There is a Japanese art form called Kintsukuroi ("to repair with gold") in which a broken pottery is repaired in a way that the cracks are put together and highlighted in gold. The marks and history of what was once damaged are not hidden. It grows from a poetic philosophy that our injuries, endurance, pursuit of healing, recovery and perseverance are to be celebrated not hidden or minimized.
It is proof positive that something can be broken and beautiful at the same time.
We often come across people in their broken state, people who feel all sorts of negative emotions and are dealing with a tragedy or disappointment. We must never make them feel like it's wrong for them to feel what they feel. For well meaning idealists, my advice sounds very counterintuitive.
Not only are some people struggling to control their own lives, they are also being patronized sometimes unknowingly by people who have never experienced their pain.
It is important to allow people feel their sorrows and disappointments, because it is their life and their memories and they will never move past it without first addressing it. It's OK to feel pain, to be broken and to be hurt. There's no need to minimise, hide or reject the fact.
Mental health issues are definitely complex. You can't just tell someone to "be positive", "be happy" or "love yourself". It isn't that simple. These messages can actually make people feel even more defeated. Aloof and very detached admonitions just doesn't help anyone. I remember an American preacher who lost her teenage son to suicide some years ago. She narrated her ordeal and expressed the fact that, people who wanted her to be strong and to not display her grief as she knew how to were the biggest roadblock to her healing.
If you're not a trained subject matter expert whose opinion or help is being sort, fight the urge to prescribe solutions or offer empty platitudes on matters you know very little about. Be quiet, be present, give reassuring looks and nods. You would have done so much good already. Everyone can live a life that's void of suffering even if there's pain. That life can be beautiful even if once broken.
We must trust that the Potter has a plan and ours isn't to worry about our broken pieces and those of our neighbour's enough to want to force a fix.
As Henri J.M. Nouwen rightly said in his book, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life, “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Your scars redefine your beauty
Thanks.
I agree with you in giving grieving people time and space to grieve or mourn the loss of love. If you don’t know what to say, say nothing and just be there for them in solitude. Don’t tell them to stop crying.
I remember when my sister was dying, one hanti like that told her to stop thinking of her only child and give up and die. 😱😱😱. She was ‘consoling’ my sister on her impending death. Shortly after my sister died, this hanti’s husband died from complications of diabetes. In his 70s. This woman who had been telling my sister to embrace death actually went mad from grief! She had to be sectioned. She literally fell apart when her husband died.