Kintsugi: The Japanese Art of Embracing the Imperfect and Loving Your Flaws

Psychologist Navarro uses kintsugi, the Japanese art of honoring the beauty in broken pottery by fusing the pieces back together, as a metaphor for personal healing in his approachable debut. Kintsugi, Navarro writes, recognizes the “fragility, strength, and beauty” in the repaired object, and Navarro has found its basic principles of close analysis, detailed planning, and patient rebuilding to be helpful tools for his patients to process and move beyond trauma. With lively prose and many creative analogies (such as the body being like a “sleeping giant,” having “everything you need to repair a wound,” though one’s body “won’t set the process in motion until you need it”), Navarro eases the way through the many questions that structure each section. Weaving in professional and personal anecdotes, he considers “repairing” from job loss, low self-esteem, the loss of love, and the loss of “hope and joy.” For each situation he offers advice based on freeing one’s judgment from guilt and shame, learning from what happened, and dissociating the negative experience from one’s self-image. Readers “focused on building a new reality” after trauma will be interested in Navarro’s constructive kintsugi analogy and many examples of healing taken from his practice. (Nov.)