Why do we crave closure?

The False Promise Of Closure

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0:37There was a time when Carly Dober really wanted closure on something that had happened to her. She thought it would help her heal.

0:48Uh, how do I put this? I thought it would be a good idea to try to seek justice through the legal system for something that occurred to me when I was younger. I just thought, like, this is what I need, and it just, it was disastrous for my mental health. Carly doesn't want to say the exact nature of what happened, and that's not the point here anyways. The point for today's episode is the goal that she was focused on. Closure. How old were you when you were going through this?

1:19I think I was about 21. Like, I knew that the justice system could be slow and not very survivor-focused. But what I will say is just even little things like being told off about filling in paperwork wrong when you are, like, so, so full of nerves. Just little things like that, you can't stress enough how much that just, like, that upends your whole week. The morning of her court case, Carly hit the eject button.

1:49I wasn't sleeping about a week before I was meant to turn up, and I just thought, this is not going to end well. Like, whatever happens, it's not going to end well. And just with the, like, rates of conviction and other things, I didn't think, I didn't think it was worth the toll on my mental health anymore. For Carly, the quest for closure had become a trap. I absolutely look back now, and I know that part of me was hoping that this was the thing that was going to fix me.

2:20This was the thing that was going to, you know, cure my PTSD, cure my insomnia, get me able to, like, participate fully in the life that I wanted to live. And it just, it didn't. Carly has been thinking about the false promise of closure for a few years now. Not just because of her own experience, but because she's a registered psychologist. And this desire for closure has come up time and time again in her therapy room. You will often hear people say, if I just, if I just know why, if I get this one bit of information, I'll understand why they did this to me.

2:53I can move on. And for some people that that might be true. However, for the majority of people clinically that I've worked with, it's far more complex than that. This isn't just Carly's personal hunch. It's backed up by research. So, what does the more complex path look like? And why do we crave closure in the first place? Closure is not the word you're looking for. You're looking for certainty. From ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind.

3:25I'm Sanaa Kadar. Today, the myth of closure. How long have you been thinking about the concept of closure and how we might be getting it wrong? Like, what did you start to notice in your practice with patients and how they were talking about closure? In my clinical work, part of my special interest area is working with trauma. And what you find is people tell themselves a particular story about what they've gone through, especially if it was something interpersonal or a violation, that if I get a particular bit of information, then I will be healed.

4:06I will be okay. I can move on. So, I've probably noticed that some people have this story about their recovery journey for about the last 10 years. And as I've specialized further in trauma and in particular childhood experiences of trauma, I've noticed it quite a lot. And I wonder if you've noticed it on social media as well. Like, I'm pretty sure I've come across a lot of closure kind of related content. Yeah. It's quite annoying for me to come across this stuff, but it's often unregulated industries or clinicians or people just saying, you know, if you do this, you will heal your trauma.

4:47If you do this, you will get closure. Do you remember specifics? Oh, my God. One person who had like a million followers on TikTok was like, you know, clean your whole house and then like that's closure for you after you've had a partner cheat on you. Oh, gosh. That sounds like a very nice way to finish off that tricky emotion. Sounds amazing, right? And again, I think there is... Or not nice way, but like nice to know it's such a clear cut way of finishing that off. It sounds amazing that there is such a clear cut way. And again, I think there is utility in, you know, clearing your space of people who have harmed you.

5:19But as if you're not going to be upset, agitated, heartbroken after an hour of cleaning, if you've been living with a partner who's cheated on you. Like, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's other stuff that needs to be done there. Yeah. And why do you think this idea of closure has such a stranglehold on us and has taken hold in popular culture? I think that people have a particular story if they've had a pretty good life that, you know, good things happen to me. I will work hard. I'll get married.

5:50Maybe I'll have kids. Maybe I won't. Good things will come my way. And then I'll die at a ripe old age. And then when something interrupts that story, our minds search for answers. Our minds are wanting closure because it will help us correct that story.

6:11Closure is not the word you're looking for. You're looking for certainty. We are more comfortable with certainty, knowing someone died, knowing what the stock market is doing, knowing whether somebody is with us or against us. But closure is a misnomer.

Ambiguous Loss And Uncertainty

6:29This is Professor Emeritus Pauline Boss from the University of Minnesota. She's a psychotherapist and researcher who's written a number of books on the topic of loss, including a book very appropriately titled The Myth of Closure. And she's known for developing the concept of ambiguous loss, losses in circumstances in which closure really isn't a possibility. Like if a loved one goes missing and the body is never found. You want to see a death certificate. You want to have remains.

7:00You want to know if they are coming back or not. And you want to know if they are dead or alive. You want to have the rituals that go along with it. That's all certainty. And if you think grief has closure, even Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said that wasn't true in her last book. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, if you're not familiar, is the Swiss-American psychiatrist that popularized the idea that there are five stages of grief. She said the five stages were misunderstood.

7:33It's messy. It's not linear. You don't achieve closure when you've gotten through the fifth stage. So why shouldn't people aim for closure? Why should that not be the goal? I just think it's a waste of time. But it's also disillusioning. It makes you feel like you have failed. There is no closure if there was ever attachment. There is no closure if there was ever attachment. That explains why ambiguous loss can be especially torturous.

8:07And Pauline conceptualizes ambiguous loss in two ways. One we've sort of already mentioned. It's physical ambiguous loss where a person is physically absent but psychologically present. She studied this type of loss in the families of soldiers. The family doesn't know if they're gone for certain or coming back again. And the second type is psychological ambiguous loss, which she studied in families caring for someone with dementia. Where the person they care about is physically present right in front of them, but psychologically gone or going.

8:44Both of these types of ambiguous loss are very painful and stressful. In the more recent book, I also added personal ambiguous loss, which is not in a relationship, except it's in a relationship with you and your own body. For example, if you're an athlete and you lose a leg for some reason, that may be an ambiguous loss for you because you really were attached to your athleticism. And so there is such a thing as personal ambiguous loss as well.

9:17With these various types of ambiguous loss, what are the downstream effects that you have seen over your career on families, on individuals who suffer either type of ambiguous loss? Does it splinter families? Does it bring them together? Like, what happens? Family conflict almost always follows ambiguous loss. And I understand why. Because if you don't have facts about the loss in your family or in your relationship, everybody has their own theory about what's happened.

9:47And so people argue with each other about, should we have a funeral? Should we not? Should I move on with my life? Should I not? Am I still a wife if my husband has been missing for 20 years? How can I be apart from this boyfriend if, in fact, we were going together two years and now he's in the same community as I am? So it's confusing. And one of the things we must do with loss is to find meaning in it. And it's hard enough with the death in the family.

10:20But it's even harder with ambiguous loss to make sense of it, to find some meaning in it. So it's a challenge. This is exactly how psychologist Carly Dober has seen many of her patients tie themselves into knots, trying to find meaning in unhelpful places. Something like, you know, sexual or physical abuse experienced in childhood from an adult violates everything that a child sees as normal in the world. And it can damage you in ways that are still unexpected as you get older.

10:53So often people think, you know, there's something fundamentally wrong with me because this thing happened to me. Why did it happen? Why me? Why when I was that young? What did I do to deserve that? And we know that there's nothing that a child can do or anyone can do to deserve that. However, how trauma impacts the person, how it impacts their brain, their development, they can get stuck sometimes wanting to find that answer that makes sense to them.

11:24And so they can be stuck sometimes thinking about, well, how do I get this answer? Who do I ask? How can I go about this? And sometimes in the work that I do with people, they'll say, you know, I'm just going to approach the person, you know, in my family or in my church or I found the person online or I'm going to approach them in some way. And it's not my job to tell them what to do, but it is my job to kind of explore their thinking with them and to test their reality. Because, again, their mind is telling them, if I do this, I will get this, my life will be better, everything will be changed.

12:01And I just explore with them and I say, well, if you do contact them, what makes you think that they will respond to you? Because if they've committed a crime, a normal, reasonable person is not going to necessarily respond to that because they're going to want to not be charged or they're going to want to continue living their life. And you're also assuming that they know why they did this. They might not know why. They might not have the insight or the capability to explain why. And then, finally, if you do contact them and if they do respond to you and if they have the self-awareness to explain why, is it actually going to take away your pain?

12:39Is it going to make you feel any better? Because at the end of the day, even if they say, well, you were there, I wanted to, so I did it, that's still awful. That's still taken away so much of your time, so much of your life, so much of your health. Is that going to actually help you in any way? Yeah. And so when you have these kinds of conversations, do you find people let go of the need for closure or do some people still go ahead and try to seek it by contacting that person? Like, how do people react?

13:10It's so varied. Some people might sit on it for a bit longer and they might sit on it for years while also engaging in other things that do actually help with recovery and healing. And some people might still be hell-bent, like, I'm going to do this. I have to do it. I'm compelled to do this. It's so varied. This variation in how strongly people desire closure has been observed in research as well. An influential 1996 study found that people who are more rigid in their thinking, who prefer order and predictability, they struggle the most when they can't get answers and closure.

13:47People who are more open-minded, creative, who can tolerate ambiguity, they fare far better. Other research from 2010 looked at the connection between religious belief and the need for closure, and it found that the two are positively correlated. If you're religious, you're more likely to desire closure and order and predictability. But religious belief can also help you achieve closure. You can explain many things as simply God's will. You're listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National.

14:24I'm Sana Khadar.

Coping Without Answers

14:26OK, we're going to get into what you can do to cope in the absence of closure. But first, I just want to mention that this need for answers, it can arise in far less traumatic circumstances than the stuff we've been talking about so far. Here is psychologist Carly Dober again. If you get passed over for a promotion at your job, that's really annoying and, you know, a lot of your hopes and dreams might hinge on that promotion. So that's stressful. Friendship breakdown or a breakup, you know, that can be really tricky.

14:57That can be really hard. And then we have the more kind of complex interpersonal issues, so like betrayal or infidelity. That can be really emotionally and psychologically damaging for some people, depending on the circumstances and what supports they have after. Yeah, OK. And in terms of like the examples of friendship breakups, that's really interesting to me because I feel like that's an area that we don't really know how to navigate when friendships break up. Like there's kind of a script with romantic breakups, but friendship breakups less so.

15:30There can be a lot of ambiguity. People can just sort of drop off the radar and you don't know how to broach the conversation. What goes on with those sorts of conversations in your therapy room? Yeah, I firstly normalise how awful a friendship breakup can be. You know, there is so many, you know, films, songs, poetry about the ending of romantic relationships, but we're statistically more likely to have friendship breakups because we have far more friends in our lives the majority of the time than we have romantic partners. And they are as important and sometimes if not more important than the people who we end up with romantically.

16:05It's just not given the same kind of gravitas. Yeah. So I firstly normalise how awful it can be and how there is a bit of a taboo element to a friendship breakup because, as I say, when there is a romantic relationship, there's that kind of sexual attraction element. With a friendship breakup, it's just a personality thing. Yeah. It can almost feel worse. Yeah. So we normalise that and then we talk about how if you can't talk to the person and you can't understand or get their understanding why that friendship has ended, how can you learn from this?

16:37How can you try to improve your current relationships? How can you nurture all of these other beautiful relationships that you have in your life? And whether or not you and your friend come together again is up to the future. But how can you move through this in a way that is helpful for you? Yeah. And with the betrayal part, the infidelity or a romantic relationship breakup, like I've certainly watched friends experience this and go bonkers trying to get answers.

17:08And the partner is not a very nice person and so isn't really forthcoming with answers. It kind of just ends without closure, really. Is that a common sort of thing? The going bonkers part, very common. And it makes sense, right? Because, again, you trust this person. You think this person loves you and will act in ways that show that love and trust. And then you find out that you've been betrayed and it can be, again, it's world shaking. And I do find that a lot of people, the majority of people that I do work with, even people in my personal life, they will be so single-minded about getting all the information, understanding the who, what, where, why.

17:46And, again, sometimes it can actually just make things so much worse. Is there not some value in trying to find out why, though? Like, we've talked about why people crave closure. But, like, I also instinctively can understand the need for some of that information to, like, put what happened to rest. Where are we going wrong with this? Yeah, I absolutely understand. I would be going bonkers and I would want the information myself. And I think it also, it helps you to kind of put into practice, well, is this relationship over?

18:21Can this person be honest? Can they have a mature conversation about what happened and why? You know, I don't need to have war and peace levels of information about it. But can you actually communicate to me about what's going on for you? Are you open and willing to share this part of you that has also been so harrowing for me? And, actually, when we're talking about people repartnering or the relationship being worked on, a big part of it is sharing enough about what occurred so there is that rebuilding of trust.

18:52So, you know, I think there is merit to it. But if you do find yourself being overly, overly invested in this, you know, wanting, like, the minutiae all the time, you're finding it very difficult to think about anything else, and it's impacting your functioning and your quality of life, that could indicate that there might be some support that you need outside of that person. Pauline Boss, the author of The Myth of Closure, who's also a psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, she has a few other ideas on what else you can do to try and cope in the absence of closure.

19:28I would recommend that they try both and thinking, which would be, my boyfriend, my girlfriend is still here, and we are seeking other relationships. He is here and not in my life anymore. So it's both conflicting statements. You see, it takes a little bit of going beyond our usual education to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. And that's what you need to do with ambiguous loss.

19:59He's here and yet not in my life anymore. My grandmother is here, but she's also gone. And if you start doing that, you'll find out that your stress level goes down because thinking in a both-and way is as close to the truth as you can get with some ambiguous losses. Neither answer is the truth to say, he's out of my life or he's totally in my life. Neither of those are true. So you have to find the middle ground, so to speak.

20:32And a lot of the surface-level advice, anyways, on social media you find about achieving closure is, you know, you can try and write a letter to the person who's no longer there. Is that a step that can be useful for people? Like, would you recommend putting your thoughts down on paper? Yes, say what you need to say. And that's a very symbolic way to do it. After the tsunami in Japan, there was a telephone booth that had been knocked over halfway. And people continued to go into it after the tsunami to call their loved ones who were washed away.

21:08It gave them so much comfort that the Japanese government, I understand, has now righted the phone booth, made it secure again. And it's called the Wintel phone. I believe you can Google it. So if it makes you feel better to do something symbolic like that, do it by all means because it may give you some peace. And that's what you want. And, you know, keep people in your heart and mind if they meant a lot to you.

21:38If they didn't mean a lot to you, they'll still pop up now and then. And don't get scared by that. And if they were mean to you, a negative relationship, you may need to get some help with getting over the trauma of what happened to you with that person. But they still aren't erased out of your life 100%. That's just the way human relationships are. But again, I say if there was attachment, if there wasn't a deep attachment, then you don't have to go this route.

22:12And in situations where someone has wronged you, Carly is also a fan of the letter writing method. I go a bit further. I say you can write whatever you want in this letter. You can write the F word, you know, 50 times over. You can write the most hateful things. You just need to get it out of your system, out of your head, because if you don't, it's just going to ricochet around, keep you up, get it all out, get it down, scribble, burn it, throw it, do whatever you want to it. Like destroy that paper and then go for a walk or go to a dance class or go for a run or go for a swim.

22:44But you need to move your body as well because emotions, they are a cycle. You need to let that emotion complete its cycle and through body-based things. That's amazing. It feels like the idea of closure, the way we talk about it, is something we are looking to get from the other person. But can it be closure if you decide within yourself, I am going to accept the ambiguity and I'm going to move on. I'm never going to have the answers I want, but I'm going to try other things instead.

23:17Like is closure something you can claim for yourself? I think closure is absolutely something you can claim for yourself. And that can be even talking to experts in a field or reading up articles or books about why people do some things. You might never get the reason why this person did this thing to you, but understanding broad themes can sometimes be really helpful information generally. Because, again, a lot of these acts can violate what you think and know to be true about the world or about yourself.

23:48And understanding that, yes, you experienced it. It is awful. And you are one of, unfortunately, one of many millions of people who have experienced this as well, sometimes billions. There is shared humanity in that. And I guess that explains why, you know, a show like ours really connects with people. Like I hear from people all the time saying exactly that, like this episode or, you know, it helped me understand something about my life. Which is wonderful. And again, understanding that it's not just you, because in the moment, if you've been cheated on,

24:19if you have the only one in your family or friendship groups that's had an early diagnosis of cancer or MS, if you have experienced significant neglect or abuse, you can feel like it's only you. It is very isolating. It is awful. But, you know, again, understanding that this happens to people and people can have rich and meaningful lives, that can be incredibly, incredibly powerful. Both Carly and Pauline also recommend seeking novelty and doing something creative as a way to process what you've been through.

24:54If you are musical, write a song, write a poem, paint, create. Yeah, try new things as well. So if you've always wanted to go, you know, try a book club, do that. If you just wanted to try tai chi, do that. But try new things because novelty is also a really nice distraction. It's giving people tools to cope with ambiguity. Things like go fishing, go to improvisational theater, go see abstract art in a museum, listen to jazz music.

25:25All these things that some of us who were socialized to be, to find the answer or to do binary thinking, that would balance that out. So sometimes the therapy, stress-based therapy, is to get yourself out and to do something different that you haven't done before that challenges yourself. Certainly, I have a Swiss-American upbringing, my Swiss parents. So I was told that being decisive and having precision was a good thing.

25:59Right. I spent my lifetime trying to make my piece with ambiguity, but I have done it through the arts. That has been a good therapy because artists tend to like ambiguity, and they can teach us how to embrace it as well. They also say fishermen are great on tolerance for ambiguity, that they like to go even when they don't catch something. So we need to take a lighter touch on this.

26:30If you need therapy, find out if the therapist has read on ambiguous laws. A lot of them have. And if they haven't, then I would look for somebody else if that is what you want to talk about.

Closure Is A Journey

26:42And as for Carly's own experience in her early 20s, trying to get closure on something that had happened to her, going through the court system, stopping the court process, I wanted to know if over the years she ever felt like she had achieved some version of closure on that. No, I didn't. Okay. Um, I think I, I was like desperately wanting an answer that made sense in my mind and, um, I got an answer from the person, but it just pissed me off even more.

27:15And it just, yeah, I think that set me back a little bit. However, I was able to, again, lean on like amazing people in my life away from that. I was able to do beautiful things. I was able to study and enrich my brain in many ways and, you know, see beautiful parts of the world that, again, um, updated my story. You know, bad things can happen to people, but good things can happen too. And so it sounds like, yeah, closure is a long-term ongoing process, not a final dot at the end of a sentence. Yeah, I always say closure is a journey, not a destination.

27:47You know, if you, if you get it, I am so happy for you. But I think if you hinge your recovery or your life on that, you might be let down.

27:58That is Carly Dober, registered psychologist and clinic owner at Enriching Life Psychology. She's also the policy coordinator at the Australian Association of Psychologists Incorporated. You also heard from Dr. Pauline Boss, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and psychologist and author of many books, including The Myth of Closure. That is it for All in the Mind this week. If you want to not just listen to more All in the Mind, but watch it, you can head to Instagram or YouTube.

28:35We've been posting more clips from the show on both those platforms. On Instagram, just head to the ABC Radio National page at ABC Radio National or ABC Health at ABC Health. Or my own page at Sana underscore Kadar. And over on YouTube, you can head to the ABC Science channel. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen. And a big thank you to you for listening. I will catch you next time. You've been listening to an ABC podcast.

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