I think one of the hardest things to accept is that the ending doesn't always come in the form we spent years imagining.
We think there will be a final conversation, a moment of complete understanding, an acknowledgement that settles everything. But even with the understanding you may never have closure.
They acknowledge what happened, there may be no resistance or denial, but there is no apology. No closure for you.
And, we can still find ourselves returning to the same emotional place.
What we needed then was understanding. Safety then. Also emotional support. Receiving some of those things years later can matter enormously, but it cannot travel backwards and give us what was missing when we needed it the most.
That doesn't mean nothing has healed.
Perhaps healing isn't reaching a point where the past never hurts again. Perhaps it is recognising when an old wound has been touched without feeling that we have to go back and solve the whole story again – unless it's important to the healing process.
We can understand why something hurts without needing another explanation. We can acknowledge where others are in their own healing without making it responsible for our own.
And perhaps we can grieve the ending we once imagined: the version where everything was understood so completely that we settle on the past. We don't have to convince those others of the truth. They already know it.
Depending on the hurt, you may always look back. In my case, with hurt spanning decades, it became inevitable.
But the past can still knock without you having to let it permanently move back in.
