The Myth of Closure

💭 Learn more: We talk more about this in episode #292 of the Joy Lab Podcast

We understandably want closure. We're often told to pursue it. And when we don't get it, we usually assume we've done something wrong.

But what if this idea that complex losses and life problems can be processed, resolved, and filed away is actually a myth? That's the premise of this episode of Joy Lab's Letting Go series

The appeal of closure is real. Really, who doesn't want to wrap up the messiness of life in a nice bow, become the best version of themselves, eliminate suffering, and get more of the good stuff? The problem, however, is that spending our lives chasing closure may cause us to miss what's actually happening.

The myth of closure has a robust history. Freud's concept of decathexis suggested that healthy grieving meant severing all emotional ties to a loss. Kubler-Ross's stages of grief, however well-intentioned, got distorted into a clean, linear arc with a tidy ending. Both ideas have had a lasting effect on how we think about loss: that there's a right amount of time, a right process, and that when it works, it's like it never happened.

We disagree.

In The Secret of the Golden Flower, Carl Jung wrote: "The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown." Jung's insight is that the most meaningful human challenges contain opposites that can't simply be collapsed into a clean answer. Which means making a decision doesn't solve the problem; instead, we work to integrate the tension of both sides as best we can. And if we think we've fully solved it, Jung warns, we've probably just pushed one side away.

The goal then is not closure, but integration. Living with the insoluble problems and growing beyond them. This takes skill-building, harnessing resources, and a lot of compassion. All the things we work on here at Joy Lab.