Why Pain Doesn’t Mean You’re Broken and How to Use It to Reclaim Your Life
Dr. Shahrzad Jalali is a clinical psychologist and executive coach. She’s the founder of Align Remedy, author of The Fire That Makes Us, and creator of Regulate to Rise, a course that helps people heal trauma and reclaim resilience. Her work equips people to break old patterns and step boldly into who they’re meant to be.
A woman once sat across from me in my office, her voice barely steady as she said, “I feel like I’m shattered into pieces. Who would ever want me like this?” Many of us know that feeling. The breakup that hollows you out. The grief that settles into your body. The burnout that convinces you you’ll never return to who you were. Beneath all of it lives the same quiet fear, "If I hurt this much, maybe I’m broken beyond repair."
But across cultures and across time, humans have told a different story about pain.
In Japan, broken pottery is repaired with veins of gold, a practice known as Kintsugi. The fracture is not hidden, it is illuminated. The vessel becomes more valuable because of what it has survived.
What if our lives worked the same way?
Pain is a signal, not a sentence
We are taught early to treat pain as a problem. As children, when we scraped a knee, someone often said, “Shh, don’t cry, it’s nothing.”
As adults, the message becomes subtler but more insidious. Push through it. Stay positive. Don’t dwell.
Over time, many of us internalize the idea that pain means failure. But pain is not a glitch in the system. It is the system speaking.
Neuroscience shows that emotional pain activates many of the same neural pathways as physical pain. This is why rejection can feel like a blow to the chest, or grief like a physical ache. Your brain is not “confused”. It is responding to threat and loss in the only language it knows.
And yet, we rarely shame someone for bleeding after a cut. We offer care. We expect healing. Emotionally, we do the opposite. We judge ourselves for feeling heartbreak, despair, or exhaustion, as if these states were evidence of weakness rather than evidence of being human. Pain is not a verdict on who you are. It is information about what matters, what was lost, and what needs attention.
Healing is not linear, it is integrative
One of the most destabilizing moments in healing is the return of pain after progress. You’ve been doing better. You’ve had clarity. You’ve even felt hope. And then, unexpectedly, sadness, panic, or anger returns. The mind quickly concludes. If I’m back here again, something must be wrong with me. But healing does not unfold in a straight line. It unfolds in cycles of integration.
Psychological research on grief and recovery shows that people naturally oscillate between engaging with pain and re-engaging with life. This movement is not a regression. It is how the nervous system metabolizes experience.
Think of healing less like climbing a ladder and more like walking a spiral staircase. You pass familiar emotional terrain again, but each time from a slightly higher vantage point, with more awareness and capacity.
The return of pain does not mean you are broken. It means another layer is ready to be integrated.
Your biology is adaptive, not a life sentence
Another myth pain whispers is this, "If I feel this way, maybe my brain is permanently damaged." For years, trauma was framed as something that irreversibly “hardwires” us. But newer research tells a more nuanced story.
Trauma can shape stress responses, this is true. But the same biological systems that adapt to threat are also capable of adapting to safety, connection, and regulation.
Your nervous system is not static. It is responsive. I once worked with a client who believed her history of generational trauma made her fundamentally defective. As we focused on stabilizing her nervous system and cultivating safe relational experiences, something shifted. Her reactivity softened. Her sense of self expanded. Hope, once unthinkable, became possible. She said, “I used to think my past decided my future. Now I see it was teaching me how to heal.” Pain shaped her, but it did not imprison her.
Using pain as a portal, not a prison
If pain is not proof of brokenness, how do we work with it rather than against it?
See the crack as a threshold: Like Kintsugi, healing does not erase fractures. It transforms them. The places that broke you open are often the same places where meaning, depth, and empathy grow.
Repair the nervous system first: Healing does not begin with insight alone. It begins with regulation. Small, embodied practices such as slower exhalations, humming, or grounding rituals signal safety to the nervous system. These are not minor techniques. They are acts of biological repair.
Turn experience into expression: Unexpressed pain becomes stored tension. When pain is given language through writing, art, movement, or advocacy, it shifts from shame into meaning. Expression allows suffering to be integrated rather than carried silently.
As Viktor Frankl observed, suffering changes its nature when it is held within a framework of meaning.
You were never broken
You are not broken because you hurt. You are human because you hurt. Pain does not diminish you, it deepens you. The cracks you carry are not evidence of failure, they are evidence of survival.
As I write in The Fire That Makes Us, “Your scars are not proof of your brokenness. They are the gold veins of your becoming.”
So don’t rush to hide the cracks. Let them teach you where you’ve been and who you are becoming. Your story is not over. It is still unfolding.
Read more from Shahrzad Jalali, PsyD
Shahrzad Jalali, PsyD, Psychologist, Author, Founder & Executive Coach
Dr. Shahrzad Jalali is a clinical psychologist, trauma expert, and thought leader in emotional transformation. She is the founder of Align Remedy and Dr. Jalali & Associates, where she’s helped thousands individuate and reclaim their inner truth. Bridging science, soul, and psychology, her work guides high-functioning individuals through nervous system healing and self-reinvention. As the author of The Fire That Makes Us and creator of Regulate to Rise, she helps people turn their most painful beliefs into their greatest source of power, alchemizing wounds into wisdom and survival into strength.
