients to stop searching for closure, and instead, find a place for their emotion. I know it’s not easy, but to find a place for it you need to acknowledge what you feel, feel it, look at what it gave you, then, (and I know this is out of the ordinary) say, I’m putting this emotion here…in this place – in this year, month, day, tree, box, shelf…whatever. Just by giving it a place you’re saying, I know you exist.
What I’ve learned is that unrecognized emotion is like vapor, it will seep in under every door of your life.
The thing is, closure really doesn’t exist…please, don’t waste your precious time searching for it.