July 19, 2025 • 16 mins
What if you were never broken? Dan Boyd reveals how our culture turns pain into performance and trauma into personal branding. This episode isn’t about minimizing your wounds; it’s about questioning why we stay on stage after the curtain has fallen. Learn to differentiate between genuine healing and the social theatre of vulnerability, and reclaim your life beyond your story.
Episode highlights:
- Why shutdowns and panic responses were adaptive, not signs of brokenness.
- How “being broken” becomes a community identity.
- The cost of letting go of your pain narrative and living without applause.
Chapters:
0:00 You Were Never Broken
1:54 What Broken Really Means
3:50 How Pain Becomes a Brand
7:48 Spotting Performed Brokenness in Yourself
10:05 What Real Healing Feels Like
11:59 The Cost of Letting Go
14:17 Your Story: Time to Cross
Ready to stop curating your scars? Subscribe and share how you’re stepping off the healing stage.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Daniel Boyd (00:10):
Episode 2 of 19.
You were never broken, justperforming brokenness.
How trauma became a costume andhealing became a stage play.
Some of us aren't healinganymore.
We're just addicted to thescript of being still healing.
This episode A mirror for theidentity you may not want to
(00:35):
outgrow but desperately need tothis one's going to mess with
your story, especially if you'vebuilt a whole identity around
healing.
We are not here to dismiss yourpain.
We're here to question theparts of you that never want to
stop talking about your pain.
You say you're healing, butreally you're rehearsing.
(00:57):
You post about your trauma likea script.
You show vulnerability, butonly when it gets engagement and
deep down.
You're afraid that if thewounds do heal, you'll lose your
voice.
You were never broken.
You were in pain.
You needed safety, but youturned it into a brand.
(01:20):
You don't know who you arewithout the narrative of being
someone who's still healing.
This isn't an attack.
It's an invitation to finallystop performing your pain,
because healing isn't what youtalk about.
It's about what you no longerneed to talk about.
(01:40):
You can keep calling it healingor you can actually let it end.
One gives you applause, theother gives you your life back.
Section 1.
What Broken Really Means andwhy it's a Myth.
Broken is a word we reach forwhen we don't know how else to
(02:04):
describe collapse.
But collapse isn't the same asdefect.
You weren't broken.
You were disoriented.
You were overwhelmed, you wereunsafe in a world that didn't
make room for your nervoussystem to breathe.
Calling it brokenness was neverthe truth.
It was shorthand, a metaphor.
(02:25):
But somewhere along the way themetaphor got promoted to
identity and now it's tattooedon your sense of self.
You stopped becoming someonewith pain and started being
someone because of pain.
Here's the thing Real traumadoesn't make you defective.
(02:46):
It makes you adaptive.
Even the parts you hate theshutdowns, the panic, the
numbness were all intelligence,not failure.
But we don't teach people that.
We teach them to see themselveslike cracked pottery, like the
damage defines them more thanthe design.
So now you're walking aroundcalling yourself broken, when
(03:09):
what you really mean is I'vebeen impacted.
I carry pain that no one saw.
I lost track of who I was whiletrying to survive.
None of that makes you less.
It makes you less.
It makes you real.
It makes you someone who's beenthrough the fire and is still
here.
You're not a defective product.
(03:31):
You're a person who's beenthrough something unkind and had
to build scaffolding where noone handed you a blueprint.
So let's stop calling thatbroken.
Let's start calling it what itactually is Human.
Section 3.
How pain becomes a brand.
(03:52):
You probably didn't mean tostart performing it Pain I mean,
but pain gets applause.
Now Vulnerability goes viral.
Trauma has an aesthetic andsomewhere in between the first
time you shared your story andthe 10th time you posted your
healing journey, somethingshifted.
(04:14):
Your identity started to orbitaround the wound.
You used to just have pain.
Now you are the person who'sbeen hurt and it's working for
you Because, let's be honest,you know exactly how to write
about your trauma to getengagement.
You've got the cadence, thehashtags, the sad-eyed selfie
(04:34):
with the distant caption.
You've learned how to open upjust enough.
Just enough to look brave, butnot so much that it actually
costs you anything, because nowhealing is a performance.
Trauma is your TED talk.
Because now healing is aperformance.
Trauma is your TED talk.
Woundedness is your aestheticand still healing is a stage you
(04:56):
never actually plan to stepdown from, because stepping down
means risking silence, andsilence feels like erasure when
your pain is the only thingpeople ever clapped for.
So let's name what's actuallyhappening here.
You're not just healing, you'realso protecting your status In
(05:18):
a world where people don'tlisten unless you're bleeding.
You've kept the wound open justenough to be seen.
That's not shameful, it'sstrategic.
But now it's time to ask do youwant applause or do you want
actual, real peace?
Because you won't get both.
Let's get even more honest.
(05:47):
Sometimes the wound is familiar.
Sometimes staying broken works,not spiritually, not long-term,
but psychologically.
Oh it pays.
You get protection fromresponsibility as long as you're
still healing.
No one expects you to show upfully.
You get to stay in the lobby ofyour life, not quite in, not
(06:10):
quite out, just processing,which means you don't have to
risk failure.
You don't have to risk youractual power Because you're
still recovering.
You also get an excuse to avoidintimacy.
Nobody really has to know you.
If you're always a little tootender, they'll be gentle with
(06:30):
you or leave you alone.
Either way, you stay in control.
You also get endless permissionto under-function.
No one questions it when you'restill working through things.
Not your missed deadlines, notyour lack of ambition, not your
emotional unavailability.
See, it's all part of thehealing.
(06:52):
And best of all, you get acommunity, people who nod along,
people who are also stillhealing but never really
changing, people who love thatyou're working on yourself, as
long as you never outgrow thegroup.
Mind you and here's thetrickiest part they're not bad
(07:12):
people, they're not faking it.
But the moment you stopperforming pain, the moment you
step off that stage, some ofthem will turn on you Because
your healing threatens theirs.
You see, your peace calls outtheir performance.
So they'll say you're avoidingthe work.
They'll say that you've gonecold.
(07:32):
They'll say that you've lostyour empathy, when what you
really lost was the addiction toyour pain's identity perks.
Section 4.
How to spot performedbrokenness in yourself.
This might sting a little,because we're not talking about
(07:53):
the raw pain that knocked yousideways.
We're talking about thepolished version, the curated
sorrow, the grief.
You've turned into a narrativeloop, not because you're still
shattered, but because you'restill scared.
This is how you know you canarticulate your trauma, but not
your truth.
You've got the story of whathappened down to a science.
(08:15):
You know the quotes, thepatterns, the psychology.
You can name the dysfunction inothers with chilling accuracy.
But when someone asks what youwant, not what hurts you, not
what you've survived, but whatlights you up, what's sacred to
you, what you believe in beyondpain.
You go quiet.
You center every story aroundwhat hurt you.
(08:38):
Even the stories that startlight end up circling the wound.
Even joy gets edited down tothis matters because of how much
I used to hurt.
Everything becomes a prequel toyour pain.
You talk about healing morethan you do anything else.
It's not a phase, it's yourbrand now.
(09:00):
It's how you introduce yourself.
It's how you connect.
If you weren't healing, you'renot even sure who you'd even be.
Silence feels like identitydeath.
You can't not post, you can'tnot explain.
You need people to know you'restill in it, still working,
(09:21):
still doing the work, becausewithout the broadcast you feel
invisible.
Without the script, you don'tknow how to be witnessed.
Here's the thing.
No one tells you Real healing,real healing doesn't need an
audience.
You don't have to be acharacter in your own tragedy
just to feel real.
(09:42):
You don't have to keep the painon display just to prove you've
earned your peace.
You don't need to be stillhealing if you're finally ready
to just be Section 5.
(10:05):
What real healing feels like?
Real healing isn't loud.
It's not a content strategy.
It's not a three-minute reelwith piano music.
It's not your next vulnerablepost.
It's quiet, it's internal.
It's what happens when theperformance finally gets
exhausting and you can letyourself rest from the need to
be understood.
Here's how you know when it'sreal.
(10:26):
You stop talking about the wound, not because you're hiding, not
because it wasn't real, butbecause it's no longer the
centerpiece, it's not the lensanymore, it's just part of your
background texture.
The wound stops being aheadline and becomes a footnote.
You don't need people to knowwhat you've been through.
(10:47):
You no longer chase validationthrough disclosure.
You're not baiting empathy.
You're not measuring connectionby how much of your pain
someone can hold, because nowyou can hold it yourself.
You stop introducing yourselfthrough pain.
You don't lead with whathappened to me.
(11:08):
You lead with who you arebecoming and you're okay if
someone doesn't understand yourdepth immediately.
It takes years to understandsomeone's depth.
You're not on a mission to makeyour trauma make sense to
everyone.
You don't owe anyone yourbrokenness to earn their care.
You're not healed.
(11:29):
You're just no longerrehearsing.
That's the real difference.
You're not perfect, notuntouched, not above the mess.
You've just stopped performingthe pain in order to feel like
you still exist.
You're not building identityaround your wounds anymore.
You're building your life andyou're letting the silence speak
(11:50):
for itself.
Section 6.
The cost of letting go of yourwounded identity.
No one talks about the griefthat comes after the healing,
when the story ends and there'squiet.
(12:11):
Not peace yet, just silence,just absence, just a timeline
with no new posts.
Because here's the truth.
You lose community, maybe evenquote unquote friends.
The people who clapped for yourpain might not clap for your
peace.
Some of them were never therefor your wholeness.
(12:34):
They were there for the drama,the relatability, the shared
ache.
Once you stopped bleeding outloud, you stopped being
interesting to them.
Some of them will say you thinkyou're better than them now or
that you're being fake, becausethey can't imagine being okay
without pretending, you lose theapplause.
(12:54):
No one throws you a party whenyou quietly reclaim your
selfhood without pretending.
You lose the applause.
No one throws you a party whenyou quietly reclaim your
selfhood.
There's no standing ovation forno longer identifying with your
trauma.
You just stop posting about it,stop explaining, stop needing
people to clap for your survivalstory and, in a world addicted
to spectacle that feels likedisappearing, you lose your
(13:19):
emotional safety script, the onewhere you always had a reason
to avoid risk, to avoid intimacy, to avoid accountability.
Without it, you're raw again,but this time you're raw without
an excuse.
You can't blame the woundanymore.
Now it's just you unmasked,responsible, terrifying, but
(13:51):
you'll gain your wholeness.
You get to wake up and notbrace for impact.
You get to enter a room and notcalculate how much of your pain
you need to reveal to be liked.
You get to move through theworld without narrating your
survival.
You get to just be, not broken,not still healing.
Just you, and that might be thebravest thing you've ever done.
(14:17):
Section 7.
Your Story Go.
The story served its purpose.
It gave your pain a place toland.
It gave your fear a name.
It gave your shame a scriptthat other people could
understand.
It built a bridge from survivalto self-awareness, and that
matters.
But bridges are not homes.
(14:40):
You were never meant to live inthat story.
You were meant to cross it.
So if you're still rehearsingyour pain just to feel seen, if
you're still writing chaptersjust to keep the spotlight, ask
yourself this what would happenif you just stopped, not because
(15:01):
you're over it, but becauseyou're finally ready to stop
needing the performance to provethat you're real?
Real healing doesn't needpunctuation.
It doesn't demand closure postsor public updates.
It doesn't demand closure postsor public updates.
It ends quietly in thebackground, like a wound that
doesn't itch anymore, like avoice in your head that finally
(15:27):
shuts up.
You're allowed to move on, evenif no one claps, even if the
audience leaves, even if the oldparts of you feel betrayed by
your peace, because healingisn't what you say.
It's what you no longer need tosay.
(15:47):
No-transcript.
Episode 2 of 19.
You were never broken, justperforming brokenness.
How trauma became a costume andhealing became a stage play.
Some of us aren't healinganymore.
We're just addicted to thescript of being still healing.
This episode A mirror for theidentity you may not want to
(00:35):
outgrow but desperately need tothis one's going to mess with
your story, especially if you'vebuilt a whole identity around
healing.
We are not here to dismiss yourpain.
We're here to question theparts of you that never want to
stop talking about your pain.
You say you're healing, butreally you're rehearsing.
(00:57):
You post about your trauma likea script.
You show vulnerability, butonly when it gets engagement and
deep down.
You're afraid that if thewounds do heal, you'll lose your
voice.
You were never broken.
You were in pain.
You needed safety, but youturned it into a brand.
(01:20):
You don't know who you arewithout the narrative of being
someone who's still healing.
This isn't an attack.
It's an invitation to finallystop performing your pain,
because healing isn't what youtalk about.
It's about what you no longerneed to talk about.
(01:40):
You can keep calling it healingor you can actually let it end.
One gives you applause, theother gives you your life back.
Section 1.
What Broken Really Means andwhy it's a Myth.
Broken is a word we reach forwhen we don't know how else to
(02:04):
describe collapse.
But collapse isn't the same asdefect.
You weren't broken.
You were disoriented.
You were overwhelmed, you wereunsafe in a world that didn't
make room for your nervoussystem to breathe.
Calling it brokenness was neverthe truth.
It was shorthand, a metaphor.
(02:25):
But somewhere along the way themetaphor got promoted to
identity and now it's tattooedon your sense of self.
You stopped becoming someonewith pain and started being
someone because of pain.
Here's the thing Real traumadoesn't make you defective.
(02:46):
It makes you adaptive.
Even the parts you hate theshutdowns, the panic, the
numbness were all intelligence,not failure.
But we don't teach people that.
We teach them to see themselveslike cracked pottery, like the
damage defines them more thanthe design.
So now you're walking aroundcalling yourself broken, when
(03:09):
what you really mean is I'vebeen impacted.
I carry pain that no one saw.
I lost track of who I was whiletrying to survive.
None of that makes you less.
It makes you less.
It makes you real.
It makes you someone who's beenthrough the fire and is still
here.
You're not a defective product.
(03:31):
You're a person who's beenthrough something unkind and had
to build scaffolding where noone handed you a blueprint.
So let's stop calling thatbroken.
Let's start calling it what itactually is Human.
Section 3.
How pain becomes a brand.
(03:52):
You probably didn't mean tostart performing it Pain I mean,
but pain gets applause.
Now Vulnerability goes viral.
Trauma has an aesthetic andsomewhere in between the first
time you shared your story andthe 10th time you posted your
healing journey, somethingshifted.
(04:14):
Your identity started to orbitaround the wound.
You used to just have pain.
Now you are the person who'sbeen hurt and it's working for
you Because, let's be honest,you know exactly how to write
about your trauma to getengagement.
You've got the cadence, thehashtags, the sad-eyed selfie
(04:34):
with the distant caption.
You've learned how to open upjust enough.
Just enough to look brave, butnot so much that it actually
costs you anything, because nowhealing is a performance.
Trauma is your TED talk.
Because now healing is aperformance.
Trauma is your TED talk.
Woundedness is your aestheticand still healing is a stage you
(04:56):
never actually plan to stepdown from, because stepping down
means risking silence, andsilence feels like erasure when
your pain is the only thingpeople ever clapped for.
So let's name what's actuallyhappening here.
You're not just healing, you'realso protecting your status In
(05:18):
a world where people don'tlisten unless you're bleeding.
You've kept the wound open justenough to be seen.
That's not shameful, it'sstrategic.
But now it's time to ask do youwant applause or do you want
actual, real peace?
Because you won't get both.
Let's get even more honest.
(05:47):
Sometimes the wound is familiar.
Sometimes staying broken works,not spiritually, not long-term,
but psychologically.
Oh it pays.
You get protection fromresponsibility as long as you're
still healing.
No one expects you to show upfully.
You get to stay in the lobby ofyour life, not quite in, not
(06:10):
quite out, just processing,which means you don't have to
risk failure.
You don't have to risk youractual power Because you're
still recovering.
You also get an excuse to avoidintimacy.
Nobody really has to know you.
If you're always a little tootender, they'll be gentle with
(06:30):
you or leave you alone.
Either way, you stay in control.
You also get endless permissionto under-function.
No one questions it when you'restill working through things.
Not your missed deadlines, notyour lack of ambition, not your
emotional unavailability.
See, it's all part of thehealing.
(06:52):
And best of all, you get acommunity, people who nod along,
people who are also stillhealing but never really
changing, people who love thatyou're working on yourself, as
long as you never outgrow thegroup.
Mind you and here's thetrickiest part they're not bad
(07:12):
people, they're not faking it.
But the moment you stopperforming pain, the moment you
step off that stage, some ofthem will turn on you Because
your healing threatens theirs.
You see, your peace calls outtheir performance.
So they'll say you're avoidingthe work.
They'll say that you've gonecold.
(07:32):
They'll say that you've lostyour empathy, when what you
really lost was the addiction toyour pain's identity perks.
Section 4.
How to spot performedbrokenness in yourself.
This might sting a little,because we're not talking about
(07:53):
the raw pain that knocked yousideways.
We're talking about thepolished version, the curated
sorrow, the grief.
You've turned into a narrativeloop, not because you're still
shattered, but because you'restill scared.
This is how you know you canarticulate your trauma, but not
your truth.
You've got the story of whathappened down to a science.
(08:15):
You know the quotes, thepatterns, the psychology.
You can name the dysfunction inothers with chilling accuracy.
But when someone asks what youwant, not what hurts you, not
what you've survived, but whatlights you up, what's sacred to
you, what you believe in beyondpain.
You go quiet.
You center every story aroundwhat hurt you.
(08:38):
Even the stories that startlight end up circling the wound.
Even joy gets edited down tothis matters because of how much
I used to hurt.
Everything becomes a prequel toyour pain.
You talk about healing morethan you do anything else.
It's not a phase, it's yourbrand now.
(09:00):
It's how you introduce yourself.
It's how you connect.
If you weren't healing, you'renot even sure who you'd even be.
Silence feels like identitydeath.
You can't not post, you can'tnot explain.
You need people to know you'restill in it, still working,
(09:21):
still doing the work, becausewithout the broadcast you feel
invisible.
Without the script, you don'tknow how to be witnessed.
Here's the thing.
No one tells you Real healing,real healing doesn't need an
audience.
You don't have to be acharacter in your own tragedy
just to feel real.
(09:42):
You don't have to keep the painon display just to prove you've
earned your peace.
You don't need to be stillhealing if you're finally ready
to just be Section 5.
(10:05):
What real healing feels like?
Real healing isn't loud.
It's not a content strategy.
It's not a three-minute reelwith piano music.
It's not your next vulnerablepost.
It's quiet, it's internal.
It's what happens when theperformance finally gets
exhausting and you can letyourself rest from the need to
be understood.
Here's how you know when it'sreal.
(10:26):
You stop talking about the wound, not because you're hiding, not
because it wasn't real, butbecause it's no longer the
centerpiece, it's not the lensanymore, it's just part of your
background texture.
The wound stops being aheadline and becomes a footnote.
You don't need people to knowwhat you've been through.
(10:47):
You no longer chase validationthrough disclosure.
You're not baiting empathy.
You're not measuring connectionby how much of your pain
someone can hold, because nowyou can hold it yourself.
You stop introducing yourselfthrough pain.
You don't lead with whathappened to me.
(11:08):
You lead with who you arebecoming and you're okay if
someone doesn't understand yourdepth immediately.
It takes years to understandsomeone's depth.
You're not on a mission to makeyour trauma make sense to
everyone.
You don't owe anyone yourbrokenness to earn their care.
You're not healed.
(11:29):
You're just no longerrehearsing.
That's the real difference.
You're not perfect, notuntouched, not above the mess.
You've just stopped performingthe pain in order to feel like
you still exist.
You're not building identityaround your wounds anymore.
You're building your life andyou're letting the silence speak
(11:50):
for itself.
Section 6.
The cost of letting go of yourwounded identity.
No one talks about the griefthat comes after the healing,
when the story ends and there'squiet.
(12:11):
Not peace yet, just silence,just absence, just a timeline
with no new posts.
Because here's the truth.
You lose community, maybe evenquote unquote friends.
The people who clapped for yourpain might not clap for your
peace.
Some of them were never therefor your wholeness.
(12:34):
They were there for the drama,the relatability, the shared
ache.
Once you stopped bleeding outloud, you stopped being
interesting to them.
Some of them will say you thinkyou're better than them now or
that you're being fake, becausethey can't imagine being okay
without pretending, you lose theapplause.
(12:54):
No one throws you a party whenyou quietly reclaim your
selfhood without pretending.
You lose the applause.
No one throws you a party whenyou quietly reclaim your
selfhood.
There's no standing ovation forno longer identifying with your
trauma.
You just stop posting about it,stop explaining, stop needing
people to clap for your survivalstory and, in a world addicted
to spectacle that feels likedisappearing, you lose your
(13:19):
emotional safety script, the onewhere you always had a reason
to avoid risk, to avoid intimacy, to avoid accountability.
Without it, you're raw again,but this time you're raw without
an excuse.
You can't blame the woundanymore.
Now it's just you unmasked,responsible, terrifying, but
(13:51):
you'll gain your wholeness.
You get to wake up and notbrace for impact.
You get to enter a room and notcalculate how much of your pain
you need to reveal to be liked.
You get to move through theworld without narrating your
survival.
You get to just be, not broken,not still healing.
Just you, and that might be thebravest thing you've ever done.
(14:17):
Section 7.
Your Story Go.
The story served its purpose.
It gave your pain a place toland.
It gave your fear a name.
It gave your shame a scriptthat other people could
understand.
It built a bridge from survivalto self-awareness, and that
matters.
But bridges are not homes.
(14:40):
You were never meant to live inthat story.
You were meant to cross it.
So if you're still rehearsingyour pain just to feel seen, if
you're still writing chaptersjust to keep the spotlight, ask
yourself this what would happenif you just stopped, not because
(15:01):
you're over it, but becauseyou're finally ready to stop
needing the performance to provethat you're real?
Real healing doesn't needpunctuation.
It doesn't demand closure postsor public updates.
It doesn't demand closure postsor public updates.
It ends quietly in thebackground, like a wound that
doesn't itch anymore, like avoice in your head that finally
(15:27):
shuts up.
You're allowed to move on, evenif no one claps, even if the
audience leaves, even if the oldparts of you feel betrayed by
your peace, because healingisn't what you say.
It's what you no longer need tosay.
(15:47):
No-transcript.
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