People often say that time is a great healer. They use that phrase because they’re going through something awful and they know that nothing but the passage of time will be a balm to their grief. I would suggest instead that time is an unexpected healer. Little stays the same; life is full of unknown unknowns. Time heals unexpectedly because it creates space for transformation. But transformation always requires permission.

Permission to begin

Permission to see what’s actually broken. Permission to feel the weight of it. Permission to think differently about what repair requires. Permission to be honest about where you are. Permission to not know how to fix it yet. Permission to be upset about not knowing. Permission to dispense with the expectation that you should have this sorted by now.

When something ruptures, we often default to rushing past the damage. We minimise what happened, explain it away, get over it faster than everyone else as if we’re a child in an egg and spoon race. We’re overwhelmed by the mess, confused by the complexity, fearful of what it means if we actually look at it directly.

But repair requires stopping first. It requires giving yourself permission to acknowledge that something is genuinely broken, that you don’t have to pretend otherwise, and that you’re allowed to not know yet how to put it right.

That’s the starting point: endless possibilities and uncertainty. An opportunity to draw a new map. A redirect. A fresh start. A new perspective.

Whether we intend it or not, we will always be changed by the journey of addressing what’s broken.

Rupture: when connection fractures

In times of calamity, we need support. We need care. Our needs often feel so great we need others to be patient with us. But in calamity, we default to escaping our circumstances, to escaping ourselves.

Rupture refers to a break or tear in a relational bond — the moment when connection fractures. In adult psychology, particularly in therapeutic contexts, it describes when trust, safety, or understanding between two people suddenly breaks down.

Think of it as the psychological equivalent of a physical injury to tissue. The relationship was functioning, maintaining a status-quo equilibrium, and then something happens. A betrayal, a cross word, a misunderstanding that cannot be overcome, a violation of sorts, perhaps a mismatch of expectations after which the connective tissue damages.

From a clinical perspective, ruptures aren’t inherently pathological. They’re normal occurrences in any ongoing relationship. What matters is whether repair follows. Unrepaired ruptures accumulate, creating patterns of avoidance, resentment, or defensive behaviour that can eventually meet criteria for relational trauma or attachment-related difficulties.

What’s particularly relevant is that ruptures force you to decide: do I have agency here, or am I stuck waiting? At the mediation clinic, I see people who’ve been sitting in rupture for months, sometimes years. We see relationships with family members, former friends, ex-partners, children, all fractured in a way that makes one ask “how do people make such a mess of their lives?” The damage isn’t just the original incident. It’s the accumulated weight of unrepaired connections, the patterns that calcify when no one is willing to acknowledge what has been broken.

Now, not all ruptures are fatal. Nor should we expect relationships to be rupture-free. But the ones where repair works is where the rupture is acknowledged and addressed rather than denied or minimised.

When repair must be unilateral

In conflict it is natural to want to make the problem external to us. But repair starts with working on what is going on within you. Internal repair addresses your own relational distress and reorganises your attachment to the relationship, even when the other person remains unavailable, unwilling, or unaware.

Here’s what that might look like:

You construct a narrative that integrates what happened without requiring the other person to validate your experience. This isn’t about excusing their behaviour but about locating it within a framework that doesn’t leave you trapped in confusion or self-blame. You’re making meaning of what happened on your own terms.

You mourn what the relationship was supposed to be, what you needed from it, what you lost when it ruptured. This allows you to metabolise the loss rather than staying frozen at the point of injury. This is grief work, and it’s necessary even when the relationship technically continues.

You identify what you can actually control: your interpretation, your boundaries going forward, your choices about continued engagement. The rupture likely left you feeling powerless. Reclaiming agency means accepting that you can’t make them acknowledge what happened, but you can decide what you do next.

You address what’s happening in your body, not just your thoughts because ruptures live in your nervous system. The tightness in your chest when their name comes up, the way you startle at conflict, the exhaustion of staying vigilant is physiological. Body-based work (therapy modalities like EMDR, somatic experiencing, breathwork) can discharge the activation that keeps you in threat response.

You adjust your expectations and boundaries with this person to match reality rather than what you hoped for. This might mean accepting limited contact, ending the relationship, or continuing it with fundamentally different terms. This is relational recalibration. You no longer have to operate from the assumption that they’ll meet you halfway.

What makes this repair rather than just coping is that you’re actively restoring your own equilibrium rather than waiting for the other person to fix what they broke. You’re addressing the damage to your sense of safety, worth, and relational competence.

The limitation is that unilateral repair doesn’t restore the relationship itself. But it can restore you within or after the relationship. The bond remains altered but you no longer have to remain hostage to whether they acknowledge what happened. This is particularly relevant when the other party lacks capacity for accountability (whether through personality, circumstance, power dynamics, or simply because they don’t experience the rupture as you do).

Healing requires agency

Not all ruptures happen between people. Some happen between who we were and who we can no longer be. When that happens, no one can repair that for you. The work has to be internal.

Time will not heal of its own accord. It heals when we stop resenting uncertainty. When we stop waiting for things and people to provide containment. It heals when we begin the work of unilateral repair: creating space for unimagined possibilities, grieving the parts of ourselves we need to relinquish, forgiving the parts of ourselves that allowed us to hold onto them in the first place. Time heals when we stop fighting the process and embrace our agency over whatever comes next. Time heals when we stop waiting for others to hold us, and learn to hold ourselves in the mess.

That’s what repair does. It doesn’t erase the rupture. It transforms your relationship to what broke inside of you, so you’re no longer defined by the breaking.