Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “gold joinery”) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Rather than hiding the damage, Kintsugi highlights and celebrates it, emphasizing the history of the object.

Core Principles:

  1. Wabi-sabi – Embracing imperfection and transience.
  2. Mushin – Acceptance of change and fate as aspects of human life.
  3. Aesthetic Redemption – Breakage becomes a meaningful part of the object’s story, not a flaw.

As a metaphor for post-traumatic growth, Kintsugi challenges the dominant cultural narrative of returning to a pre-trauma state.

It suggests that healing is not erasure but transformation, the scar itself is the site of value. In psychological terms, it reframes the aftermath of trauma not as a blemish to conceal but as a locus of resilience, insight, and reconstitution.

This approach resists both victimhood and denial, instead honoring the fracture as integral to the person’s evolving identity. Growth here is not despite the break but through it.