Co-Authored by Mark Shelvock and Angela Waterfield.

Have you ever actually experienced a good ending?

In the cinematic version of our lives, we leave a career with a graceful exit, basking in the gratitude of our former colleagues. The same fantasy in our romantic lives could have us envisioning a couple sitting down to break bread one last time… not to throw it at each other, but share what mattered, what was learned, and why it’s time to part.

But let’s be honest: most of us know this is a fantasy. A good ending feels like the ‘Bigfoot’ of human psychology. We’ve all heard of it, but have we ever seen one personally?

In reality, many of us are far too familiar with the ‘walk of shame’ version of events where we shuffle towards the elevator, avoiding eye contact, and clutching a soggy cardboard box of hoarded office supplies. Or the scorched-earth romance policy, which seems to require a similar feat of coordination: viciously dishing about our ‘narcissistic ex’ with one hand while white-knuckling a glass of cheap Chardonnay in the other.

Many endings feel like survival rather than a sense of completion or wholeness.

This isn’t merely a failure of perspective. As it turns out, there’s something deeper at play.

Attachment Is Not A Preference

From the perspective of attachment theory, our drive toward connection is not a lifestyle choice, but a psycho-biological imperative. John Bowlby, the ‘father’ of attachment theory, noted how infants are born neurologically unfinished and depend on caregivers’ proximity for functioning, protection, and survival itself.

Our brain development is shaped by relationships and calibrated through felt safety. This wiring persists into adulthood, quietly informing every friendship, workplace, partnership, and identity we build.

When an attachment bond begins to unravel, the experience often registers not merely as sadness or disappointment, but as threat. The body responds before the mind can understand. What looks, from the outside, like “difficulty letting go” is often a body responding as it was designed to: by protesting separation.

This is why endings often come with panic, defensiveness, rumination, or the sudden urge to rewrite the story in simpler terms.

In moments of rupture or transition, most people’s minds and bodies unconsciously ask: is it safe to separate?

The Biological Anchor

Our biological drive to attach isn’t just a ‘vibe’, rather it’s an embedded survival setting.

Neurobiological research on social attachment shows that across mammalians, bonds are supported by integrated neurosystems that regulate stress, reward, and survival. Attachment is not an abstract emotion; it is a full-body regulatory process involving the brain, heart, and endocrine system.

Research in health psychology demonstrates that proximity to an attachment figure helps modulate physiological arousal. When the connection is stable, stress responses soften. When a bond is threatened or lost, the nervous system shifts toward alarm. Cortisol rises, attention narrows, and the body mobilizes to restore contact and equilibrium. This helps explain why sudden endings can feel overwhelming.

The same neurochemical systems involved in bonding (reward, motivation, and soothing), are implicated in separation distress. From the instinctual perspective, loss is not simply heartbreak; it’s destabilizing for the entire organism.

This destabilization can become visible at the level of the heart itself. In Takotsubo syndrome, or ‘broken heart syndrome’, acute emotional stress can alter cardiac functioning. While uncommon, this experience offers a striking reminder that the body does not experience relationships as ideas or narratives; our body’s living intelligence experiences things as safety or threat.

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The Art of Endings

If attachment is wired into the body, ending well is a learned capacity rather than an instinct. Most of us were never taught to leave a relationship, role, or identity with care. We learn to attach, strive, and endure, yet rarely how to complete a cycle without collapse, blame, or disappearing.

When endings arrive, we default to short-term strategies that soothe our immediate distress at a long-term cost. Villain-making, burning bridges, and rewriting the past offer momentary relief by restoring a sense of control. However, these moves flatten complexity and erase the very meaning we once built.

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The Harvest

In nature, harvest is neither sentimental nor violent. Growth is gathered; what withers returns to the soil. Nothing is wasted, yet nothing is clung to past its season.

Applied to human endings, this poses a difficult question: can we take what nourished us without scorching the ground? A quiet task of adulthood is learning to hold paradox without rushing to resolve it; acknowledging that a relationship mattered while accepting it must end.

We can grieve without creating an enemy. We can honour who we were in a season without needing to remain that person. What dissolves is not erased; it is composted. The bond transforms into memory, discernment, and a deeper understanding of what sustains us, and what no longer does.

Choosing the Ending

We do not get to control when many endings arrive, but we have more agency than we often realize in how we participate in them. We can choose an ending shaped by pausing, slowing down, and making room for reflection or integration rather than leaning into pure reactivity.

Thoughtful and intentional processes allow us to recognize and honestly say: this mattered, and it is complete.

If you can end a chapter of your life with the sense that you are more spacious rather than more contracted, something essential has occurred. The body settles, the psyche widens, and the future story becomes so much more interesting.

Angela Waterfield* brings over 20 years of multidisciplinary experience in emergency response, education, writing, coaching, and personal development. Together, Angela and Mark explore the deep psychological and cultural currents that shape human experience, celebrating the many expressions of consciousness in Ontario, Canada.*