Losing Them & Finding Yourself Series: Closure Needs

You will not receive closure in every situation, but you can create it for yourself.

Concluding

Closure is the need to end the relationship rather than simply stop the relationship. Closure allows you to conclude the relationship with some semblance of completion involving patterns, rituals, or interactions that you can count as evidence of restoration or resolution. In short, closure is recovering what you invested in the relationship. The return may not be one-to-one or even equal, but your concern is that you can express yourself and your requirements. You desire the ability to count the costs with the person and negotiate a settlement.

When this experience is denied you, the feeling is one of being cheated. The resources, including emotional resources, that you invested are immediately counted as wasted. In any transaction, the worst feeling to walk away with is that of being cheated. It challenges your thoughts about your intellect, judgment, and competence. These form the scaffolding of your emotional targets and physical actions to be addressed for your healing.

Closure Emotional Targets

Emotionally speaking, intellect, judgment, and competence translate to emotional intelligence, discernment, and capacity. Emotional intelligence is your ability to comprehend your emotions and those of others. In this situation, you want to learn to hold your emotions and define empathy as the ability to see the choices of others as reasonable—this even without an indication from them explicitly. Discernment is the ability to determine the fit between any option and your goal and process. Everything that is possible is not advisable. That means that you can refuse feelings and explanations that don’t fit the evidence and those that don’t fit to inspire your progress. Capacity is the ability of a person to account for their limitations and those of others. This reinforces that some people are not capable, don’t have the depth, don’t possess the ability to provide considerate, empathetic interaction. Release them from the requirement which also releases you from the expectation and disappointment associated with their inability to meet the expectation.

Closure Physical Actions

Create closure for yourself with a combination of intellect, judgment, and competence. Physical actions that support intellect focus on the development of reasoning skills. Begin with evidence and variables that you can control. Sift through the available information you have. Match it with your emotion information. Apply any lessons learned to your personal development—the only process that you can control. If this includes ensuring your safety from the relationship, make certain to take the appropriate steps to address this need for security.

Judgment allows you to approach situations as experiments that seek additional information. Take your time to explore situations from a position of safety and a position of comparison. Establish an ideal including what you want from any given relationship. Give yourself the chance to evaluate new relationships and resources from a position of comparison with your ideal. Accept your evaluations as science and make decisions based on that science.

Competence is a concept to be informed continually. In addition to the basic fact-finding about the current situation, consider reading information, taking assessments, and reviewing your experiences in ways that support an increase of emotional competence. Emotional competence will result in emotional intelligence, social capacity, and interactive competence. Your competence will result in greater capability in every type of interaction.