The Art of Becoming After Being Broken: 8 Stages of Healing and Self-Rebuilding
We are not on good terms with brokenness.
We treat it with indifference and try to dodge it. And the sad part is that when we need more self-compassion, we become cold. This is due to our distorted relationship with brokenness.
We did not familiarize ourselves with it because we never sat with it.
We become resentful of anything and everything that breaks us. This happens because we are selective about our experiences. We chase what gives comfort and escape what breaks us.
Experiences that are comforting, pleasing to the senses, and joyful get a seat at our table, whereas anything painful is asked to leave.
This exposes our selective bias toward life.
We don’t welcome life in all its colours. The bright ones get the best treatment while the subdued ones are ignored and sometimes even abandoned.
This kind of unequal relationship with life’s experiences is rooted in our lack of understanding of life’s true purpose.
When something breaks us, the emotions are dark, negative, and painful.
Our system is not trained to allow and accommodate them.
It runs, escapes or becomes numb.
This happens because we haven’t seen ourselves beyond “being broken”.
We see it as irreparable damage that brings about outright collapse.
We believe it will bring havoc into our lives.
We think “Being broken” means the worst thing that could happen to us. We see it as our dead end, the point where we lose all our power, and this perception leads us further into despair.
Because we have only learned to love life when it is beaming, blooming and blossoming, we reject it when it’s breaking, depressing and painful.
We dismiss anything that disturbs us. We see these chapters as working against us, making our story gloomy and dark.
We either avoid our brokenness or become bitter when experiencing it.
Somehow, in despising brokenness, we fail to see what comes with it.
Long before it could reveal the deeper truth it carried for us, we had already abandoned it.
Because of our dysfunctional relationship with brokenness, emotions that derail us and patterns of self-sabotage start taking root in us.
So what we really did was not just avoid our brokenness, but also lose the chance to receive what it had come to teach us.
This insecure, weak relationship with brokenness becomes the root cause of seeing it as something unfair that happened to us.
Now, if we want to mould and repair this relationship, the starting point is accepting it.
It begins by embracing life in all its colours.
Unless we change this dynamic, we will never get past the brokenness and never reach the other side of it, to see it not as a villain, but as a character-building chapter of our story.
Who we can become after being broken depends on how we go through this brokenness.
Becoming starts when breaking is allowed.
When it is no longer rejected.
When we allow it to sit with us.
When we choose to move through it.
When we give time to observe it.
When it is not seen as something against us.
When we accept life, including its rain and storms, only then do we have a chance to witness its rainbows.
To accept life in its entirety does not mean we will normalise or become comfortable with pain or being broken; it will still make us uneasy. However, we will no longer see it as a threat.
It is to feel discomfort and pain while going through brokenness, yet remain aware that it is serving us in ways we cannot yet comprehend or imagine.
This is to see yourself as part of the process, believing that it is preparing you in the best way for the best things, rather than crumbling under its grinding and crushing.
Once you stop villainising being broken, you start to craft the skill of becoming.
I decided to choose the art of becoming when I hit rock bottom in my life.
When I first felt the urge to know this art and cultivate it, I was raw, incapable, and did not have the resources or the mindset to explore my brokenness. But that urge was enough to begin. Things started to unfold step by step, and with each step, I could see what came next.
Because I stopped ignoring my brokenness and started observing it, I gradually began to understand the lessons that came with it.
This helped me slowly to discover the strength within me that I never knew existed.
I watched myself gradually become someone who was no longer easily shaken, triggered, controlled, or affected by external events.
The art revealed the slave I had unknowingly fed for so long, allowing me to finally become free.
It did not happen overnight.
I went through seasons.
Each one shaped me and prepared me for the next.
Looking back at all the stages, I can see a step-by-step process that led me to cultivate the art of becoming after being broken.
At every stage, I underwent mind shifts that rewired me into the person I was meant to become.
Stage 1: Awareness of Breaking
Awareness starts with interrogation. Because you do not see anything good in it when brokenness first hits you, you begin to question it.
“Why am I in pain?”
“Why have I been chosen to go through this?”
The questions may first give an impression of resentment for the pain, but deep down, they are becoming the path to get closer to your pain and your brokenness.
This is because when you feel the urge to understand why you are having an uncomfortable experience, you have a chance to move toward it, not out of resentment this time, but out of a desire to understand why it has entered your life.
So, this interrogation, even if it is out of discomfort, becomes the connecting thread to your discovery of the purpose behind pain.
And only when you go closer to your brokenness, do you have the chance to unravel the purpose behind it.
In this state, questioning pain somehow becomes the force that compels you to face the wound.
Mindshift:
Pain is not random; it is revealing something.
Stage 2: The Collapse of Control
“Can I stop myself from feeling this ache?”
You want to bounce back to your normal life because in this brokenness, you lose control.
Your life was running on autopilot, where everything seemed under your control, until one day a chapter of brokenness broke you open and took away that sense of control.
The truth is, control was always an illusion; the breaking chapter revealed it.
You still try to regain control by suppressing those difficult emotions or by refusing to accept that some things happened beyond your control.
You search for control and fail.
This is where you realize:
You cannot escape your emotional pain with logic.
Mindshift:
Not everything within me is under my control.
Stage 3: The Attempt to Escape Pain
The moment the illusion of control breaks, you feel the full weight of your brokenness.
Because you neither anticipated brokenness nor felt prepared to endure it, you begin looking for ways to escape it.
You think escape is freedom.
You think you will get the control back.
Facing the pain fills you with dread, and escaping it feels like freeing.
But escape is not redemption; it is delay.
Escape does not bring an end to pain; it postpones it.
The more you try to avoid it, the more it consumes you, because escape may be physical, but brokenness is mental.
It is in this pursuit of escape that you begin to feel an even stronger pull to face it.
This happens because even when you escape, at an energetic level, you are still controlled by your brokenness, and that is when you sense a strong urge to face it, deal with it and navigate it.
It is only by facing it that you can truly transform and become free.
Mindshift:
Escape does not set you free; it hinders the transformation that is waiting for you.
Stage 4: The Search for Support Beyond Self
When you realise escape is futile, the courage to face your brokenness does not arise overnight. In that turmoil, you recognise that your current inner capacity is not enough.
Because escape did not help you, and facing brokenness did not come easily, you start searching for support beyond yourself. You seek something higher to fight your battle against pain.
This shift becomes the turning point in your journey. It summons you to surrender to the Source—to the One who is truly in control.
It is through this surrender that you enter a divine realm, where you begin to transcend and discover your true strength.
Mindshift:
I need something greater than my current self to hold me.
Stage 5: Reframing the Break
What once looked like a scattered piece of a puzzle now starts to make sense.
In the divine light, you see your power and step into deeper awareness.
It is the same space, but now your position is different. The breaking is still there, but you look at it differently.
You reframe the break: “What broke within me was never meant to serve me, so in that breaking, I was favoured.”
Mindshift:
The breaking is not destruction; it is correction.
Stage 6: Surrender & Connection
You no longer seek to end the pain; you surrender to the Source.
When surrender happens, pain loses its power to shake your peace. It may still surround you, but not suffocate you.
You stop resisting pain and brokenness because you now wear the divine armour.
Mindshift:
I don’t need to control the process; I need to allow transformation through it.
Stage 7: Conscious Reconstruction
Now the real work begins.
You no longer fear pain, and brokenness does not terrify you.
You sit with them, fully aware, wearing the divine armour.
The same pain and brokenness are seen in a different light.
This is when you understand: it did not break to create a void; it broke so that you could replace it with a better system.
What broke were unhealthy patterns; what was lost was the version of you that your future could not sustain.
And now you reconstruct, this time consciously and intentionally.
You rebuild:
- Beliefs
- Emotional patterns
- Boundaries
- Identity
Mindshift:
I am not who I was; I get to choose who I become.
Stage 8: Emergence of a New Inner Power
This is when you see pain as a gift. It was the doorway to your transformation.
It came not to break you, but to break the weak systems within you.
You don’t just heal; you become different.
Pain helped you shed what was weak so you could build what would strengthen you.
The new you is:
· Less fragile
· Less dependent
· More grounded
· More detached
· More at peace
Mindshift:
My power is no longer in avoiding pain but in withstanding and transforming it.
