What It Means When You Feel Broken On the Inside
- Fortitude Psychological Therapy
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
In therapy, clients often tell me their life looks fine from the outside, but inside, something feels broken. What does this mean, and what can we do about it?
What It Means When You Feel Broken On the Inside
In my experience, ‘feeling broken on the inside’ is a really common way to describe something not being right internally, especially among those who’ve experienced trauma.
When we dig into what people really mean by this, they usually feel like they’re carrying things nobody knows about. There’s a heaviness, like mental or emotional baggage, from things that happened to them in the past. Some people describe a sensation that’s more like a disconnect or an emptiness, as if there’s a part of them that didn’t have the chance to develop and grow.
Feeling broken can also come from people seeing themselves as worthless, bad or fundamentally flawed. This might extend into believing they’re different from other people or defective in some way. Masking and hiding their struggles can also increase these feelings of shame.
Feeling Broken On the Inside After Trauma
When people are existing in trauma, their main focus is survival. This means they prioritise the most basic things to get through the difficult situation and stay alive.
In this context, things like figuring out who you are and how you see yourself are often overlooked because you’re just doing your best to get by. This might explain feeling empty or hollow – you simply never had the chance to figure out who you are on the inside.
Trauma also shapes what we believe about ourselves, others and the world around us. These beliefs can come from the way we coped with our emotions at the time of the trauma and sometimes they develop because we didn’t understand or have the words to describe the things that happened to us.
For example, feeling broken might stem from the belief that you’re to blame for the bad things that happened to you. The only possible explanation for your experience is that you must be defective in some way.
Or perhaps you learned to suppress your emotions to survive something traumatic. As a result, you’re quite detached and cut off from your feelings. When you recognise this isn’t the same for everyone around you, you start to see yourself as broken in some way.
If it’s taken you a long time to recognise you’ve been through something traumatic, you may have spent much of your life feeling broken without understanding why. Sometimes, people are only able to see that what they’ve been through isn’t normal when they have experiences that are different to the trauma.
Read What Does Trauma Do to Your Belief System? for more on this.
You’re Not Broken Beyond Repair
Let me end with some reassurance – you can heal and recover from whatever you’re going through right now. The two most common things I find myself thinking and saying in therapy is ‘you’re not broken’ and ‘it wasn’t your fault’. When you accept these truths, you create much more space for self-compassion.
Therapy for Trauma
If you’re struggling with any of the things described in this article and you’d like an expert to help you heal and recover, please get in touch.
If you’re not quite ready for one-to-one therapy but want a gentle, supported way to begin understanding why you feel this way and how to start healing, you can explore my self-paced course, Freedom Beyond Trauma.
Alternatively, subscribe to The Trauma Toolbox to receive my insights and tips straight to your inbox every month. I also share lots of mental health education via Instagram.
Further Reading
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