You think you need closure, but what if that belief is the very thing keeping you stuck?
In this episode, breakup coach Sarah Curnoles breaks down why the search for closure is actually a distraction from the real work of healing. Through a powerful client story, she reveals that what people call closure is often unresolved grief, identity loss, and fear of uncertainty.
Closure doesn’t come from them. Closure is a personal process, and this episode tells you everything you need to know.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low, lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk through you. I'm Sarah Kernows, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk to heal your heart, let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
(00:43)
Hello, my friends, Sarah Kronls here and I have a question for you. What if the thing you've been chasing is the exact reason you're still stuck? Today we're talking about closure. I probably have at least 10 conversations each and every week about somebody telling me that they need closure. And I wanted to do this episode just for you. If you are in the place where you feel like you need closure, I want you to know what you actually need as opposed to what you think you need. Because honestly, it's like that Rolling Stones song. Sometimes you don't get what you need. You don't get what you want, you get what you need. You want the closure. I'm going to give you what you actually need here. All right? Because we're chasing down a rabbit hole, an unhelpful rabbit hole when we go looking for closure.
(01:47)
But before I get too far into it, I want to tell you a little story about one of my clients. She was really stuck on her ex and was really insistent that she needed closure because she needed to understand why he left. They were together for three years. She was getting close to 40. She thought they were going to have a future together. And for her, what that looked like was getting married and starting a family. And they'd been broken up for, I want to say it was six months when she came to me originally. And she was having a hard time letting go of the idea that she needed closure. We started talking more about what was the life she thought she was going to have with him and where was the disconnect happening that she felt like she needed this closure in order to be able to move on.
(02:51)
And what I discovered was it wasn't actually about closure at all. It was about dealing with the feelings of disappointment. This was the person she thought she was going to have a family with. She had a whole dream life in her mind. And I'm not saying she was crazy because she had the dream life. It wasn't. She was talking to him about it. They were both actively engaged in creating this dream together. But I mean, it hadn't occurred yet. That's what I mean. It was in her mind. They had a dream together of starting a family and she saw it very clearly with him. And as a woman getting older, she was also dealing with if she wanted to have biological children.
(03:45)
She felt like she had a little bit of a deadline. Excuse me. I think I hit my microphone there. Sorry about that, friends. And so she was just really focused on, I need the closure in order to move on, but what she actually needed was to mourn the loss of the dream that she had with him. The dream of having a family with him was not going to happen. And we had to mourn that, which is of course painful. And then we went deep into defining what is her dream and what does that look like for her with where she is today? And what she decided was becoming a mother was one of her life's purposes. It was something she wanted very, very much in life. And just because her relationship status changed does not mean that she has to give up her big dream.
(04:46)
And she decided, "I'm going to become a mom no matter what. I'm going to make that a priority and I'm going to take the pressure off of dating and needing to get married like yesterday in order for me to have a family with somebody. It's not the only way to have a family. There are lots of ways." And so she started diving into what that might look like. She started getting her support team around her and she decided to become a mother. And I got an email update from her not too long ago and she shared her big news that she was pregnant and she was also dating somebody and they happened independently of each other. And the person she's dating, he's very supportive of her pursuing her dream of being a mother. He is right there alongside of her, even though it's not his biological child, but he is excited to support her through that and they are moving as partners through her journey.
(05:47)
So all of that to say, and I should have added in there that as soon as we identified, or the reason she felt she needed closure was because she thought he was her last chance to be a mom. That was sort of the big aha light bulb moment with her. And as soon as we identified it, it was like he was instantly forgotten.
(06:14)
Nothing else had changed. We just identified there was a dream that needed to be mourned and another dream that needed to be reawakened because she still had the desire to be a mother. That doesn't go away when the person goes away. That desire stays with you and you can keep it as long as it still feels like it's true to you and you get to do whatever you want with that. You can pursue it, you can acknowledge it, you can nurture it in other ways, but she was so stuck. I need to understand him. I need to understand the situation. But really what was driving that was the pain of the disappointment that the relationship didn't go the way that she wanted it to, and she needed to mourn the loss of one of her dreams and recreate it into a new shape. So through that story, maybe you heard the truth I'm going to share with you about closure.
(07:17)
Closure feels necessary because you have these gaps in your understanding. This breakup has happened to you and maybe you don't fully understand why, and it feels really unclear and things feel really uncertain to you and that's really scary and intimidating.
(07:43)
And in order for you to feel like you have control again, you think closure is going to fill in all this ambiguity that you're dealing with in your life and it's going to fill in some of these gaps of information and then you'll feel like you're in control again and you get to avoid the uncomfortable feelings of pain and heartbreak. So we seek closure because we think it's going to fill in these gaps of our understanding. And if I have understanding, then I don't have to feel the hard feelings and I will be instantly able to move on. Fortunately, this isn't actually how it all works, which you might already know is true. If you've ever tried to have a conversation with an ex and ask them your questions, and maybe you even get to have that conversation and they answer your questions, but you don't feel satisfied.
(08:38)
So you ask more questions and you try to get more understanding, but it just gets frustrating and your ex feels like they're being interrogated and they get defensive, right? You don't actually ever end up satisfying the gaps of understanding because that's not the only driving piece of your discomfort and it actually doesn't have that much of a bearing on how you feel.
(09:13)
So when we say I need closure, this has just become a shorthand for a lot of things that are happening in your brain and in your body. So let's break that down. Okay? The first thing that's happening in your brain when you say I need closure, one of the things that that means is that I want cognitive certainty. That just means I want to understand your brain is wired to understand and to have certainty because it is still stuck in those cave people days where uncertainty equal death. If I don't know what's outside of my cave, there could be a tiger there. There could be a freak snowstorm. There could be poisonous berries and I could die. Uncertainty was a threat of death and you needed certainty in order to survive, but we as a human species don't need certainty to survive anymore. We have evolved past that.
(10:19)
Unfortunately, our brains haven't fully caught up yet and it still is trying to fight for your survival, but we don't need certainty in order to survive. It's not a need. Look at how much in your life today that you just trust without questioning and without understanding. I bet if you looked around your environment right now, you could probably name at least five things. I couldn't explain electricity to you, but I still turn on the lights. I don't know how the internet works. I don't even know how all of these fancy things like podcasts happen and why this wired device of my microphone actually creates a recording of my voice. I couldn't explain all of that to you. I couldn't even explain to you how digestion in my own body works, but it does.
(11:18)
There's so much of our world right now that we don't know about and we don't understand, and yet we accept it. The internet just is. WiFi just is, and we don't have any problem using it without understanding it. So understanding is not a requirement. It's not a need. It feels that way when you are in a state of heightened fear and stress. So the panic of needing certainty is more of a signal of like, "Oh, I bet I'm under a lot of stress right now." "Oh, I must be feeling a lot of fear right now.
(12:07)
"That's all that that is. Okay? There's more, but wait, there's more. When you say I need closure, what you're actually also saying, not just the certainty, you're also saying," I need to alleviate my emotional pain. "A lot of times when you say that you need closure, what you really mean is, " I can't handle my emotional pain right now, or I don't want to deal with this. This heartbreak feels like too much. The sadness is too much. The fear is too much. The disappointment, I don't know how to deal with it. I'm too angry. "Whatever that emotion might be for you, that you are like, "This is too much. I need to opt out. "Your brain kicks in and it tries to use its power of thinking and understanding as a way to avoid emotional pain, emotional distress, uncomfortable emotions.
(13:19)
When in fact, most of us are far stronger when it comes to emotional pain than you are led to believe. And processing emotional pain is actually really similar to processing physical pain. It's just sometimes with physical pain, it can be a little bit easier because we understand what a headache is and we know how to get through that. Or if we break our arm, we understand I'm going to feel bad for a little while because I broke a part of my body. You can't really see emotional pain and it's harder for us to wrap our brains around the concept of it. And so we sometimes think it's not real or we think we can't handle it because we can't see it. This is just a thought error. You just need a better tool, a better system to handle the emotional pain so that you can get through to the other side.
(14:20)
Okay?
(14:23)
I got three more things, so it was just two. I would not be surprised if you're already having big breakthroughs just by understanding these two parts of what it means when we say," I need closure. "When you say," I need closure, "you also need to regain your sense of control, right? It can feel like things are really out of control in my life, and oftentimes when we feel out of control, we start grasping to try to control things that we can't actually control. We can't always have a satisfying sit down with our ex and get the answers that we need, but we try to anyway.
(15:05)
We try to understand what's going on with them by stalking them on Instagram. But instead, what you could do is just start to look at what is actually in my control right now. I can't control them. I can't control what they do. They've created a situation in my life when they ended the relationship. They've created this heartbreak and I can't control that, but what can I control right now? What actually is in my control? Okay. Number four, when you say you need closure, what you're actually needing is a plan to detach from the relationship and decrease the amount that you want to be with that person. We think if I understand it, if I have closure, then I'm not going to want to be with them anymore, and I'm just going to be over the relationship. Well, that's not exactly how it works.
(16:05)
Just like it took time to build the relationship together of talking, connecting, listening, opening up, being vulnerable, sharing moments of intimacy, whether it's physical or emotional or mental, right? You built your attachment to that person. You also need to build your detachment from that person, and it doesn't happen just because you have a conversation with them. That can definitely be the seed that gets planted, but we need to work on a plan that creates detachment and a decrease in the desire that you have to want to be with them. So we need to go from a place where it's like, I need to hear their voice. I need to connect with them. I need to hear from them. I need to talk to them. I need to be with them. We need to decrease the urgency and the desire that you have to be with them so that you now have the freedom and the peace of mind and the clarity of living your life without that desire and urgency to be with them.
(17:24)
And finally, the fifth thing that you need when you say that you need closure is that you need some validation. Sometimes we are having these big emotional reactions to a breakup and we feel like, I must be the crazy one. Does everybody else see it and I'm the crazy one? Is there something wrong with me? I'm having all these big feelings and I don't even know if I have a right to be having these big feelings and there is something about closure that feels like validation. You're not crazy. You haven't done anything wrong. The relationship was not a lie. What you had was real and your reaction to the breakup is also real and valid.
(18:17)
You don't actually need a conversation with your ex in order to get validity for how you feel. So in the future, moving forward from here, when you start thinking, I need closure, I want you to replace it with this sentence. Closure is assuming that my past can give me peace. It doesn't. Peace does not come from your past. We create peace on purpose. Okay. How do we create your peace? How do we create your own closure without having a conversation with your ex? Well, I'm so glad that you asked because I'm going to tell you. So the trap, in order to get closure, what you might feel like you need to do is you might feel like I need to reach out and need to have one more conversation. I need to ask my questions. I need to stalk their social media and see what they're doing and who they're with.
(19:25)
Or if you've at least eliminated those two things, you might still be doing the other piece that we do when we feel like we need closure. We replay the conversations over and over and over again. We replay that one fight and we start thinking, "What could I have done differently or said differently that would have created a different result in that conversation? How could I have stopped that conversation from going so bad and how could I have prevented the breakup?" I know I've been stuck on those lips before, so I know I'm not the only one there.
(19:59)
Those are not the behaviors that create the closure that I'm talking about. We're actually going to talk about some very specific concrete things that you can start doing to create closure for yourself. One of the very first things that I want you to do is I want you to look at where can I control something right now? What is in my control? I want to start establishing some control. I can control soothing myself when I don't feel well. And when I say I don't feel well, I don't necessarily mean like an upset tummy, but like if I'm sad, I can soothe myself while I let myself cry. It's okay. It's okay to be sad. It's okay to be grieving.
(20:45)
I can control how I react to this situation. I can choose to focus on myself and take care of myself, or I can be reactionary and fly off the handle and comment a whole bunch of nasty things that your ex has STDs and put it all over social media. Doesn't actually make you feel any better. So you can first start by looking for what is actually in my control right now, how I talk to myself, how I treat myself, my self-care, the support I ask for and I seek out. That's step one. Step two, where am I avoiding emotion? What emotions have I been trying to avoid? What am I scared of feeling?
(21:46)
Getting honest about what you might be avoiding by seeking closure instead of feeling, getting honest about it can bring some clarity. And where have I been attached? This is number three. Where have I been attaching how I see myself, my identity? How have I been attaching my identity to my ex or to my relationship? And that might be, that one was a tricky one for me, but I was the one who ... I was the broken one. I was the one who always had to do the personal growth work, who had to do all the emotional, the emotional labor of processing all the emotions and the relationship and making sure everything was smooth and even.
(22:58)
I didn't necessarily ... Well, there definitely were ways that I created my identity around that relationship. I sort of pretzel to fit myself in to his world instead of creating my own world. But for my client at the beginning of the podcast, her identity was, "I'm going to be a mom with this person. I'm going to have a family with this person." So she was still identifying herself, wrapping herself up in being tied to him. And when we identified that that's what she was doing, we got to create who is my identity now as a person not in that relationship.
(23:49)
And what are my understanding gaps? Where do I feel like I have an open loop that I keep trying to get these questions answered? Figuring out what are exactly the questions, not so that you can ask the person the questions, but so that you can actually start to look at, if I had the answer to this question, what would change? And what kind of answer do I need in order to get that change? Sometimes we have these questions and there's only one right answer in order for our brain to be happy. Figure out what that answer is. You can actually tell yourself the answer. Your brain doesn't know the difference.
(24:49)
You might be able to fill in some of those open loops, those gaps of information, you might be able to fill them in for yourself. What we're going for here is completion. We're going for completion and detachment, which doesn't actually require the other person. It actually works better without them. So moving forward, I want you to start to see that closure is actually a process that happens internally, not externally. It does not require the other person. It's actually a decision of, I actually need more self-understanding here. I need more self-awareness here. How can I create that for myself? What are my open loops and what are the answers I can give to myself? And how can I process my uncomfortable emotions and create a plan for detachment so that I see myself independently from that relationship?That's really big and I don't think I've ever said it that way before, but that really landed for me.
(26:16)
How do I see myself independently from the relationship?
(26:22)
My friends, closure is what happens the moment you stop negotiating with the past and you start figuring out who you are today, independent of the relationship with your whole future ahead of you. This is taking an approach that honors your emotions and becomes more based in your identity of who you are, not who you used to be, not based around somebody who used to be in your life. This is based on today and where you're going. So if you've been taking notes throughout this podcast, if you've been nodding along, if this is clicking and making a lot of sense for you, I want you to know that we can keep going with this. This is just the beginning of your transformation because if you've been stuck in the loop, you do not have to stay there. I can get you out of that loop actually very quickly.
(27:27)
And if you have tried moving on, but you find yourself going back, whether actually physically going back to your ex, or even mentally, if you keep thinking about your ex over and over again, you don't need more time, you don't need more information, you actually just need a different approach, which is what I do with my people. I give them a different approach so that we create your own closure. I give you a process for dealing with the difficult emotions. I help you decrease the amount that you want that person while also detaching from the relationship, while we rebuild your dreams and desires of what you want in your life, because the life you thought you were going to have with your ex is totally possible without that person. It is not dependent on them. It's dependent on you. It's your life. So your next step that I want to invite you to take is to decide if working with me as your personal coach would be a great fit for you.
(28:36)
That's the decision I'm going to invite you into. And I know that sometimes people need more information, they need to have a conversation about that. And I love having those conversations because I really get to know you. I really get to help you get the information you need to make that decision.
(28:55)
And in order to do that, I want to give you my personal calendar link so that you can book time with me. It would just be you and I one-on-one. I get to ask you some questions to really understand where you are now and where you want to go, and I will give you a full roadmap of how to get there. This is about having a process with guidance, support, and accountability, so that you actually get to the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not just something that you kind of like sort of maybe see long ways in the distance.
(29:33)
So I want to encourage you if this has felt really good to your nervous system, if this has made a lot of sense to you, if you want to take it deeper and go to the next step, book that call with me and I would be happy to have that conversation. All right, my friends, I want you to continue giving yourself credit for how much work you're doing and how far you've come. I Because you have. I know if you're here. I know if you're listening, you've been having breakthroughs. I know that you're doing the work and I am proud of you and I hope that you are proud of yourself too. All right, my friends. Until next week, take care of yourselves.