The Courage to Sit With What’s Broken

Why our greatest healing happens when we stop running from our pain

In my twenty years of practice, I’ve witnessed countless moments when clients reach what I call “the breaking point”—not the dramatic collapse we see in movies, but something quieter and more profound. It’s the moment when someone finally stops trying to fix, flee, or fight their emotional pain and instead does something revolutionary: they sit with it.

This isn’t about wallowing or giving up. It’s about developing what may be the most undervalued skill in our fix-it-fast culture: the courage to remain present with our brokenness long enough to understand what it’s trying to teach us.

The Myth of the Quick Fix

We live in a world that promises instant solutions. Feeling anxious? Here’s a breathing technique. Depressed? Try this supplement. Relationship struggling? Follow these five steps. While these tools have their place, they often become elaborate ways of avoiding the deeper work that genuine healing requires.

The truth is, some things in life aren’t meant to be fixed quickly—or perhaps at all. Some wounds are meant to be tended, not cured. Some grief is meant to be carried, not overcome. Some anxiety is meant to be understood, not eliminated.

When we rush to “fix” our emotional pain, we often miss the profound wisdom it contains. Pain is not just an inconvenience to be managed; it’s information about what matters to us, what we’ve lost, what we fear, and what we need.

The Art of Therapeutic Presence

In therapy, I often tell clients that my job isn’t to take away their pain—it’s to help them develop a different relationship with it. This begins with what we call “therapeutic presence”: the ability to be fully present with difficult emotions without immediately trying to change them.

Think of it like tending a garden. You don’t yell at weeds to make them disappear, nor do you pretend they don’t exist. Instead, you observe them, understand why they’re growing, and then decide how to respond. Sometimes this means removing them; sometimes it means accepting that they’re part of the ecosystem.

The same principle applies to our emotional landscape. Depression might be our psyche’s way of forcing us to slow down and examine what isn’t working in our lives. Anxiety might be highlighting values we care deeply about. Grief might be the price we pay for having loved deeply.

What Happens When We Stay

When clients first learn to sit with their pain rather than immediately trying to escape it, something remarkable often occurs. The intensity that seemed unbearable when they were fighting it begins to shift. Not necessarily diminish—though that sometimes happens—but transform into something more workable.

Sarah, a client who lost her husband suddenly, spent months trying to “get over” her grief. She read self-help books, threw herself into work, and even considered medication to “feel normal again.” But healing began when she finally allowed herself to feel the full weight of her loss without trying to fix it.

“I realized I wasn’t just grieving his death,” she told me. “I was grieving all the conversations we’d never have, all the trips we’d never take, all the ordinary Tuesday mornings we’d never share. When I stopped trying to push those feelings away, I could finally feel how much I loved him—and how much that love is still part of me.”

The Neuroscience of Sitting Still

Recent research in neuroscience supports what therapists have long observed: our brains are remarkably adaptive, but only when we give them space to process rather than constantly interrupting with “solutions.” When we sit with difficult emotions without immediately trying to change them, we activate the prefrontal cortex—the part of our brain responsible for emotional regulation and meaning-making.

This process, called “emotional granularity,” allows us to distinguish between different types of pain and respond more skillfully. The person who can sit with their loneliness long enough to understand it might discover it’s actually a longing for deeper connection. The person who stays present with their anger might find it’s pointing toward an important boundary that needs to be set.

Practical Courage: How to Begin

Developing the courage to sit with what’s broken isn’t about becoming passive or resigned. It’s about cultivating what I call “active acceptance”—a dynamic process of engaging with our pain in a way that honors both its reality and our capacity to work with it.

Start small. The next time you notice a difficult emotion arising, try this: instead of immediately reaching for your phone, a snack, or any other distraction, simply notice what you’re feeling. Where do you feel it in your body? What thoughts accompany it? What would it be like to breathe with this feeling for just one minute?

This isn’t about enjoying the pain or seeking it out. It’s about developing the inner resources to be present with the full spectrum of human experience—the beautiful and the broken, the joyful and the sorrowful, the easy and the impossibly difficult.

The Paradox of Healing

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of sitting with people in their darkest moments: the things we think will break us are often the very things that reveal our deepest strength. The courage to face our brokenness—to sit with our anxiety, our grief, our shame, our loneliness—is not just about surviving these experiences. It’s about discovering that we are larger than our pain, more resilient than our fears, and more capable of love than we ever imagined.

The broken places in our lives aren’t obstacles to overcome; they’re doorways to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. And sometimes, the most courageous thing we can do is simply remain present long enough to walk through them.

When we stop running from what’s broken, we discover something profound: we are not broken people trying to become whole. We are whole people learning to embrace all the parts of ourselves—including the parts that hurt, the parts that don’t make sense, and the parts that will never be “fixed.”

In a world that profits from our dissatisfaction with ourselves, sitting with what’s broken becomes a radical act of self-acceptance. It’s the beginning of a different kind of healing—one that doesn’t promise to erase our pain, but promises something perhaps more valuable: the courage to be fully, authentically human.