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Key points
- Closure isn’t a one-and-done, but an ongoing process.
- Closure requires opening up. Its a pick-and-shovel job of processing your feelings about an experience.
- Closure can’t be forced, as hungry as you are for emotional efficiency and a happy ending.
- What you’re after is catharsis, not completion in which you wipe your hands of suffering once and for all.
The defining ordeal of Bonnie O’Brien Jonsson's childhood—the disappearance of her father during the Korean War—was characterized by what bereavement counselors call “unresolved grief,” an endlessly open wound that haunted her family with a feeling of suspended animation.
He was officially listed as missing in action, says Bonnie, a health educator at the University of California/San Francisco, and she waited for him all the years of her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It wasn’t until she and her sister attended a POW/MIA meeting in 1998 that they finally learned what had happened to him—a very belated result of the Russian government (which had orchestrated the North Korean side of the war) coming forth with old records on the fates of missing soldiers. It turns out her father’s plane had been shot down over North Korea in 1952, confirmed by the finding of scattered wreckage and a machine gun whose serial number matched the one on her father’s plane.
The meeting was attended by about 100 children—mostly daughters—of Korean War soldiers and the widows of Vietnam War soldiers, and the grief that poured out was as if the soldiers had just died. Decades of unresolved grief suddenly came flooding to the surface, and through that experience, Bonnie says, “I really began to understand how people are affected by war, how much my own life has been affected, and how that affects all the people I meet.”
Some would call what Bonnie was finally able to experience closure— finding emotional resolution around a bereavement, a breakup, a trauma, or any event that splits your life into BC and AD, into marking time as whatever came Before the Crisis, accident, illness, death, divorce, and the time that came after. Ideally, closure allows you to move on with your life, brings restoration and healing, sometimes justice and a finishing of unfinished business, and perhaps helps you make better sense of whatever happened—the purpose for the pain, why it happened.
But closure—especially when it involves unresolved grief or ambiguous loss—isn’t the feel-good ending people imagine and hope for, because you don’t ever really close the door on grief. You learn to live with it, and maybe find meaning in it. When asked about his deceased daughter, Freud himself said, “She is here,” pointing to a locket he fastened to his watch chain.
Still, closure is something our brains are wired for, naturally attempting to fill in the blanks whenever they encounter information gaps—a word that’s missing a letter, a circle with a segment missing, a road sign partially hidden by a tree branch. Similarly, the body works toward closing up physical wounds, and the psyche works toward creating order out of chaos and confusion, though sometimes by grasping at straws.
The truth is, closure is often impossible in the face of ambiguous loss—for instance, that involving a missing person, an unexpected breakup, or being a homesick immigrant or refugee. And people are often disappointed when they don’t experience the relief they expect after getting an apology from an ex, or getting to read a victim statement in court, or seeing a perpetrator justifiably punished.
These can certainly help the healing process, but closure isn’t a one-and-done. It’s, in a sense, more of a verb than a noun, a protracted pick-and-shovel job of processing the feelings you have about an experience through anything from journaling and dreamwork to therapy, support groups, and grief-work.
Forgiveness, for instance—a common feature of the attempt at closure—is good for your physical and mental health, but only if you earn your stripes. Setting your soul to rights isn’t for quick-fixers and resolution junkies.
This is especially true if you’re seeking closure around a trauma, which is an emotional superfund site that isn’t going to be cleaned up overnight, or tidied up with a hankie and a good cry. As hungry as we often are for emotional efficiency and a happy ending—to turn lemons into lemonade, or forget our suffering altogether and make the past come to heel—closure can’t be forced. For one thing, there’s no statute of limitations on grieving, and the past isn’t always ours to project-manage.
In fact, I’m not convinced you can completely heal a wound sustained 40 years ago with anything you do in the present, though I’ve certainly put my shoulder to that wheel on many occasions. The wound also belongs to its own time, and to some degree is out of our reach. As the 12-steppers say, we’re always in recovery. And as Tibetan lama Tsoknyi Rimpoche puts it, “You do not turn grief into light. You grieve.”
Which isn’t to say that grieving—and therefore closure—can’t be helped immeasurably by having a conversation with—or hearing the confession of—someone who’s hurt you. I recently attended a workshop during which the facilitator shared her story of being physically and sexually abused by her father while growing up. When she confronted him decades later, he initially denied it, but then said to her: “I can’t change what I did to you, but I can offer to pay for therapy for you—for the rest of your life.”
What we’re largely after in our longing for closure is catharsis, not some kind of ultimate completion in which we wipe our hands of our wounds once and for all. Catharsis was originally a medical term referring to the flushing out of the body during menstruation, and means to cleanse or purge.
In the early days of psychoanalysis, “the talking cure”—one-on-one therapy—was sometimes referred to as “chimney sweeping.” It’s a cleaning out of the pipes, a restoring of the flow, but it isn’t typically clean and tidy work.
Thus, catharsis must be handled with care. It’s not just about blowing off steam and venting aggression, or going supernova on somebody who’s done you wrong, which has a tendency to just reinforce the venting of aggression because it temporarily feels good. The health benefits of catharsis require that you actually feel your buried emotions, not just vent them.
You might argue that you’re definitely feeling anger while venting it, but what about the grief that’s below it? And the vulnerability that’s below that? And the love that’s below that? Ironically, getting closure requires opening up, though there’s an even chance that doing so will make you feel worse before it makes you feel better. Before it kicks in, catharsis will immerse you in whatever disturbing emotions have accompanied your troubles and traumas.
But these darker emotions aren’t something to chloroform. Improv teacher Nina Wise believes that our darker impulses should not only be acknowledged but played up and played with.
She reminisces about a “depression party” she once hosted. Guests had to wear black, they lit black candles, served black food—black caviar, black sesame crackers, black bean dip, black coffee, dark chocolate. They ate on black plates, wiped their downturned mouths with black napkins, and when anyone asked how you were, you had to say you were terrible, horrible, awful, and complain volubly about all the depressing and demoralizing things that had befallen you lately: heartache, heartburn, weight gain, financial loss, romantic breakup, mental breakdown, car trouble, career off the rails, and the world generally going to hell in a handbasket.
Finally, having exhausted themselves with the rigors of kvetching and catharsis—and feeling better for it—they put on loud music and danced.
