Closure Part 3: How to Get Relationship Closure the Right Way

Welcome to the third part of this series. In this last post, I will go over how to get relationship closure after a break-up the right way! Let’s start by reviewing some content pertinent to this post. In the first part, we discussed how our brains’ “seizing” and “freezing” tendencies lead to improper information processing during closure. This primacy effect causes a bias where we make conclusions solely based on the initial impression. It is much more difficult to incorporate any additional information or look at the entire context when we have a high need to reach closure. As a result, the more we want closure, the more we end up making poor judgments that permanently stick in our minds.

The problem is that the thoughts we adopt from getting closure can tremendously impact our personal well-being, future relationships, and mental health. The effects can be devastating when we draw the wrong conclusions and become completely locked in them. Every break-up has emotional and psychological aspects that can be dealt with in a healthy manner that promotes empowerment, freedom, and growth.

Similarly, the same aspects can be coped with in a way that promotes being stuck, losing self-esteem, and even lasting trauma. There are valuable lessons to be learned after every break-up and an opportunity to healthily process closure in a way that helps us improve our lives. Unfortunately, we cannot change how much we want closure (or need it) and how our brain operates as a result of this. But what we can do is consciously examine the information that we are integrating and holding on to. So, let us get to crafting that perfect closure!

First Step: Define Your Goals Clearly in Your Head

As discussed in Part 2 of this post, closure will not heal your emotional wounds but should fulfill your needs for clarity and certainty. So, let’s do a hypothetical exercise. Imagine a perfect world where you could choose the ideal closure for your relationship after the break-up. What would it feel like? What characteristics will it have? How will it serve you?

It probably feels like freedom, understanding, happiness, and acceptance. It would probably have the characteristics of reaching an awareness that teaches lessons about the relationship and yourself. Lastly, it would serve you by helping you feel empowered to be a better you than you were before. By having this ideal closure, you would come to an understanding of a clear path for the future moving forward as well as better relationships ahead.

What are other aspects that you would like this closure to have? Think through what you want to get out of this experience. Set a clear vision for that goal!

Keeping these goals in mind, work towards them! The following steps in this post will help you get there by giving you the tools to examine your own closure conclusions. Apply them, and you can ensure that what you take away from your last relationship will serve your best interests in Creating Your Best Love Life (B.L.L) in the future!

Second Step: Reintegrate negative thoughts with new information

Now that you have defined what you want to accomplish, the magic is examining what conclusions you have already drawn and then integrating new information into them that help you achieve that perfect closure.

The first step is to look through all the negative thoughts in your mind. The key here is to first become aware of them by writing them down. Your mind naturally has a negative bias that makes you disproportionally fixated on the negative more than the positive. So if there is anything that absolutely needs to be reevaluated, negative thoughts have to be the first ones on the list. They have the most potential to cause damage in your life moving forward.

Below I’ll give you a few examples:

• There is something wrong with me that I can’t make a relationship work
• I have a broken picker and always date losers, cheaters, etc.
• I’m rejected, no one loves me, I’m unlovable
• I’m unlucky in love
• It was all my fault, and I was the one who ruined my relationship
• I won’t find anyone else in the dating pool because “all the good ones are taken” or “everyone left is too picky”

Write down all your negative thoughts on a piece of paper. This is the best way to get it all out there so you can work on them.

Now, question, question, question those thoughts! We know that your mind is prone to generalizing, drawing quick conclusions, and grabbing on to the first piece of information, so don’t let it. Really try to actively disprove these negative thoughts by giving examples that do not support these generalizations.

Use these examples to reintegrate your thoughts to help you get a whole picture of the situation instead of getting stuck in generalizations that won’t help you.

How do you do this exactly? Don’t worry, I’ll show you through our examples:

There is something wrong with me that I can’t make a relationship work

• Do you have family, friends, coworkers, mentors, or community members with whom you have a good relationship? If so, you proved that you can make a relationship work!
• Could you possibly imagine that nothing is wrong with you? Maybe you just didn’t learn the skills necessary in a romantic relationship because you were never taught that?
• Has there been a time when you did make a relationship work for at least a while?

I have a broken picker and always date losers, cheaters, etc.

• In your entire life, have you ever dated or gone on dates with someone who wasn’t a loser, cheater, etc.?
• Could you possibly have specific traumas and beliefs that predispose you to date these types of people? Is it something you can learn from and move away from so that you won’t always have a broken picker?

I’m rejected, no one loves me, I’m unlovable

• Do you have family, friends, coworkers, mentors, or community members who love you? If so, then you are loveable!
• Imagine yourself as a baby. Could anyone not love you back then? Aren’t all human beings born inherently loveable?
• Could the rejection not be 100% about you but other issues contributing to the end of the relationship?

I’m unlucky in love

• Could you possibly be lucky because you got to be in a relationship that obviously meant something to you?
• Are you lucky to be free of a relationship that didn’t work out and now have the freedom to pursue love again?

It was all my fault, and I was the one who ruined my relationship. I did something horrible

• Could it be that other factors caused the demise of the relationship?
• If your ex had reacted a certain way or made you feel a certain way, could it have been that you may have acted differently?
• Have you had experiences in the past that predisposed you to act a certain way that you are not proud of? Is this something you can work through, so you won’t feel this way in the future?

When you start questioning and reintegrating new information, you can start moving away from these negative thinking patterns that keep you stuck. Now, you can finally figure out a path forward. You don’t need these negative thoughts, I assure you. You don’t need to keep criticizing yourself in this way to keep yourself accountable. Because next, I will tell you how to keep yourself accountable in a productive way by differentiating between destructive criticism and constructive criticism.

Step 3: Distinguish between destructive and constructive criticism

This is an important distinction because learning to keep constructive criticism while keeping destructive criticism out will help you discover lessons that improve your life. It prevents you from dragging down your own self-esteem. This applies even more strongly to self-criticism, which can often be much worse, more repetitious, and therefore cause even more damage than criticism from others.

Destructive criticism is the feedback that will undermine who you are and eat at your own self-esteem by putting yourself down. Constructive criticism is the feedback that will help you find your shortcomings and offers solutions for growth by encouragement.

So how do you practically tell the difference between the two? Destructive criticisms are those who will attack your personal self by giving you a negative attribute. Because destructive criticism strikes at the heart of who you are as a person, there is no way you can improve or change. Therefore, it has exceptionally dire consequences for your self-esteem when internalized because it essentially erodes your perception of self. Examples include:

• I am bad
• I am unworthy of a relationship
• I am messed up

Constructive criticisms target specific actions and offer a clear, actionable course of correction. Because it targets a behavior instead of who you are as a person, it is something that can be improved with different actions. Therefore, constructive criticism is the only efficient way to keep yourself accountable because it is improvable in the future. It is something that you can grow out of. Examples include:

• I get involved in dating patterns where I become a people pleaser, and the other person takes me for granted. I need to work on my people-pleasing tendencies to be more successful in my next relationship
• I crossed a boundary that my ex set for me. I need to learn to respect other people’s boundaries in the future
• I did not communicate effectively in my last relationship. I left a lot unsaid. Next time, I realize I must be more vocal about my feelings and needs

Now that you know the difference between the two, it is vital to examine your thoughts and if they are destructive or constructive. Suppose the conclusions you have drawn from closure consists of any destructive criticisms of yourself. In that case, you must go through the previous section’s steps and question them. Holding on to them will keep you stuck, take a chunk of your self-esteem and affect your future interactions and relationships.

Keep constructive criticism, but let go of destructive criticism.

Step 4: Seek out positive thoughts

One of the psychological ways to balance out the brain’s propensity for negativity bias and dwelling on the negative is to counterbalance it with positive thoughts. You must be more intentional with positivity than negativity just to come to a neutral ground because of how our brain works.

Specifically, thoughts involving gratitude have been shown to change neuronal sensitivity even three months after the initial thought. So, I would strongly encourage you to integrate as many positive thoughts into your final closure as possible.

Integrating this information helps keep what you are going through in context and helps balance out our natural propensity for developing a negative perspective. Some examples of positive gratitude would be:

• I’m grateful for the positive experiences had with my ex that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
• I’m grateful for the lessons from this relationship that will help me improve myself.
• I’m grateful for being able to feel the broad spectrum of human emotions, including joy and pain.
• I’m grateful for the connection I now know I can have with someone else.
• I’m grateful for tomorrow and the new opportunities that I have in the future for more love in my life.

Lastly: Caution against seeking answers from an ex

I want to caution you about going back to your ex for answers. Just as you will have trouble forming unbiased opinions during closure, so will your ex. Their bias will also amplify your own bias.

Many people don’t even understand psychology and don’t examine their thoughts in the way I have described here to untangle their own conclusions. Many people don’t question what they come up with when making sense of everything.

So, if you go to your ex, there is a good chance that what they say will not accurately represent the whole context. The last thing you need is for your brain to latch on to this information and draw conclusions from it.

You do not need closure from your ex. Unless you have specific questions that are to the point, with answers mainly recounting entirely objective events, I wouldn’t ask. There is a good chance that you are better off not asking.

It is human to draw biased conclusions when looking for relationship closure after a break-up. But now that you are aware of this, you can be more astute and reintegrate information to form thoughts that actually SERVE YOU! You deserve the perfect closure that will lift you up and make you feel empowered and ready for what’s to come.

Growtheart Actionable Step:

Write down destructive criticisms of yourself. Then, for each criticism, write down three pieces of evidence of why it is invalid.

Reference:

Wong, Y. J., Owen, J., Gabana, N. T., Brown, J. W., McInnis, S., Toth, P., & Gilman, L. (2016). Does gratitude writing improve the mental health of psychotherapy clients? Evidence from a randomized controlled trial. Psychotherapy Research, 28(2), 192–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2016.1169332