Daniel Sloss, a Scottish comedian, has a Netflix special that explores the jigsaw puzzle metaphor for love—the idea that your life has a person-shaped hole, and you’ll find the piece that fits. What Sloss realized, performing to thousands of people who laughed a little too hard, was that most of us jam the wrong piece in and then rearrange everything else to make it look right. I think about that metaphor often, but not in the context of love. I think about it in the context of closure: the way we keep trying to make someone else’s account of events fit neatly into the hole left by our pain.
The conventional wisdom says closure comes from confrontation. You sit down with the person who hurt you, you explain what happened, they explain what happened, and somewhere in the middle you find a shared truth. Maybe they apologize. Maybe you forgive. The wound closes. Millions of therapy narratives and rom-com third acts rest on this assumption.
But what if there’s no shared truth to find? What if the other person isn’t withholding their version of events out of cruelty or cowardice, but genuinely lived through a different experience than you did? That asymmetry changes everything about how we heal.
The closure myth and why it persists
We are drawn to closure the way we’re drawn to the last page of a novel. Psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik documented this phenomenon in the 1920s: incomplete tasks and unresolved situations occupy more mental real estate than finished ones. Your brain literally won’t stop circling the thing it can’t close. This is why you remember the fight from three years ago better than yesterday’s lunch.
The Zeigarnik effect explains the compulsion. But compulsion isn’t the same as solution.
Psychologists have found that closure often doesn’t provide the relief people expect. The conversation you rehearsed in the shower for six months rarely goes the way you imagined. The other person says something you didn’t anticipate, or they say exactly what you feared, or they look at you blankly and you realize the event that rewired your nervous system barely registered in theirs.
That blank look is the part nobody prepares you for.
Same room, two completely different events
Memory is not a recording device. This feels obvious when stated plainly, but we behave as though it is. We assume that if two people were present for the same moment, they possess the same footage and can compare notes.
They can’t. Perception is filtered through attention, emotion, prior experience, attachment style, and the physiological state of your body at the time. Two people sitting across from each other at dinner are literally processing different sensory information based on what their nervous systems flag as relevant.
When someone dismisses you in a way that echoes a childhood wound, your amygdala fires. Time slows. Details sharpen. The words land like blows, and they’re encoded with all the weight of every previous time you felt that way. Meanwhile, the person across from you is eating pasta. For them, it was a throwaway comment. Their nervous system filed it under “Tuesday.”
This is the asymmetry that makes closure-seeking so often futile. You’re not asking them to be honest about what happened. You’re asking them to have experienced what you experienced. And they didn’t.
Research on interpersonal harm suggests that people can cause genuine damage without understanding or experiencing that they caused it. This creates a psychological paradox: the person you need an explanation from may not possess the explanation you need. They’re not hiding it. It doesn’t exist in their version of events.
Why the conversation never merges the two realities
I’ve watched people chase closure conversations for years (including myself, if I’m being direct about it). The pattern is remarkably consistent. You go in with a clear narrative. You want them to say: “Yes, I did that, and here’s why.” What you get instead is a counter-narrative that makes you feel slightly insane.
“I don’t remember it that way.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You’re being really unfair right now.”
These responses aren’t necessarily gaslighting. Sometimes they are. But often they’re the honest output of a brain that encoded a different event. The person isn’t lying. They’re reporting accurately from their own perceptual record, and their record doesn’t match yours.
In my recent piece on the rarest mental strength being the ability to sit with uncertainty, I explored how our tolerance for not-knowing has eroded. Closure-seeking is a specific flavor of that intolerance. We want the story to have an ending, a reason, a lesson. We want the ambiguity resolved.
The problem is that some ambiguity doesn’t resolve. It just is.
The grief beneath the need for closure
When I stopped thinking of closure as a conversation and started thinking of it as a feeling, the whole framework shifted. The feeling I wanted wasn’t understanding. It was acknowledgment. I wanted the other person to say: “What happened to you was real.”
That’s a grief response, not a communication problem.
Healing without closure is especially difficult when the relationship involved emotional abuse or manipulation, because part of the harm was the systematic invalidation of your reality. So seeking closure becomes an attempt to reclaim that reality through the very person who destabilized it. It’s asking your arsonist to help you rebuild.
Even in less extreme cases, the desire for closure masks a deeper need: the need to trust your own experience. If they confirm your version, you can stop doubting yourself. If they don’t, you’re left holding a story that only you believe.
Learning to hold that story alone, without external verification, is one of the hardest psychological tasks there is. It’s also one of the most freeing.
What actually works instead
So if closure conversations rarely deliver what we need, what does?
Name the asymmetry explicitly
Simply recognizing that you and the other person lived through different events is a radical act. It sounds small. It isn’t. Most of us operate under the unconscious assumption that shared experience means shared perception. Dropping that assumption frees you from the impossible task of making someone see what they didn’t see.
You can say to yourself: “They experienced something different. My experience is still valid.” Both things can be true simultaneously.
Write the letter you’ll never send
This is a cliché for a reason. It works. The act of articulating your experience in full, without editing it for the other person’s comfort or comprehension, completes something internally. You’re not seeking their response. You’re giving yourself the complete narrative your brain has been circling.
Remember the Zeigarnik effect. Your brain wants the task completed. Writing is completion.
Grieve the explanation you’ll never get
This is the step most people skip. We’re good at grieving people. We’re terrible at grieving the conversations that will never happen, the apologies that will never come, the mutual understanding that was never available. Treating the absence of closure as a loss, rather than a problem to solve, changes your relationship to it.
Loss you can process. Problems you can’t solve just torment you.
Rebuild trust in your own perception
I wrote about valuing your own judgment over external validation recently, and the closure question is where that principle gets tested hardest. When someone else’s account contradicts yours, you face a choice: believe them or believe yourself. For people with histories of invalidation, that choice feels impossible.
Practice starts small. Trusting your read of a situation without checking with three friends first. Noticing when you felt uncomfortable and honoring that discomfort instead of explaining it away. These small acts of self-trust compound over time.
When closure conversations can help (and when they can’t)
I don’t want to suggest that every attempt at resolution is doomed. Some conversations genuinely heal. They tend to share specific features: both people have enough self-awareness to hold two realities simultaneously, enough emotional regulation to listen without defending, and enough humility to say “I didn’t know that’s how it landed for you.”
That last sentence, by the way, is the gold standard. Not “I didn’t do that” or “that’s not what happened,” but “I didn’t know that’s how it landed for you.” It acknowledges the asymmetry without erasing either person’s experience.
But this kind of conversation requires both parties to be capable of it. You can’t have it alone. And if the other person lacks the capacity, pursuing the conversation will likely deepen the wound rather than close it.
A useful filter: ask yourself whether you’re seeking understanding or confirmation. If you need them to agree with your account before you can move on, you’re giving them veto power over your healing. That’s a dangerous amount of power to hand someone who already hurt you.
The quiet strength of an unresolved story
We live in a culture that treats resolution as a moral good. Tie up loose ends. Find meaning in suffering. Turn your pain into a lesson. There’s value in that impulse, but it can become tyrannical. Some experiences don’t resolve neatly. Some people will never understand what they did to you, and you will never understand how they failed to notice.
Sitting with that, genuinely sitting with it without rushing to fix or explain or confront, is an act of extraordinary psychological strength. I explored the difficulty of sitting with uncertainty in a piece about the inability to relax, and the same principle applies here. Your nervous system wants resolution. It scans for it constantly. Choosing to stop scanning is not giving up. It’s redirecting that energy toward yourself.
The person who hurt you was in the same room. They experienced something different. No conversation is going to merge those two events into one coherent story.
That’s not a failure of communication. That’s the nature of being a separate consciousness in a world full of them.
Your healing doesn’t require their participation. It never did.
Feature image by cottonbro studio on Pexels
