Not Broken Anymore
Kintsugi, the Japanese Art of fixing broken things with gold. The picture is from my first go at it. It was done at a retreat I attended for female survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It was at this retreat that I first heard of this art. Fixing something broken and creating something beautiful and functional again. What an interesting concept. I cannot say that I had previously considered this possibility. I think I believed, despite a strong desire to be better, that this messed up space in my brain was going to be my normal for the rest of my life. Hadn’t I been trying to be better since I was a teenager? Didn’t I fail, repeatedly? What did being “better” look like for me?
This search to be better was one I had been in pursuit of from the moment we left (fled, might be a better term), my stepfather’s home. I wanted to be okay, I wanted to be happy, to thrive, to not be haunted. The haunting was the worst. Waking up from nightmares, sure that he was in the house to do what he had promised and kill me, ending the years of abuse with the threat that had always loomed over me. I did not want this struggle, and I could not for the life of me understand why I wasn’t able to just move on now that I wasn’t living there or at his mercy anymore. There were many issues that blocked this path to healing but the biggest was that my understanding of what healing or being better meant was very skewed.
What does healing mean? According to the Oxford Dictionary it’s “the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.” So simple. Right? WRONG! I thought healing would mean I’d no longer be impacted by what had happened to me. I thought it meant I’d go back to being the happy person I had been prior to all the abuse. What I didn’t understand for a very long time was that those events had made it impossible for me to go ‘back’ to being anything, I had to repair, I had to understand that the pain of it and the triggers would still be there and that as you healed some of those triggers, others would pop up. Healing meant having enough tools to not go down paths of self-destructive behavior. I was very capable of setting fire to everything that was going well, watching it burn, and wondering how I had gotten there.
We must accept that our journey, our trauma, our pain has changed us. We do not get to wipe the slate clean and pretend it no longer exists. It does exist, it will sneak up and pierce through our peace. What we must get to is recognizing how events and situations impact us; how our physiology changes and how our thought patterns change in those moments. We must be able to create a gap between the stimulus and the next thing, which is often a reaction that does not get us to the outcome we desire. Quite often we operate on emotion and feeling. We feel unsafe and we must protect ourselves and so, we react. Healing helps us create a gap following the stimulus and allows us to respond, rather than react.
But there’s more to it than just creating the gap, we must acknowledge what’s happening to us. Remember when I mentioned that our physiology changes and our thought patters change? We must learn to acknowledge those changes, recognize them as they are happening and understand what’s causing that reaction, then begin having the internal dialogue that allows us to show up better and steer away from poor coping mechanisms we’ve used in the past. Recognize your trigger and practice changing the outcome.
When we get here, we begin to feel peace. That’s what we want, right? Yes! But we so frequently don’t understand or feel safe in that peace. We, who have been traumatized, so often thrive in chaos. We will create it if we don’t have it because it is normal for us, it’s where we know how to operate. We’ve been built for it by a lifetime of trauma. We are masters at navigating chaos. Changing all that means we need to navigate and learn to find safety in the quiet and peace.
This work is hard. I understand that sometimes, for some people, it is easier to sit in our pain, our hurt, our trauma, and repeat it or relive it as adults. I would argue that there is pain and suffering regardless of what path you take. You will suffer the pain now of putting in the work to heal or you will suffer the pain of regret later for how many years have been wasted in the pain you never were able to rise above. The choice is yours. The art of kintsugi is akin to the healing process. The gold (healing) must be applied carefully as you line up the broken pieces (you) and then held in place while it sets (patience and practice), if a piece (a part of you) doesn’t hold (a trigger occurs, and you react) you reapply the gold (try again with patience and practice). Soon the pieces (you) hold steady and can stay together when hot or cold liquids are placed in it (you can weather the triggers and respond rather than react).
