The Naked Truth | How to heal emotional scars from breaking up and come back stronger
- When fitness blogger Zanna van Dijk happily displays her surgical scar to the world, it’s a perfect example of how we should treat emotional wounds too
- Learning to live with heartbreak not only strengthens us, it teaches us to be proud of flaunting all our own glorious imperfections
I came across the motivational lifestyle and fitness blogger Zanna van Dijk half a year ago. The British social media influencer provides daily content to inspire and empower her more than 300,000 followers on social media.
The glamorous BBC podcaster unfortunately had a health scare in January when she was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery to treat a double twisted bowel while holidaying in the Maldives. Luckily, she made a swift recovery and returned to her social channel routines almost immediately.
This bold and beautiful woman has no qualms about exposing her prominent surgical scar in many of her outdoor fitness shots. Combined with her typical spirited and enthusiastic self, it has won her even more deserving praise and admiration.
You can draw some insights from Van Dijk’s assertiveness towards her scar and apply them in life in general to help you deal with emotional wounds. When a relationship comes to an end, like receding ocean waves, it tends to pull away everything in its path, leaving us with agonising emotional pain.
A lot of people find it hard to get over the pain of loss, heal their emotional scars or even move past the bad experience. It is especially painful when you have loved deeply or have been in a long, committed partnership. We do not always completely get over a bad relationship, or it can at least take a significant amount of time to do so. But we can lessen the pain and live with the wounds if we know how to treat emotional scars.
You can carefully pick up the fragments, put them together, and instead of hiding the cracks and the imperfections, you fill them with good experiences to hold the shattered pieces firmly together. Then you wear the flaws proudly, knowing that you are whole again, or even stronger than ever before. This interesting process is called kintsugi. It literally means “to join with gold” in Japanese. It is a traditional Japanese method of fixing cracked ceramics. Every time a crack appears, the potter fills it in with gold.