What If Breaking Is Part of Becoming Whole?
What if the moments that break us are not simply interruptions to life, but part of what shapes who we are capable of becoming?
As part of my Conversations on Human Potential series, I spoke with Sabrina D’Amato, Soul Mentor and hypnotherapist, about identity, transformation and what can emerge when life dismantles the version of ourselves we thought we were.
Sabrina’s work is deeply influenced by Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold.
The cracks are not hidden. They become part of the beauty of the finished piece. That idea runs through Sabrina’s own story and the work she now does with others.
Meet Sabrina D’Amato
Sabrina works with women who have lived through profound change, including loss, trauma, illness and collapse, helping them explore the patterns beneath the surface and reconnect with themselves. Her work combines hypnotherapy, breathwork, body-focused practices and soul mentoring. Her central philosophy is that healing is not necessarily about returning to who we were before. It may be about becoming someone new.
Sabrina describes Kintsugi not as a decorative metaphor, but as a way of understanding transformation itself: the broken object is not restored to its original state. It becomes something different because of what has happened to it. That immediately raises a bigger question.
Why are we so often trying to get back to who we used to be?
We Are Told to Put Ourselves Back Together
When something significant happens in life, there can be enormous pressure to recover.
Get back on your feet.
Get back to normal.
Get back to work.
Get back to being yourself.
But what if "back" is not where we are supposed to go? A major loss, breakdown or period of profound change can alter our priorities, identity and relationship with the world. Sometimes the old version of us no longer fits.
Sabrina’s work asks us to consider whether rebuilding ourselves should mean recreating what existed before, or whether there might be an opportunity to create something entirely different.
Kintsugi gives us a beautiful way of looking at that. The repaired bowl does not pretend it was never broken. Its history remains visible.
The Cracks Become Gold
One of the things I like about Kintsugi is that it turns our usual idea of perfection on its head. We are very good at hiding our cracks. We hide the failures.
The difficult years. The mistakes. The parts of our lives that don’t fit neatly into the version of ourselves we present to the outside world. But those experiences often shape us more profoundly than our successes. They can create empathy, discernment, strength, boundaries, perspective.
A clearer understanding of what actually matters.
Sabrina’s own journey includes periods when she lost what she had built and had to reconstruct her life from the ground up. She describes discovering that the person forged through those experiences was more capable and more grounded than the person who existed before them. Perhaps the aim isn’t to erase our fracture lines. Perhaps it is to decide what we fill them with.
The Patterns Beneath the Surface
Of course, transformation is rarely as simple as deciding to think differently. Many of the patterns shaping our behaviour sit beneath conscious thought.
The things we avoid. The situations that trigger us. The beliefs we carry about our worth. The ways we react automatically.
Sabrina uses hypnotherapy and subconscious work as part of her practice to explore where those patterns were formed and what continues to reinforce them. Her Golden Bridge work is built around going beneath the presenting problem to the underlying belief or meaning attached to it.
That idea interests me because we often try to change ourselves entirely through conscious effort. We tell ourselves: Think positively, Be more disciplined, stop worrying, be confident, move on. And then become frustrated when the same behaviours return. But perhaps some patterns cannot simply be argued away by the rational mind.
The Body Is Part of the Story Too
Another thread running through Sabrina’s work is the body. We can spend an enormous amount of time living from the neck upwards. Thinking. Analysing. Planning. Trying to understand ourselves intellectually. But experience is also held physically.
In breathing patterns.
Muscle tension.
Our nervous system responses.
The instinct to brace or withdraw.
Sabrina combines subconscious work with breath and body-focused practices, based on the idea that change has to be experienced, not simply understood intellectually. That feels increasingly relevant to conversations about human potential. Because we are not brains being carried around by bodies. We are whole organisms. And perhaps many of the things we describe as "knowing ourselves" require us to listen to more than our thoughts.
Who Are You Without the Old Story?
There is another difficult part of change that we don’t always talk about. Identity.
If a career disappears, a relationship ends, health changes, children leave home, a business fails or life simply stops looking the way we expected, we can lose more than the circumstance itself. We can lose the story of who we thought we were. That can be frightening. But it can also create space.
Because when the old identity no longer works, there is suddenly a question we may not have asked for years:
Who am I now?
Not who should I be.
Not who was I before.
Not who other people expect me to be.
Who am I now?
That is a much more interesting question.
Human Potential Is Not About Becoming Invulnerable
We often talk about human potential as though it means becoming stronger, more successful or somehow untouchable. But perhaps real potential looks different. Perhaps it includes the ability to break and rebuild. To change our minds. To outgrow identities. To survive experiences we would never have chosen. To find meaning without pretending everything happened for a reason. To integrate what happened rather than spending our lives trying to erase it. Sabrina’s Kintsugi philosophy offers a simple but powerful image for this.
The fracture is not the end of the object.
And the repaired object does not need to pretend the fracture never happened. It becomes part of its story. Maybe we are allowed to do the same.
Becoming Whole Does Not Mean Becoming Unbroken
There is something deeply human about wanting to fix ourselves. But perhaps wholeness and perfection were never the same thing. A whole life can contain grief. Failure. Contradiction. Fear. Change. Scars. And extraordinary growth. The question may not be:
How do I become the person I was before?
It might be:
What can I become because of everything I have lived through?
That is a very different version of human potential. And, I think, a much more interesting one.
Discover More About Sabrina D’Amato
Sabrina D’Amato is a Soul Mentor and hypnotherapist whose work combines subconscious work, breath, body practices and spiritual mentoring.
Her approach is shaped by the philosophy of Kintsugi and the idea that our fractures do not have to be hidden or erased. They can become part of how we rebuild ourselves.
You can discover more about Sabrina and her work here:
Sabrina D’Amato Mentor
https://sabrinadamatomentor.com/
Watch Our Conversation
You can watch my full conversation with Sabrina here:
