April 2022
Kintsugi, or Kintsukuroi, is an old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold or other metals so that the reconnected ceramic pieces celebrate the breaking, repairing and transformative process of becoming something even more beautiful. The name kintsugi means “golden joinery” and the healing in the gleams of gold, if I may put it this way, emphasizes the fractures instead of hiding them.
That which was broken has the possibility of becoming something beautiful, but only if we do not try to conceal our anguish. Our lives are continually changing, continually being broken and repaired. We tend to want to dump everything of our lives when dramatic changes are thrust upon us, which is understandable, but the saving of the pieces of our lives as well as the memories and the instances of delight of the vessels that contained us before the devastation help the rebuilding, the re-making of us.
As I’ve said. above, that which was broken has the capacity of becoming something beautiful, but only if we do not try to conceal our anguish. It is perfectly understandable that we want to press on and rebuild our lives as if nothing was broken. Try as we might, however, the pain remains until it is literally visited and transformed.
Compare the repair of broken pottery with invisible superglue, where the vessel looks sort of ok, but nevertheless retains at a hairline level evidence of a break, with the outright golden repair of metal in the joins between ceramic pieces. The first declares itself as a shadow of its former past, while the other says, effectively, “Here I am, I’ve experienced damage in my life, but now I am even more extraordinary than before. I am empowered by my experiences and I can participate in the lives of others, and myself, with deeper authenticity.”
This metaphor of healing has huge implications for us in the healing professions. Our knowing of our own pain can become the tool of our empathic capacity to enter in the healing of others. If we do not acknowledge our own pain, our injury, but pretend to know everything there is about trauma and healing, we, paradoxically, cannot actually heal. A cognitive understanding of emotional injury really is no substitute for the participation in one’s own therapeutic healing. Get therapy, if you feel you need it.
Post-traumatic stress injury isn’t inevitable after dramatic and life-altering events, like the recent devastating floods in northern NSW and Queensland. After going through a traumatic event, it’s natural to experience some emotional repercussions. Anxiety, fearfulness, irritability, and numbness are all normal feelings that may arise in the wake of a trauma, but in most cases, these feelings will subside as time goes on. I note here, that fear and stress are vital to a person’s safety as they trigger physiological “fight-or-flight” responses that help us be protected from harm.
For those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, these symptoms of anxiety, fearfulness, irritability, and numbness persist, and sometimes intensify over a two, or more, month period. A characteristic of PTSD are avoidant behaviours, such as an endeavour to avoid talking about the traumatic event, or to stay away from places or things that remind them of the incident, but this strategy backfires. It’s like trying to apply superglue to the broken pieces, in an endeavour to hide from feeling frazzled, while feeling even more anxious than before. Talking with someone in a safe, confidential environment is a useful step in the healing of the person.
In the therapeutic supportive conversation, insights into positives – like, for instance, ordinary people helping one another, people saving animals and animals saving us, even just a flower floating by, or noticing the subtle shifts in interests in special activities, like music, gardening, painting – can be part of the gold melding the broken bits into something new.
Kintsugi is a playful art, and art in the making of something new from the broken old. It is, literally, golden joinery, golden healing.
