As a culture, we value strength and power, and we imagine that strength looks like being impervious to the hard things in life. We idolize the stoic individual who never seems to get hurt or wounded by life’s tragedies and losses.
Because we tend to define strength in this way, we see ourselves as weak when we do get our hearts broken and bruised by life. We add to the heartache by beating ourselves up for feeling the way we do. We erroneously allow this perceived weakness to define us as broken, unworthy, or defective, when we are not.
I think we’ve got it backwards, though. When we define strength as not feeling (or at least not showing) any pain, we are celebrating denial and suppression of natural human emotions and encouraging closing ourselves off from emotional connections to other people.
The result is not strength, but rather an unhealthy isolation filled with repressed emotions that explode out from us in uncontrolled reactions because we have not learned to deal with them effectively. That’s not healthy. It’s not strength. It’s not something to aspire to. It’s a recipe for suffering and for causing suffering for those around us.
True strength comes from being able to face our heartbreaks, deal constructively with the pain and anguish we encounter, and to continually heal and grow from those experiences.
It is not weakness to feel pain. Facing, admitting to, and dealing with your pain are signs of your strength.
Experiencing heartbreak does not make you broken. Broken is never who you are. It is just how you are experiencing yourself in this moment of pain. Strength is allowing yourself to feel as you feel and to work toward healing from that place.
Strength is choosing to walk into your wounded places with your heart wide open ready to feel the pain and to do the hard, courageous work to heal and come out the other side more able to face the next challenge life throws at you. Strength is choosing to heal instead of staying stuck in the pain through denial.
Next time you are facing pain and heartbreak, don’t let yourself get sucked into the cultural narrative that says that makes you weak. Choose instead to hold to a more courageous definition of strength and celebrate your ability to feel, to heal, and to grow.
The art of kintsugi is an ideal image of this, illustrating how our strength is in our healing.
Your strength is in your ability to come back with even more kintsugi gold in place. Embrace that!