Exercise – Take a glass bottle filled with water into an empty carpark. Throw it high into the air away from you and watch it shatter. Now go and collect the pieces and glue them back together. As they’re searching for the pieces and trying to glue them stand over them saying how long they’re taking and how they need to work harder. Tell them how disappointing it is that they can’t get it right. Now tell them to try and put the original water back into the bottle. Now see what happens when you try to fill it from the tap.
It can’t be done? That is what we face when we are dealing with trauma. That is what has been done to us. That broken, incompleteness is exactly how it feels, sometimes years after an event. That is where we have to come from to be seen as useful members of society. If that mending leaves holes then we can still leak, still break apart, and potentially cut others if they try to handle us wrong. This event (or events) is so much more than depression, anger, or unwillingness to move on. We have been shattered and very often we will be dealing with the effects of that for the rest of our lives. On top of that the world is always moving on and we are trying to keep up with just living while we mend ourselves.
This exercise is one I designed out of frustration. It’s dramatic and it’s designed to be so. It is meant to be the response to the “just” brigade and to show them the value of their “just”. You know the ones…… “ If you JUST do this” or “JUST stop focusing on”. These people are as dangerous to recovery and healing as the perpetrators of the original trauma.
As an exercise it really works but sadly to fully get the gravity of the experience you have to experience a barracking sergeant major of a facillitator telling you to “hurry up” and “get it right”. Asking someone where your cup of tea is while they’re trying to find all the pieces is also a useful discussion point.
In the end the process is frustrating, it can be painful, but it’s definitely not pointless. To finish I once asked someone to sweep the entire space to ensure no one got cut by any pieces they’d missed. After a torrent of abuse the person looked at me and confessed that’s how they felt about they’re own mental health. They were always worrying about the sharp little piece of themself which someone could get hurt by.
In essence that’s the discussion which has to happen. The mind can be a tortured place and it’s hell to live inside. We find ourselves cut by our own sharp edges and judged on our inability to perform as we are meant to. No matter how well we mend there is still the focus on the cracks and the leaks, and on a deeper level there is a mourning for the water which we held inside that can never be replaced. No wonder so many of us throw ourselves into the recycling bin and wait to see if we get smashed again in the next life.
How we describe each other, how we view each other becomes important. Just as important as how we view and describe ourselves. Broken is an absolute. A broken glass bottle will never be the whole bottle again. When it becomes a competition or we ignore another’s brokenness we lose the potential for change. There are no more or less broken bottles; there is only the state of brokenness and that is key for me.
Rather than see broken, what if we were to look at the pieces instead? What can they become? Where can we find the value in the new form that can be created? Is there value to that process? We also have to accept that pieces will need to be thrown away. Nothing will ever change glass shards back into what they were. The potential for something different has to become the focus.
We also have to respect one other choice. The broken bottle may not want to change into what it must become. I believe wholeheartedly that this is also a right. Hard as it may be there are times when the pain of recreation are too much. The hand which threw the bottle never asked if the bottle wanted to go through the process of transformation. In the end that hand has no right to insist the bottle fixes itself and becomes what it was never meant to be.
The Gitigan Project 