What Breaks When We Feel Broken?

I’ve been a coach for more than 10 years, and over hundreds of conversations in that time, I’ve learned a lot about the pain, sometimes crushing and unbearable, that we experience as human beings.

Tragic, violent, and horrible things happen to people. I have sat with people who have had these things happen to them, and I have been with people who have done these things to others. And I have sat with many people who feel like their minds torture them – with anxiety, with grief, with anger, with regret, with shame.

And nearly every one of these people has been surprised when I say I don’t believe a person can be broken.

There is a deep desire to be seen in our pain, our anguish, our loneliness, our fear, our helplessness. And I don’t want anyone to feel unseen. Yet, “broken” is not what I see.

Over 20 years ago, I founded an innovative school for middle and high school students. But I didn’t just want to start one school, however exemplary it might be. I wanted to change the whole system of American education, because my heart ached for all the ways that it inflicts pain on young people. It does this by having a one-size-fits-all system when we come in lots of different shapes and sizes (and learning styles, and home situations, and interests, and personalities and strengths). Whomever doesn’t fit the norm, or how the system is designed, is labeled a problem.

When I was getting my Ph.D. in education, I studied the history of American education and how our system and methods of schooling evolved. Like all complex systems, it’s designed for certain outcomes and has intended and unintended consequences for those within the system. For those that fit into the system, change may not seem all that necessary. But for those that don’t fit in the system, for a wide range of reasons, the messages can be brutal.

You’re stupid. You’re wrong. You don’t belong here. You aren’t worth it. You are expendable. There’s something wrong with your character. You’re lazy. You’re a troublemaker. You are a problem. We don’t have time to understand you. Or care. Fit in! Don’t be yourself. Do what we ask, even if it doesn’t make sense or matter to you.

When the system is designed a certain way, it can make people feel broken. But the school I designed was based on a very different understanding of how we learn, the many different ways that we learn, and what it means to be welcomed as a whole person at school. And so it isn’t surprising that some students who felt “broken” in a previous school suddenly don’t feel broken anymore at this school. And this shift often comes with feelings of excitement, engagement, gratitude, and aliveness.

In a similar way, we live in an increasingly dysregulating society, with the omnipresence of phones and social media, and a culture oriented towards convenience rather than connection. Many of us grow up in a dysregulating environment that creates lifelong patterns and triggers, and all of us face circumstances that can overwhelm us at one time or another. The pain is real, the feelings are real. But we’re not broken. 

So what breaks when we say we are broken?

Over the years, when I’ve asked this question, my clients have said things like:

“I’m so depressed I can’t really feel much anymore.”

or

“I haven’t cried in years.”

or

“This grief feels so big that I can hardly breathe, or get through the day.”

or

“I’m so burned out that I don’t know how I’ll ever feel like myself again.”

These are all pointing to intense pain from what’s happening to us or inside of us. But there’s nothing broken.

The ability to notice our experience isn’t broken.

The way our nervous system works to protect us and keep us safe (sometimes in the most elaborate ways) isn’t broken.

Our capacity to love and be loved isn’t broken.

What I hear – or more accurately, what I sense – is a feeling of painful constriction, a feeling of isolation, a feeling of hopelessness. And making all of those feelings worse is the resistance to it all. The wanting it to be different.

And often we don’t have the opportunity to just metaphorically find a new school or a new society.

But what we can do, in response to the constriction and the resistance that causes our suffering, is to find a new internal environment in our minds and our hearts that feels more spacious. 

And in this spaciousness, we encounter our essential selves, the part of ourselves that simply cannot be broken. Ever. 

Finding this spaciousness can take so many different forms. 

There are embodied ways to find spaciousness, with our sensory experience, with our breath, with welcoming and moving our emotions, by moving our bodies, by feeling connection to ourselves. 

There are spiritual ways to find spaciousness, feeling connection to something larger than just our small selves, through nature, through wonder, through inquiring into what has never changed about us as far back as we can remember. 

There are psychological ways to find spaciousness, through understanding the nature of thought, through exploring our shadow selves, through exploring the interplay of the different personalities that reside in the voices in our head, and finding more harmony and freedom with those voices.  

However we choose to do it, and with whatever support we seek or not, whenever we create more spaciousness in our system, we step out of the feeling of broken. 

It feels like my heart breaks when people I love are suffering, but what I’m really experiencing is that I feel the pain of my heart expanding to make room for more love. Love that is big enough to hold the pain. I can, and sometimes do, resist and constrict. But when I find the spaciousness, and welcome the heartbreak, it’s not brokenness I feel any more. It’s love. 

I understand why people feel like they are broken, but I don’t buy the story of brokenness.  We get to be with the pain (ours, and the pain of those we love and care about), welcome the pain, and not resist the pain. Finding the spaciousness that we all have within us is what transforms it.