My therapist and my husband both kept telling me I’m not broken. I needed them to hear that I was.
When I started a partial hospitalization program in January after having already done residential, PHP and IOP in 2025, I felt like “broken” was a good descriptor of my lived experience at that time. But my therapist and my husband both kept saying, “No, you’re not broken,” and kind of rejecting this reality that I was trying to convey.
I can understand why therapists tell us consistently not to refer to ourselves as broken, because labels matter, but I think that there’s something minimizing about that in those moments where our true experience is that we are broken. Nothing works the way that it used to. Our brains don’t work the way they used to. Our bodies don’t work the way they used to, and to us, it truly feels like being broken.
There is a negative connotation to the term “broken” that perhaps shouldn’t be there. Finally, after thinking about it and processing some more, I was able to communicate to them what “broken” meant to me. “I am broken, but that means that through therapy and doing the work, I get to look through all of the pieces and choose which ones I want to keep.” I get to define my experience, how it feels in my own body, and what I’m going to do with it. Not only that, but I get to define the value of that experience.
Here’s the thing: there are people out there who just feel comfortable thinking they can define our experiences for us. Helping others and meeting them where they are is a value of mine. But, if somebody else comes up to me and says, “Oh, well, isn’t the pain that you’ve experienced worth it because you helped these people,” I want to punch them in the throat. It’s okay if you feel the same way. It’s a minimizing statement coming from someone who didn’t live through your truth. They don’t get to determine what your pain is worth. But you can.
Do I think that it’s a fair exchange that I had to go through all of this stuff in exchange for benefiting somebody else? No. But I appreciate and value the fact that I was able to help somebody else and meet them in their dark moment.
There is a Japanese philosophy, wabi-sabi, that embraces the beauty of imperfections. From this philosophy came an art technique called Kintsugi. This is the practice of repairing broken pottery using gold, platinum, or silver, and the result is a piece that is both stronger and more valuable than it was prior to being broken. To me, Kintsugi is a beautiful metaphor for the work that we do in rebuilding our lives. The gold is the self-acceptance and self-compassion that helps us become a gentler version of strong.
What’s a word for your own experience that people keep correcting? What does the word mean to you?
Still figuring it out with you,
Samantha
