When a ceramic bowl shatters, most of us just sweep up the pieces and throw them in the trash. But in the Japanese art of kintsugi, artisans carefully gather the fragments and bind them back together with lacquer mixed with gold. The resulting object isn't disguised or diminished, it's transformed, its fractures revealed in precious metal, its history of cracking made visible and beautiful.
photo courtesy of Dr. Sarah Gundle
It's an apt metaphor for what Dr. Sarah Gundle does. A clinical psychologist who treats both trauma and relationship issues, Dr. Gundle has developed a five-session "breakup therapy protocol" for people who have already decided to divorce. The goal isn't to hide the fracture, but to make meaning from it.
"These breaks and these transitions are always as much about identity as they are about the rupture," Dr. Gundle tells me over the phone from her New York practice. Which sounds, on its face, completely counterintuitive. Why would two people who can't stand to be married anymore voluntarily sign up for more couples therapy?
"I know this sounds counterintuitive, I know it sounds a little bit crazy," Dr. Gundle admits. But after more than fifteen years in practice, she noticed a pattern. Couples would end therapy once they decided to divorce, which made intuitive sense. Except they'd inevitably circle back, one or both of them calling with the same litany of unanswered questions: What could I have done differently? What are they thinking about me? Why did this happen?
"They were looking for a story that made sense," Dr. Gundle says. "We all circle around our stories until they feel coherent and robust and you can let them go."
The Rumination Problem
In the United States, roughly 41% of first marriages end in divorce, about 674,000 divorces annually. And while divorce rates have actually declined significantly since 2000, dropping from 4.0 to 2.4 per 1,000 people the emotional aftermath remains stubbornly consistent. Most people get stuck not in the past exactly, but in the ending with the final rupture replaying on loop, collecting questions like barnacles.
Dr. Gundle's own experience bears this out. She's been through two significant breakups that resulted in children: one contentious divorce, one amicable separation. Same person, wildly different outcomes. "I was trying to think, like, why is this so different?" she says. With her ex-husband, she sat with "all these rumbling questions" for years. With her daughter's father, they actively processed the relationship's arc together, creating what Dr. Gundle calls "a story of what the relationship meant to each other."
The difference was night and day. "I didn't end up sitting with lingering questions," she says. They co-parent successfully; there's mutual respect. "I had a story to make sense of it."
The realization that understanding the full narrative of a relationship could fundamentally alter how it ends became the seed of her breakup therapy practice.
Mapping the Break
Dr. Gundle is careful to distinguish breakup therapy from regular couples therapy. "We're not re-engaging in a relationship. We're trying to understand the relationship so you can move on." It's a highly-structured five sessions, no more, with specific homework assignments that build toward a shared document both partners will eventually sign.
The process maps the entire relationship arc: Who were you when you got together? What function did the marriage serve? How did that change over time? Did you notice the change, or did you ignore it?
She tells me about an arranged marriage between two people who came to America from India in their twenties. For years, they clung to each other in this new country, bonded by shared language and identity. But as they individuated, as they became their own people in America, they had less in common. "One of them was much more tied to India, and the other wasn't, and she wanted to be much more individuated than he was comfortable with," Dr. Gundle explains. "Is there anything wrong with that? No. But it doesn't work in a marriage where you don't want the same things."
Reframed not as blame, but as divergent paths, the recriminations fell away. They felt relief.
Sessions two and three are consistently brutal. "I feel like it's like being on a high, tight wire," Dr. Gundle says. This is when couples shift from blaming each other to examining their own contributions to the relationship's demise. "You're looking at ways in which the other person shut down. But what are the ways that you shut down? What are the ways that you passively accepted that and didn't push them?"
It's vulnerable work, and not everyone can handle it. Dr. Gundle has had high-conflict couples leave mid-process, "and it might have made it worse, not better." The work requires both people to take emotional risks at roughly the same pace. If one person goes deep while the other stays defended, the whole thing collapses.
But when it works (and Dr. Gundle insists it works more often than not), couples stop asking those circling questions. They're able to move forward. Some even become friends, which genuinely surprises her sometimes.
"I've had couples who seem so collaborative, and they've had a collaborative divorce, and they come in and they have all the good intentions, and then they leave, not friends," she says. The therapy exposed something they'd been avoiding. Conversely, she's had warring couples who take her up on her door open policy for “booster sessions" and return having somehow forged a new kind of amicable relationship.
She recalls one particularly memorable case: a couple whose marriage imploded over the husband's college sex tape. The wife was devastated, not by the tape itself exactly, but by what it represented. "You could have been that [adventurous], and I tried, but I couldn't access that in you, and you didn't show me that.” Their ending became about all the ways they could have been together, which paradoxically allowed them space to be friends.
By the final session, Dr. Gundle and the couple have crafted a co-written narrative – not a legal document, but an emotional one. Both parties have to agree to every word. Some sections get left out because consensus can't be reached. Then they sign it.
Dr. Gundle emphasizes it's especially pragmatic for co-parents. "Kids sense when [their parents] don't [have the same story] even when they're not saying it overtly," she says. Having a coherent, agreed-upon version of events helps everyone, children included, metabolize the change.
Binding the Pieces
The whole approach runs counter to how we're taught to think about divorce. "Endings are tragedies, and we are taught from a really young age to think about endings as failures," Dr. Gundle says. "To think about them not as failures, but as opportunities, is so counterintuitive to the way we are all raised." It's written into the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita. We're conditioned to see divorce as catastrophe.
"But all endings are sad and there's a continuum of how you can think about the ending. It's not just one thing."
Research supports her approach. People who pursue conscious uncoupling report more optimism about their futures, higher self-confidence, and fewer depressive symptoms than those who pursue traditional adversarial divorce.
Not everyone can do this work. It requires both partners to be vulnerable, which rules out contentious divorces or situations where one person is still actively hurt and defensive. It's a self-selecting group, Dr. Gundle acknowledges. But for those who can do it, the payoff is significant. They stop asking those circling questions. They move forward without the weight of unresolved narrative.
The Gold in the Cracks
Dr. Gundle doesn't market herself as a breakup therapist per se. She still sees individuals, runs trauma groups for women, teaches at Mount Sinai, and travels regularly to train Burmese counselors on the Thai-Burma border. But word of mouth has made the breakup protocol a significant part of her practice. It's also some of the hardest work she's ever done. The stakes are high, emotions are raw, and she's threading a needle in every session by acknowledging pain without getting mired in it, excavating the past without re-litigating it, helping people take responsibility without assigning blame.
"The only thing we really have control over, and control is a really important grounding thing in a transitional time, is our own actions and our own selves," she tells me. "Taking responsibility is not about right or wrong, but as grounding yourself."
She pauses, considering. "Every relationship teaches you something. And I think there's a lot of opportunity to know yourself better when you lean into that information."
It's the kintsugi principle in practice, those ceramics bound with gold, made more beautiful for having been broken. What Dr. Gundle offers is an alchemy that transforms rupture into something you can actually use, not by pretending the break didn't happen or doesn't hurt, but by making it visible, acknowledged, integrated. Illuminate the cracks rather than hiding them. Trace them in gold. Own them, and keep going.
