Our past can be hard and our wounds can hurt. People can be cruel and they can hurt us. But there's something I've learned recently that has changed how I handle my past hurts. I do not expect closure from those who have hurt me. I don't and here's why:
No one is as responsible or as capable as I am for finding closure for myself. Giving that responsibility to someone else or expecting them to heal a hurt I have isn't fair to them, but mostly, isn't fair to ourselves. Now, understand, I consider closure and confrontation to be very different. You need the other person to confront, and sometimes that is absolutely necessary, but I don't think you need the other person for closure. I completely understand going to someone and confronting them for their actions. Finding closure within yourself does not mean ignoring the fact that someone hurt you, only that by denying their duty of giving you closure, you give yourself back that power.
And many times, we guilt people that have hurt us into thinking they're the reason we can't move forward from our pain. I know because I'm guilty of it. It's much easier to place our hurts in the lap of someone else than deal with that mess. But how can we expect them to be responsible for "healing" us, per say, and think we will reap the benefit and growth from them giving us closure? I don't think we can. I know I haven't. My growth has come from when I looked that wound in the face and decided I didn't want someone to give me closure, I wanted closure from myself and for myself. This doesn't mean taking the blame for someone else's wrongful actions. To me, it means taking away the power of the hurt you have because of their actions. Telling myself "I don't need this person to move on." Not to say apologies don't help or aren't necessary. Apologies can mend but they can't make things better until we reconcile within ourselves. That change has to come from inside, from us, not them.
I don't want to ask them why they did what they did to me, how could they do that to me or why me. I want to ask myself what will it take to move on, learn and grow into a better person for the people around me. There's something really empowering that happened when I realized I didn't want that person's closure.
I had a professor quote the writer Anne Lamott, when she said, "You own everything that happened to you." It took me a bit to wrap my head around what that meant to me, but even then it gave me a sense of strength. Here's how I processed and took this saying to mean: Owning does not mean responsibility for everything that has happened to you, but it does mean that we possess the ability and capability to find closure for ourselves. And for those certain hurts I can't seem to get past, my spirituality has helped me a lot.
This may not be true for all, but if one person can find hope from this, that's enough for me.
