The Hilary Silver Podcast - Been Ghosted? The Secret To Getting Closure

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Episode #12: Been Ghosted? The Secret To Getting Closure Introduction: If you've ever been ghosted or had a relationship end without an obvious explanation, this episode is for you. In this week’s episode, Hilary dives into the often misunderstood concept of closure in relationships. She explores why seeking closure from others can be unfulfilling and emphasizes the empowerment found in self-given closure. This episode is a must-listen for anyone struggling with unresolved feelings from past relationships. Hilary encourages listeners to reclaim power over their emotional well-being by fostering self-awareness and internal closure, rather than depending on external validation.   Episode Highlights: The illusion of closure from others and the power of self-closure. Practical advice on handling feelings of rejection and inadequacy. Real-life examples demonstrating the importance of internal resolution. Episode Breakdown: 00:00-01:00 - Introduction to the topic of closure and its personal significance. 01:00-05:00 - Discussion on common reasons relationships end unexpectedly and the natural quest for closure. 05:00-10:00 - Analysis of why waiting for closure from others can be detrimental and the importance of taking control of your own emotional responses. 10:00-15:00 - How self-awareness and acceptance play critical roles in personal healing and closure. 15:00-16:08 - Conclusion with encouragement for listeners to reflect on their own experiences and find personal closure. Listener Takeaways: Closure is something you can give yourself; it does not need to be granted by someone else. Understanding your role in past relationships can help you move forward more effectively. Embracing your personal truths and experiences can lead to significant emotional empowerment and freedom.

The best way to get closure is always to give it to yourself. Take the power back and give it to yourself by deciding it doesn't really matter what this person is saying and you're not giving yourself enough credit for knowing what you know. Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Hillary Silver Podcast. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining the conversation today. Today, we are talking about closure. And I love talking about this topic because every single one of us, all of you listening,

and myself, and everybody out there, we've all been in situations in our lives where a relationship has ended not by our own doing, whether that is a friendship that faded or a romantic partner who ghosted us or even a professional relationship or an acquaintance that just kind of disappeared on us. That can often leave us feeling like, oh my God, what happened? And it doesn't feel very good. So today's conversation, I'm going to be talking about all the reasons why it doesn't serve us to chase after closure and what we need to do instead that is so much more fulfilling and empowering and helpful for all of us. Before we get into the conversation, I want to remind you to please rate,

review, and subscribe. That tells the algorithm, yes, please, more of this, please, and it will circulate us out into the stratosphere and send more people our way so that we can be found by everybody. Okay, so without further ado, let's get into the conversation today. I'm going to start off by talking about why it sucks so bad when this happens to us. When somebody decides on their own doing that they no longer want to be in a relationship with us, they don't want to be our friend anymore, they don't really want to engage with us anymore, they're not going to be in love with us anymore, whatever it is, when they disappear and they ghost, it's kind of like the trail just goes cold on a mystery. It feels again, well, where the word closure comes from. It's a circle that's not closed and it's unsettling and it doesn't feel

good at all. Especially if you thought everything was going along just fine. It can feel really like I call it the breakup blind side when you just have no idea that that was coming at all. Why it feels so bad is obviously what I just said, that it's an unanswered question. But deep down, it triggers us to that place where we don't feel good enough. It triggers the rejection button in us. Was I not good enough? Didn't they like me? I wasn't likable. They didn't like me. I wasn't funny enough or smart enough or interesting enough or something enough. When somebody decides they don't want to be with us anymore, if we aren't centered in ourselves, we can take it as a rejection. And that just sucks. And not having the answers as to why feels really bad, doesn't it? So I'm going to lay out all the reasons why it doesn't serve us to chase after closure. And the first is you may never get it. If you're waiting for this other

person to tell you what was going on with them, their point of view, their perspective, what they were thinking or feeling so that you can then move on, you might be waiting forever. You might be waiting forever. Waiting for somebody else to give you answers means you might be waiting forever. And that's no good because I've heard clients and people stewing in the mystery of this for years, not feeling like they can move on. And that's extreme, but it can happen. And even just, even weeks is too long to feel like you're waiting to move on with your life, that you can't move forward until you get some external validation, external answer about your life, your fate, your destiny, your future, your happiness. We don't ever want to put our own

well-being in somebody else's hands. And that's what seeking closure does. So you might be waiting forever. And what goes along with that is that you're putting it in somebody else's hands. Like, oh my God, I don't want somebody to be at the wheel of my life. I want to be at the wheel of my life. I don't want to be in the backseat of a car being a backseat passenger and somebody else is driving in my life. No, I don't want that. And I don't want that for any of you. It's a powerless feeling. It's a horrible feeling, in fact. So the next reason why it's not good to chase and seek closure from somebody else is that what you're doing is you're saying this person's point of view or experience or perspective is so important to me, almost more important than my own.

You're not realizing that you're doing that, but you're saying, I need to know from this person what they think and feel and need and want or what they were experiencing. You're giving it so much value that by doing so, you're devaluing your own. And if you were to ever get an answer from this person, if you were ever granted a conversation, you may only be hearing and you will be only hearing their point of view. You're saying it's the truth. I want to know the truth about what happened. But what you're not getting is the truth.

You're getting their truth, their side of the story. And while they may give that to you, two things, you may not know that what they're saying to you is the truth that they're saying anyway. They may just be telling you something lip service to make you feel better. They're avoiding conflict. They don't want to make you feel bad. So they're just kind of glossing over it and they're saying what they need to say to avoid the hot seat. So what they're telling you may not even really be the truth for them, but they're just making it easier on themselves or they're trying to, you know, avoid making you feel bad. So is it really the truth that you've been seeking?

Maybe not. Even if you do get an answer from them and it feels, okay, that feels like the truth. Sure, I can see your point of view. It may not feel as good as you think it's going to feel getting that information. And getting the information from them about what was going on from their point of view may often actually make it worse for you because you feel impotent to change the past. If they're saying, well, this was happening

and all you can do is apologize, you can't go back in time and change any of that. So what we need to do instead is recognize the difference between their truth, your truth, and the truth. And the best way to get closure is always to give it to yourself. Take the power back and give it to yourself by deciding it doesn't really matter what this person is saying. It doesn't really matter what this person is thinking. You may never find out. And even if they tell you it may not satisfy you or it may not be the truth, we won't know.

But what matters more is what you know. And you're not giving yourself enough credit for knowing what you know. It's true. Closure is an illusion that you are chasing after if you're chasing it from someone else. Giving yourself the closure that you need is the most empowering thing you can do. And the way you do that is two things. There's two ways to do this and they go together. The first is to get really brutally honest with yourself about what was going on in that relationship at the time that you were in it? My guess is that you already knew.

You knew at the time that that relationship was happening, something wasn't right. Something was off between the two of you. Something was off with that person. Something was off with you. And the most powerful thing you can do here, the most liberating thing you can do here, liberate yourself is to be honest about how you were showing up in that relationship. I'm gonna give an example in a minute. The second part of that is even if you look back

into that relationship and you don't see it, you still get to decide for yourself why it ended. You get to make the meaning out of that. So the story that I want to share with you could be anybody's story. This is a true story, but oh my gosh, it's so generalized that it's universal. It fits for everyone. So years and years ago, before I even met my husband, I was dating a guy and he decided he didn't want to continue the relationship with me. He didn't ghost me, but he just kind of gave me a little bit of like, oh, you know, there's something missing. It's not working. That's all I got. And it really

wasn't satisfying for me to hear that. I wanted to know, well, why, well, why, well, what was missing? What was I doing? Was I not good enough? What was the blah, blah, blah, all of that, right? You can relate. I'm sure we've all been there. And it took me a while of beating up on myself. Why was it not good enough? Was I not pretty enough or thin enough or active enough or this enough or that enough or whatever enough for this guy to want to be with me? We've all been there. And at one point, it just dawned on me that,

holy shit, it doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't matter what he thinks about why he needed to end this relationship. What matters is what I know and what I tell myself about why the relationship matters. And I was, I decided to just be honest with myself about that relationship. And what I saw about that and what I saw in myself was that I knew he wasn't for me. I knew all along he was not my person and this was not my relationship and it was never going to work. So how I was showing up in that relationship was pretty half-assed. I was not full, whole, showing up my best self.

I was not the best partner. I was half in and half out, half-assed, half-hearted. And that is what I decided to focus on. Well, it makes sense that he wanted to break up with me because look who I was being in that relationship. I would break up with me. How many of you can think back on a relationship where you got ghosted or where you got dumped or broken up with. And it felt like shit, but all along you knew. You knew. And it was affecting how you were showing up. So I decided to give myself the closure I needed

that I was gonna, that's what I was gonna focus on. It doesn't matter what he thinks, if I was good enough or not. I know the truth. My truth is that, yeah, I probably wasn't good enough in that relationship for him because he wanted more and I wasn't giving him all. I was giving him some knowing that I wasn't fully invested. So that's part of my truth. Now, if you look back on a relationship, a friendship, or whatever it was that ended not by your own doing, and you cannot see anything, whether you knew it at the time and decided to pretend you didn't and you avoided it, or you can look back and see it now or not, what you can still say is

what you choose to believe about it now, which is that friendship, that relationship had to end because I needed to learn X, Y, and Z because of it. Thank you, ex-boyfriend, for ghosting me because I learned how to give myself closure. Something I needed to learn how to do. Thank you for ending that relationship with me because I might have stayed a long time settling for something that wasn't it for me. Thank you, friend, for just disappearing because, hey, worst case scenario, you're saying, thank you, friend, for ending this friendship because if that's how you feel about us, and you could just ghost me after all the time that we've been friends,

then we weren't really the friends I thought we were. So thank you. You did me a favor. Thank you. As painful as that was, I accept that. That's the closure. We get to tell ourselves whatever story narrative we want to tell ourselves that will allow us to feel empowered and liberated and to allow us to move on. And it's not delusional. It's your truth, your side of the story, what you choose to believe about why that ended. You get to decide. So chasing after closure from somebody else is going to leave you feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied because, again, you may not get the answers that you seek.

And if you do get answers, it still may not feel very good for you. The best answer you can get is the one you give yourself. And you get to decide what that answer is. And that, my friends, is how to live a self-centered life, to be centered in yourself, deciding for yourself what you know to be true, being brutally honest with yourself, and deciding to make the meaning that you need to make for you to be your best self, to get your own back. What I decided to believe about that relationship ending was the most healing, empowering thing I could have ever told myself.

Way more powerful than anything he could have said to me. And that is my wish for you. So thank you for listening today. I hope that this will help you gain some closure in your life. Look back on some of the relationships that have ended in your life and go through these steps in your mind and maybe journal about it. But give yourself the closure that you need. The best and only way to truly give yourself closure is to give it to yourself.

That's all, y'all. See you next time. Thanks so much for joining the conversation today. I hope you learned something new or heard something that inspired you to take action in a new way. As your greatest champion and someone who truly cares about your love, happiness, wealth, and success, I always want to encourage you to ask yourself this question. How have I contributed? You are the only person who can ask this and the only one who can answer it. This doesn't just change your life. This changes everything. you