Is Closure Real? An Examination of a Cultural Obsession

First post in a long time.

Let me tell you about closure. Not the kind where you finally understand why your therapist told you she loved you (that’s a different story), but the kind we’re all supposed to be chasing after every loss, every breakup, every trauma. You know the drill: “You need closure.” “I never got closure.” “Once I have closure, I can move on.”

But what are we actually talking about here?

Here’s the thing—I’ve been thinking about this word we throw around like it’s some kind of psychological Swiss Army knife. We act like closure is this thing you can order from Amazon Prime, and once it arrives, boom, you’re healed. Your ex finally explains why they left? Closure. The person who hurt you apologizes? Closure. You scatter the ashes in that special place? Closure.

The academic types trace closure back to Gestalt psychology in the early 1900s, where it meant something completely different—just your brain’s tendency to see complete patterns even when parts are missing. You know, like when you see three dots and your brain goes “triangle!” (Britannica, n.d.). Then in the 1990s, this social psychologist named Arie Kruglanski came along and gave us “need for closure,” which he defined as “a framework for decision making that aims to find an answer on a given topic that will alleviate confusion and ambiguity” (The Conversation, 2025).

Notice something? Neither definition promises to end your pain. Neither says anything about healing trauma. The academic version is basically about your brain wanting to organize information and make decisions. It’s about cognitive resolution—making sense of things—not emotional resolution.

Kruglanski even developed a whole scale to measure this need, 42 questions that have been translated into multiple languages. What they found is kind of fascinating: people who score high on needing closure tend to have “a more rigid way of thinking and a low tolerance for ambiguity” (The Conversation, 2025). They’re the ones who struggle most when they can’t get definitive answers. Meanwhile, the more open-minded, creative types who are comfortable with messiness? They do better without closure.

But somewhere between the research lab and your therapist’s office (or your best friend’s couch, or that self-help book you bought at 2 AM), closure underwent a transformation. It became this thing that other people could give you or withhold from you. A commodity. A right.

Popular culture has turned closure into something that looks suspiciously like a Hollywood ending. As one analysis notes, movies “love a good breakup-to-bounce-back story that cram emotional journeys into neat, 90-minute packages” (O2 Counseling, 2024). We’ve been trained to expect that the right conversation, the perfect apology, the final confrontation will somehow transform our pain into peace.

Social media has made it worse. Now we perform closure—changing relationship statuses, blocking exes, posting about “new chapters.” One relationship expert notes that Facebook has actually “created new tools to help people manage their Facebook profiles after a breakup” (Elle, 2023) because this performative closure has become so common.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The gap between what psychology says closure is and what we think it is reveals something profound about how we deal with pain. The original concept was about organizing information. The popular version promises to end suffering. See the problem?

This becomes especially clear when you look at trauma and grief. Research increasingly suggests that closure, in the “tie it up with a bow” sense, might not even be possible for many types of loss. Some scholars have linked pursuing closure after trauma to seeking “catharsis” and “satisfaction” through things like the legal system (Wikipedia, 2024). But ask anyone who’s been through a trial after losing someone to violence—does the verdict end the grief? Does understanding why someone died make them less dead?

I’ve noticed something else: the pursuit of closure can become its own trap. One psychologist observed that people with high need for closure, “even when they were given reasons for a breakup or getting fired, still obsessed about it and wanted more and more answers” (Medcalf, 2024). Each explanation just generates new questions. It’s like scratching an itch that only gets worse.

Some mental health professionals are getting skeptical about the whole concept. They argue that “attempts at closure may actually be attempts to relive trauma or drag out a painful experience” (GoodTherapy, 2015). Think about that. When someone says they need to meet with their ex “for closure,” are they really trying to end something, or are they trying to keep it alive?

The neuroscience adds another layer. Apparently, our brains might be wired for this. Research suggests the hippocampal formation creates “a certain codependency between strong emotions (like love and sorrow) and place” (Health, Brain and Neuroscience, 2019). We’re biologically driven to tie emotions to locations and create meaningful patterns. But being wired to seek closure doesn’t mean closure exists in the way we imagine it.

Let’s talk about accountability for a minute. In many situations where people desperately seek closure—abuse, abandonment, senseless death—what they might actually be seeking is acknowledgment. Validation. Justice. When your abuser won’t admit what they did, when someone disappears without explanation, when death seems random and cruel, the absence isn’t just of information. It’s of moral resolution.

The popular concept of closure conflates all these needs. It suggests that understanding can substitute for justice, that explanation can replace accountability. But can it? If the person who hurt you explains exactly why they did it, does that heal the wound? If you understand precisely why your therapist violated professional boundaries, does that undo the damage?

Here’s what kills me: we’ve turned closure into something external. Something other people can give us or deny us. “He won’t give me closure.” “I deserve closure.” As one therapist bluntly puts it, “you are in charge of obtaining closure – you can’t really get others to do it for you” (Medcalf, 2024).

The research on what actually helps people move forward is telling. Writing can help, but not the kind where you’re searching for answers. Instead, “writing that allows people to examine their loss through a redemptive lens without blame and which focuses on the positives can be useful” (The Conversation, 2025). Notice what’s not in that prescription? No mention of understanding why. No requirement for the other person’s participation.

Different contexts, different versions of closure. Grief counselors increasingly talk about learning to carry loss, not “getting over it.” Trauma therapists focus on integration, not resolution. But in popular discourse? Closure remains this achievable endpoint, this finish line that definitely exists if you just try hard enough or say the right thing or hear the right words.

We are, as one analysis notes, “storytellers” with “stories in our minds about ourselves, our experiences, and our close relationships” (Calmerry, 2023). When disruption occurs—when someone dies, when relationships implode, when trauma shatters our assumptions—we need to edit these stories. Maybe closure is less about ending the story and more about finding a way to keep writing it.

So is closure real?

Yes and no. (How’s that for closure?)

It’s real in that people do experience states of resolution and acceptance. Some people do reach a point where they’re no longer consumed by thoughts of what happened. The wound becomes a scar.

It’s not real in the way popular culture sells it. There’s no magic conversation that ends grief. No perfect explanation that erases trauma. No grand gesture that ties everything up neatly. The person who hurt you might never acknowledge what they did. The reason someone died might never make sense. The answer to “why” might be profoundly unsatisfying.

The danger isn’t in wanting closure. It’s in believing it must come from outside ourselves, that it must take a specific form, that we can’t heal without it. It’s in giving someone else the power to determine whether we can move forward.

Maybe instead of chasing closure, we should be talking about integration. About making meaning. About learning to live with ambiguity and incomplete stories. About the fact that some questions don’t have satisfying answers, and that’s not a failure of effort or understanding—it’s just life.

The most honest thing I can tell you about closure is this: the questions that matter most—why did this happen, could I have prevented it, will I ever feel whole again—often don’t have neat answers. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the real work isn’t finding closure but learning to live without it.

After all, if everything could be neatly resolved, would we need therapists? Would we need friends? Would we need to keep telling our stories, over and over, until they finally make a different kind of sense?

I don’t think so. But then again, I’m still working on my own closure. Aren’t we all?

References

Calmerry. (2023, March 27). What is closure and why do we need it after relationship breakup? https://calmerry.com/blog/relationships/what-is-closure-and-why-do-we-need-it-after-relationship-breakup/

Closure (psychology). (2024, April 11). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(psychology)

Closure (psychology). (n.d.). In Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/closure-psychology

GoodTherapy. (2015, October 8). Closure. https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/psychpedia/closure

Health, Brain and Neuroscience. (2019, October 28). Why we need closure: Your brain on grief. https://yourbrain.health/why-we-need-closure/

Medcalf, A. (2024, August 8). Closure: What it really is and how to get it. https://abbymedcalf.com/closure-what-it-really-is-and-how-to-get-it/

Elle. (2023, December 2). How to announce a breakup on social media. https://www.elle.com.au/culture/news/how-to-announce-relationship-breakup-on-social-media-24144/

O2 Counseling. (2024, February 8). The influence of societal portrayals on relationship closure. https://www.o2counseling.com/blog/the-influence-of-societal-portrayals-in-relationship-closure-healing

Solomon, A. (2024, March 14). How to get closure after a breakup. https://dralexandrasolomon.com/how-to-get-closure-after-a-breakup/

The Conversation. (2025, May 7). The psychology of closure – and why some need it more than others. https://theconversation.com/the-psychology-of-closure-and-why-some-need-it-more-than-others-104159