Healing Doesn’t Mean Your Broken

Dispelling the 'Broken' Myth 

We live in a culture that talks about healing as if it is a journey from damage to repair. A return from brokenness. A fixing of something that failed.

But what if that story is incomplete?
What if healing is not about fixing, but about remembering?
And what if you were never broken to begin with?

This is not a dismissal of pain or trauma. The wounds are real. The scars are valid. The nervous system remembers everything. But to view ourselves as damaged is to internalise the very systems that failed to protect us in the first place.

Healing, in its truest form, is not about becoming someone new. It is about returning to someone you have always been, beneath the burdens, beneath the protectors, beneath the survival strategies that once kept you alive.

The Problem with the “Broken” Narrative

The idea that we are broken before we begin healing is one of the most pervasive myths in the world of personal development and psychotherapy. It is baked into advertising, spiritual language, and even well-intentioned clinical spaces.

But the concept of brokenness can become a kind of identity. It often keeps people in a cycle of self-improvement that is rooted in shame, not Self. When we believe we are broken, we spend our lives striving to be fixed, often bypassing the parts of us that need witnessing, not correction.

In Internal Family Systems (IFS), we understand that all behaviours, no matter how harmful or confusing they seem, are rooted in protection. They come from parts that are doing their best to help us survive. These parts are not dysfunctional. They are adaptive. They arose for a reason, and they carry wisdom as well as pain.

As Dr. Richard Schwartz reminds us, “There are no bad parts.” Only parts that carry burdens too heavy for one system to hold. Healing happens when we unburden these parts, not when we erase or exile them (Schwartz, 2021).

Trauma Responses Are Intelligence, Not Defects

From a neuroscience perspective, trauma does not break us—it reshapes us. According to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s work in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma alters brain activity, particularly in areas responsible for threat detection, memory, and emotional regulation. These changes are not signs of damage. They are the body’s attempt to adapt to overwhelming experience (van der Kolk, 2014).

Similarly, the Polyvagal Theory by Dr. Stephen Porges explains that when the nervous system shifts into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, it is not failing. It is protecting. These states are biological survival mechanisms, not evidence of internal failure.

The problem arises not in the responses themselves, but when we carry shame about them. When our protector parts begin to believe they are the problem, not the solution. Healing requires us to offer those parts the compassion they never received. It is not about changing them to be more palatable—it is about letting them know they are finally safe enough to rest.

Returning to Wholeness, Not Building It from Scratch

IFS teaches that beneath every part, no matter how extreme, is the Self. The Self is not something we earn through healing. It is not a reward for good behaviour. It is our birthright. It is always there, even if it has been obscured or exiled.

This is a radical shift. It means that healing is not about becoming someone whole. It is about accessing the wholeness that was always within us.

Psychologist Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centred therapy, once said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change” (Rogers, 1961). Healing happens through permission, not punishment. Through compassionate awareness, not perfectionism.

You are not a project. You are a person. A sacred system of parts, all doing their best, waiting for a moment of safety and connection.

The Role of Language in Healing

Words matter. The way we speak to ourselves, the way clinicians speak to clients, and the way culture speaks to pain, all shape the healing experience.

When we say someone is “damaged” or “too much,” we are not describing them, we are pathologising their protectors. We are making assumptions about the strategies they have developed to survive.

Dr. Gabor Maté, in his work on trauma and addiction, argues that “the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain.” When we focus on pathology, we ignore the root. When we honour the protective function beneath the behaviour, we begin to understand. And understanding is the beginning of healing.

You Are Not Broken for Needing Healing

There is a part in many of us that resists healing because it believes that needing help is a sign of failure. That being in pain means we have not worked hard enough, been strong enough, or done enough spiritual growth.

But healing is not proof of brokenness. It is a testament to resilience. The fact that you are still here, reading, seeking, listening, opening, means something in you has never given up.

Self-leadership means showing up for that part. Not to fix it, but to accompany it. Not to override it, but to listen.

And when we do that, we begin to realise the truth.
You were never broken.
You were burdened.
And burdens can be released.

A New Narrative of Healing

Healing is not a correction. It is a reunion.
It is a soft return to what has always been sacred within you.
It is the moment you stop fighting your parts and begin to lead them.
It is the remembering that you are not your trauma, your symptoms, or your survival strategies.

You are a system of wisdom.
You are a constellation of protectors, exiles, and Self.
You are whole, even when you feel fragmented.

Let us retire the language of brokenness.
Let us choose to heal not because we are unworthy, but because we are.
Let us come home to ourselves, one tender part at a time.

In abundant love and kindness for all gentle souls,

Angela xox 

References

• Maté, G. (2010). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Vintage Canada.

• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.

• Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.

• Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True.

• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin.