UNDERSTANDING THE FEELING OF BEING “BROKEN” AFTER ABORTION
Many people experience a wide range of emotions after abortion, and feeling “broken” is one of the most common ways to describe that weight.
It is a sentiment shared by many women and men who contact our After Abortion Line, often using that exact word—“broken”—to give voice to their internal struggle.
These are real experiences from individuals navigating their own paths toward healing:
“I’m having a hard time moving on from my abortion. I can’t stop thinking or dreaming about my son. I can’t function. I quit college. I sleep all day. I’m so devastated and broken. And I can’t tell anyone.”
“I’m just… broken. I made the heart-breaking and difficult decision to have an abortion because of pressure from my boyfriend and family. The loss I feel is unreal, and I have been broken. I feel empty and alone. The grief is horrible.”
“I’m lost and broken. I feel like I can’t breathe. It gets harder every day. I don’t want to feel like this anymore, but I don’t know how to get over it.”
These are real things people have said after abortion—sometimes through tears, sometimes barely above a whisper.
“I’m having a really hard time since my pill abortion. Today I cried all day in sadness and guilt. I literally feel broken, like I can’t see past this.”
“I feel broken and in so much emotional pain it’s causing physical stress. Nothing seems to help. My heart is so heavy.”
“My therapist told me I just have to move on. How am I supposed to go back to my day-to-day life? I’m so broken, angry, and sad since my abortion. I feel dead inside.”
If you’ve ever felt something like that—even quietly—you’re not the only one. And “broken” doesn’t just mean one thing. It can mean grief, regret, relief that feels more complicated than you expected, anger, numbness, a heaviness that won’t settle, or any number of other heavy emotions.
Sometimes it shows up less as a feeling and more as a sense of disconnection—like you’re not quite yourself, or something inside you doesn’t feel as steady or familiar as it once did.
Sometimes it doesn’t even look like what you might think of as grief. It can look like replaying the same thoughts over and over. Shutting down. Staying busy so you don’t have to think about it. Feeling fine one moment and completely overwhelmed the next.
Instead of trying to define it, let’s look at it from another perspective.
Imagine dropping a ceramic bowl on your kitchen tile floor. You hear it before you even see it—that sharp crack, pieces scattering in different directions. When you look down, it’s not one clean break. It’s fragments. Some big, some small, some you almost miss.
There are a few ways you could respond to the broken bowl. You could lay a towel over it and wait to deal with it later. You could set a box over the top and try not to think about it. You could start walking around it, adjusting your steps so you don’t have to look directly at it. You could even put the pieces in a closet or drawer—out of sight, out of mind.
But the bowl is still there. Even if you can’t see it, you know it’s there. And over time, it starts to affect how you move through the space.
For a lot of people after abortion, something similar happens internally. Something breaks—or shifts—and instead of being able to stop and look at it, life keeps moving. There may not be space to process it. Or it may not feel safe to. So it gets covered, avoided, worked around, or pushed out of view.
But it’s still there.
KINTSUGI: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON ABORTION GRIEF AND RECOVERY
There’s a Japanese art form called kintsugi that takes a very different approach. When a bowl breaks, it isn’t thrown away, and the damage isn’t hidden. Instead, the pieces are gathered and carefully reassembled using a lacquer mixed with gold. The cracks remain visible. They become part of the bowl’s story.
The philosophy of kintsugi fits well with abortion healing.
What stands out about kintsugi isn’t that the bowl ends up looking beautiful, although it does. It’s that the process takes the break seriously. It doesn’t rush past it or pretend it doesn’t matter. It works with what’s there—toward restoration.
Kintsugi begins with acknowledging that the bowl broke. That may sound obvious, but it’s not something everyone gets space to do in abortion grief. Many people feel pressure to move on quickly, to not think about it too much, or to keep their feelings to themselves. When there isn’t room to acknowledge what happened, the pieces don’t go away. They stay scattered—just out of sight. They get pushed down, hidden, or locked away.
The next step is gathering the pieces. Every piece matters, even the small or jagged ones. Nothing is dismissed as unimportant.
Healing after abortion often begins when you start noticing what’s there instead of pushing it aside. That might mean putting words to something you’ve never said out loud, recognizing emotions that have been sitting under the surface, or connecting patterns that didn’t seem related before. Some people don’t think of their struggles after abortion as grief. They just know they can’t stop thinking about it, or they feel off, or something keeps pulling them back to the same place.
Grief after abortion doesn’t always look the way people expect. It can show up as looping thoughts, emotional swings, numbness, or behaviors that don’t seem connected but keep resurfacing. When your grief hasn’t had space to be acknowledged, it can get stuck—like something you keep stepping around without ever clearing it.
Another key part of kintsugi is looking at the broken pieces before anything is repaired. The person doing the mending studies them, turns them over, and understands how they fit together. There’s no rush to move to the next step.
An abortion healing facilitator who uses kintsugi with her clients describes it this way:
“Before anyone starts putting the bowl back together, they spend time with the pieces. They look at them. They notice them. They let the break be real. That’s part of what makes the activity so powerful. It slows people down enough to acknowledge what happened before rushing into repair.”
For many people struggling after abortion, this part has been missing. Not because they don’t want healing, but because they haven’t had a place where it felt safe to sit with what’s there. Sometimes the messages around them make that harder. They may have heard, directly or indirectly, that they shouldn’t feel this way or that it’s something they should just move past or that they deserve to feel bad. When those messages happen, what’s inside often gets pushed down or amplified rather than worked through.
In traditional kintsugi, the restoration isn’t a one-step process. The pieces are joined, set, reinforced, and the gold lacquer is applied in stages. In a similar way, healing after abortion often happens in layers. Different emotions, memories, and meanings may surface at different times. The goal is not to erase grief or pretend the abortion or struggle never happened, but to shift from being stuck into processing, layer by layer.
With kintsugi, once everything has had time to set, the seams are traced with gold, marking the places where the break became part of the story and highlighting where the bowl has been restored.
In abortion healing, that “gold” can be having your pain heard by someone who doesn’t try to fix or minimize it. It can be saying something out loud that you’ve only ever kept to yourself. It can be recognizing the difference between what happened and what you’ve come to believe about yourself because of it. It can be finding a way to express or honor what you’ve been carrying.
AN ABORTION HEALING KINTSUGI-INSPIRED ACTIVITY YOU CAN TRY
If the image of the kintsugi restored broken bowl resonates with you, you might want to try it yourself. It doesn’t need to be fancy or perfect. There’s no “right” time to do this, and if you start the project and want or need to stop, that’s okay too.
- Order or pick up a beginner kintsugi repair kit. (Here’s one on Amazon) While you wait for it to arrive, you might write down — or simply hold in your mind — one word for something you’ve been carrying. Not to fix it yet. Just to notice it’s there.
- Find a ceramic bowl, cup, or small dish that feels meaningful for you to work with—a thrift-store find is perfect for this. What drew you to this piece?
- Wrap your ceramic piece in a towel or place it in a paper or plastic bag. Hold it for a moment. Some people find it meaningful to think about what they were carrying before their abortion—what felt heavy, what was at stake. Others simply sit with the weight of the piece in their hands.
- Use a hammer to break the piece in a way that feels safe and manageable. How did it feel to break it? Was it harder or easier than you expected?
- Gather all the pieces, lay them out, and spend a little time looking at them. Notice what stands out to you. You might write down a few words or thoughts. Do any of the pieces feel harder to pick up than others? What have you been carrying that you haven’t had space to look at?
- Follow the instructions in your kintsugi kit to join the pieces back together. Another person can help hold the pieces while you apply the bond and gold — and if someone is with you: What’s it like to let them hold part of the process with you? If you’re doing it on your own: What’s it like to stay with it, piece by piece? Either way: What was it like to put the pieces back together?
- Let it set fully. This part takes time. You might reflect on what it feels like to pause instead of rushing—especially if you’re used to trying to move past things quickly or get focused on learning the next thing.
- Keep the bowl somewhere you’ll see it as a reminder of your healing journey. Over time as you look at the bowl, you can reflect on What does this bowl mean to you now? What feels different, even slightly, from when you started?
Sometimes with healing after abortion it helps to have something you can hold in your hands—a reminder that the break was real, the pieces mattered, and restoration is possible. Your personally created kintsugi project can offer that for you.
We welcome you to share a photo of your kintsugi piece and any thoughts or observations during the process. Click here to email us.
WHAT HELPS HEAL GRIEF AFTER ABORTION?
Two things tend to make a big difference in helping grief move: having your grief witnessed and being able to express it. When those are missing, grief often stays stuck. When they’re present, even in small ways, something begins to shift.
When a kintsugi piece is finished, it doesn’t look the way it did before. The cracks are still there, but the bowl is whole again. It can be held, valued, and kept. The history of the break is part of what it is now.
Healing after abortion often works in a similar way—finding a way to move forward with your story included, honoring your experience and grief without letting it take over everything.
One way of understanding healing grief describes it as life gradually expanding around the pain. The grief may still be there, but it no longer fills the entire space.
As the facilitator who does the kintsugi project with her clients says:
“Sometimes wholeness resides in the very cracks and crevices where we thought hope was lost.”
YOU DON’T HAVE TO HEAL AFTER ABORTION ALONE: REACH OUT FOR POST-ABORTION SUPPORT
If you feel broken right now—like the women and men whose words you heard at the beginning of this article—you don’t have to sort all of this out on your own. You don’t have to have the right words or even know exactly what you’re feeling. You don’t have to decide what to call it.
Whether what you’re feeling is clear or hard to name, support can make a difference. We are here to listen with compassion and without judgment and help you find a next step that feels right for you.
Want someone to listen?
Reach out to the After Abortion Line for a compassionate, anonymous conversation. You can call or text 844-289-HOPE (4673), email, or use webchat at supportafterabortion.com. You can share as much or as little as you want. And we can help connect you to healing options that match your preferences, like virtual or in-person; group, one-on-one, or self-guided; religious or secular. You matter. Your story matters. And we’re here for you.
Looking for a place to start?
- Keys to Hope and Healing is a secular resource for women and men with short readings, reflection questions, and optional videos and journals you can work through at your own pace, with a mentor, or in a group.
- Finding Solid Ground: A Man’s Guide to Healing After Abortion offers a faith-based approach for men, with real stories, practical steps, and a video series to guide you through it.
If you feel broken or like everything is in pieces, that’s a solid place to start the kintsugi-like healing process of noticing the pieces, acknowledging your experiences, emotions, and grief—and beginning your restoration, your restored well-being. We’d be honored to support you as you take your next step.
© Support After Abortion
We always welcome your feedback! If something in this blog struck a chord—or left you thinking—feel free to share your thoughts here or email us.