If you have begun reading something titled “Feeling Broken is Your Invitation” you already know the feeling you want to get rid of. As a therapist, one of my most helpful tools is the lived experience I have with this feeling. Since I have had it myself, being a therapist with tools does not mean I have a fix to your broken parts. What I have is a new concept entirely for you to embrace. I know from 17 years of experience as a therapist specializing in stuck experiences that are either single events, relationships themselves or a period of life that holds many complex difficulties, there are thousands of iterations of this feeling. Not a soul who has come to a therapy session in my 17 years as expert struggles with it any more or less than another because it is not what happened to you in your life that qualifies “broken”.
I have seen this common need, no matter who you are, that equalizes the struggle of being here and being human. We all seek to know what our problems are and fix them. This elevation we place on knowing things to control our course is our collective anxiety. I am here to tell you, it blocks our healing things profoundly. The truth is we don’t have to label and find what I call “Your Stuff” in the ways we have constructed and are so common in traditional talk therapy. So many of us have the broken feeling regardless of the unique content of your life story. So, it is not “Your Stuff” that qualifies you as traumatized or not and you don’t need to wait for a therapist to diagnose something. I would like to propose that feeling broken is your invitation to look at “Your Stuff” differently. I define “Stuff” as akin to “emotional baggage”. This refers to unfinished emotional issues, stressors, pain, and difficulties we’ve experienced that continue to take up space in our minds. This Stuff affects our present relationships, our bodies and the deep rooted somatic and neurobiological systems we possess for our most important task; feeling safe, secure and ready to connect.
If you have been following this Subtack page or The ENYA Podcast, you have learned about the Toolbox Approach having three main categories: Narrative Tools, Reprocessing Tools, and Relational Healing Tools. These resources have begun to present to you that you need a staged process with tools. These resources also start to create a community for you that prepare you for the last stage of Relational Healing. As you join here to the Subtack page or The ENYA Podcast you get the felt sense of people there interested in this way we repair things inside us that have been damaged but not broken and in need of fixing. This community is there for you. This community has events planned to hold space for live healing events. All you have to do is begin. I encourage you if you have not listened or read Do You Want to Listen or Begin, to do so now. This content is meant to guide you today, so far it has been free. There are links to explore to extensions that are only open to paid members however because I am doing the work too. I am working on knowing this work has the most value when I put one on it. I paid many prices coming to it, I hope you will consider one as well.
The tool presented today is part of the Narrative Tools. If you have not explored Your Stuff is Not the Story, I would encourage you to do so. That resource on Substack and on The ENYA Podcast introduces the Toolbox Approach and Narrative Tools as a part of this process of relearning yourself and your life for deeper meaning. This first tool is the Timeline Tool, which can provide clarity in that it is a new way of seeing what parts if your story you may be carrying that have never been discussed because they are not ready for that kind of process without this tool. This tool helps you gain backstage passes to your performance ‘My Life’ and therefore more access to the show. Normally we access it only through what you can talk about in an episodic way, like “This is what happened in the Netflix series called ‘My Life’”. This tool gives you enhanced features. Please go to that resource, before this next tool which is called Knowing Your Attachment Wounds. For deeper work with this tool, the paid resource Knowing Your Attachment Style and Patterns is also offered to you here. You will be able to take and score your style easily for deeper work.
The diagram below is something I encourage people to just look at and “let it happen to you”. When I encourage this, the felt sense kicks in and most are able to feel a pull towards a category that fits. The experiences are varied but many have a sense “oh my goodness, this explains my experience so much”. Many tell me they are not even exactly sure what they mean, if it is the experience they had growing up or have right now, often it is both and this makes this awareness a profound awakening. This is what is “wrong” but not in the sense it needs to be fixed or made right, but this is the ache and that broken feeling.
Once you identify with a category you are already inside the process of developing a more coherent narrative for yourself beyond what you previously might think to talk about in a “what’s wrong” concept where you need to fix something about yourself. Attachment research tells us that to break free of a cycle of strained attachments, we must make sense of and feel the full pain of our past but not re-experience every detail. As many attachment experts relate, how our parents made sense of our childhood experiences predicts how secure we are, however a child’s experience can be missed in so many ways, no matter the health of the parent. That is why; in order to repair our attachment ability and develop more inner security as adults, we must be willing to create what Daniel Siegel calls a “coherent narrative” of our experience.
Therefore, by allowing this diagram to turn up new autobiographical questions, we can discover how you have made sense of your past— how your mind may have shaped your memories of the past to explain who you are in the present. When you reveal this internal narrative or story you were not aware of telling yourself, you find insight into what may be limiting you in the present and may also be causing you to pass down to your children the same painful legacy that damaged their own early days. In other words, if we can face our history and make sense of our narrative, we can actually influence the course of our lives now, as well as our relationships, and the attachment patterns we pass on to our kids.
Telling our story in a coherent way can help us resolve both what is called “big T and little t traumas” in our lives. The truth is that most of us have experienced trauma. While people may think of trauma as something unusual or life-threatening, “big T trauma”; a serious loss, abuse, or life-threatening event, is only one kind. There is also “little t trauma,” a situation, event or period of time in which it may not have seemed like a drama unfolding at the time but impacted us by causing distress, fear, or pain. “Little t” is somewhat of a misnomer as usually it has, we realize often in hindsight, changed the way we saw ourselves and the world around us irreversibly. If we don’t make sense of our experience, we are likely to be triggered and affected by our trauma in ways of which we aren’t aware, but that cause us considerable sorrow.
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Please continue on for an enhanced dive into attachment by determining your style as another tool: Knowing Your Attachment Style and Patterns.
Feeling Broken is Your Invitation