I never really liked that word in my counseling practice, “broken”.  It would seem to indicate that we all need to be “fixed” – or, worse, maybe that we can’t be “fixed”.  Perhaps “damaged” fits better in my mind.  However, you look at it, imperfect, flawed, damaged, broken…  they are all part of the human condition.

In my reading so far this year, the amount of “brokenness” has been nearly depressing.  Spiritual reading in the early parts of the Bible (I’m working on reading and hopefully understanding it this year with this podcast and reading plan) is a reminder that we are broken individuals, from broken families, with a broken history.  Rose’s The End of Average and Bregman’s Humankind offer dark and disappointing discussion of our broken systems that we have lived under for the past century.  And Johann Hari’s Lost Connections further highlights the need to change these systems and how difficult it might be.

Of course, in each one of these volumes, and in life in general, there is always HOPE.

Pain, guilt, death – Logotherapy’s “Tragic Triad” – those things we cannot escape in life, in the human condition. But we always get to choose how we face them.  We get to choose how we relate to our brokenness.

We get to choose whether to be “repaired”, to be made whole again, or to sit in our brokenness.  And if we choose wholeness, we get to choose how we relate to our suffering – will it make us stronger, better, more beautiful, or will we allow it to weaken us?

One of my favorite stories of this repairing of brokenness to make something more “beautiful” is the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended with a mixture including gold or silver dust to highlight the imperfection.  ” It treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.”

So you get to choose – highlight your imperfections and brokenness to make them part of your history, or….  Well, as a therapist, I really don’t like the “or”.