Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Certified behavior analyst, founding former Director of The University of South Florida’s (USF) Wellness Resource Center, Founder of GLOW Women’s Gathering with credentials in Neuroscience for Business from MIT Sloan.

An apology. A discussion. An explanation. That’s what I thought closure looked like.
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Let me begin here—gently.

If you are still thinking about the conversation you never had,
the questions that were never (satisfactorily) answered,
the apology that never came,
some shared understanding that finally made the story make sense,
the moment where everything was supposed to click into coherence…

Look, your mind was built to look for patterns.
Your heart was built to look for safety.
And your nervous system, bless it, keeps hoping that clarity will arrive as relief.

Sometimes, it won’t.
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Here’s what most of us were taught (quietly, culturally, incorrectly):
That closure is something granted.
That it arrives when two people agree on what happened.
That it requires understanding, remorse, accountability.
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For millennia, we were sold the idea that closure is interpersonal—
something negotiated, explained, mutually acknowledged.
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That myth has cost so many of us lifetimes of over-explaining.
Stuck in needing to know what really happened.
Creating PowerPoint-grade emotional decks.
Annotating timelines.
Receipt-keeping (with footnotes and subclauses).

Exhausting. And unnecessary.
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The problem is not your longing for closure.
It’s where we were taught to look for it:
Closure does not live in agreement.
It lives in authorship.

You interrupt the pattern.
You uproot the weeds.
You close the soul gates.
You reclaim the bandwidth.
You bless and release it back to Source.
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(Stay with me, Reader)
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Not every cycle ends with a conversation.
Some end when you stop feeding it.

Just this:
You stop feeding the loop with your attention, your 999 ruminations, your emotional over-functioning, your 11:47 p.m. “just one more message”.

Closure begins when the effort ends.
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Deliberately.

Closure is not an ending agreed upon.
It is an ending claimed.

And claimed endings don’t require witnesses.
They don’t ask for permission.
They don’t come with a feedback form.
They arrive when you decide (quietly, decisively) that access has expired.
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Oof, your mind may protest.
Your heart may ache, so badly.
Hot tears might flow through dry heaves.
Your body may surge with a thousand phantom impulses to explain, repair, or rescue.

Let. Them. Pass.

You don’t need to act on every urge to be good, kind, clear, to understand or to be understood. Some urges are simply residue.
Leftover static.
Neural echoes.

And let’s not romanticize it...
Claiming closure can feel anticlimactic.
Underwhelming.
No relational performance.

Just relief.
Low-drama.
Almost boring.
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Like setting down a bag you forgot you were carrying: filled with hyper-specific grievances, twenty-seven imagined outcomes, and the emotional equivalent of a muscle you kept bracing long after the threat had passed.
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But, your energy returns with a soft thud. Yours again.
You don't get the conversation. You do get your life back.
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Which brings us to the center of this conversation: Waiting for someone else to make sense of your pain keeps your brain busy, not better.

What the science actually shows: when a situation remains unresolved, the brain doesn’t stay neutral. It loops.

Here’s where the body and the data agree.

Functional neuroimaging studies show that rumination activates the default mode network (DMN) a system associated with self-referential thought, autobiographical memory, and mental time travel. When left unchecked, this network becomes metabolically expensive and emotionally sticky, reinforcing distress rather than resolving it
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In plain language (again) : waiting for someone else to make sense of your pain keeps your brain busy, not better.

Positive psychology research over the last three years has clarified something crucial: psychological closure is driven less by explanation and more by meaning-making and attentional disengagement, the ability to stop allocating cognitive resources to an unresolved social narrative
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Closure happens when the brain receives a clear signal:
​this loop is complete.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth the data supports: that signal does not require agreement, apology, or understanding from the other party.
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Claiming closure works because it does something exquisitely practical:
it reallocates attention.

Network neuroscience shows that when attention is deliberately withdrawn from a narrative, especially one tied to social threat or ambiguity, connectivity between the DMN and threat-detection circuits quiets. The nervous system downshifts. Cortical resources free up.
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Your system stops scanning the past for missing data.
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This is why “one last conversation” doesn't help.
It reignites the loop.

More words.
More hoping.
More neural mileage on the same worn out narrative.

Closure begins when the effort stops.
With a decision.

From a psychological standpoint, over-explaining is a stress response, not a virtue. It’s an attempt to restore predictability.

Claiming closure interrupts that reflex.

It tells your brain:
​This relationship is no longer a problem to solve.

And that instruction: simple, firm, does something miraculous.
The nervous system exhales.
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If anything you’ve read here has been resonant, nourishing, or of service to you in a meaningful way, please do, share this email. I appreciate your reciprocity.

In sharing, you contribute to a bigger picture - a world pulsating with well-being and wholeness. I'm grateful for you!

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p.s.
​And if you’re wondering whether this counts as “real” closure, let me end here, personally, plainly:
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Peace comes when your body realizes the story is over, Reader.
And you finally let yourself walk—steady, unburdened—back into your own life.
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