Over the last few months or so, I have found myself increasingly drawn to a particular TV programme, “The Repair Shop”.

Perhaps it’s the objects that sometimes draw out my own memories of childhood days.  Perhaps it’s sometimes just the process of seeing experts carefully and painstakingly bring something back to life.

Obviously therapy doesn’t work quite like that in that it’s the client who really brings about the repair to their life, rather than any “expert” therapist.  But the therapist is undoubtedly a catalyst, and a facilitator in that process.

I suppose you could say that the therapist facilitates a process of internal repair that enables the client to then attend to any external repairs and adjustments in their life.

But within the programme, the experts really attend to the external repair with the utmost care and attention.  It takes time, patience, dedication, persistence and sometimes taking a risk.

Just like therapy.

In the Repair Shop, whilst bringing about that element of external restoration, many internal conflicts, wounds, disrupted and fractured memories are provided with the environment for repair.  In essence, their external repair means they become the catalyst for the internal repair.

So whilst those two processes work from different starting points, they both involve taking great care; providing that safe environment and nurturing, gently coaxing elements back into place.

And just as with the TV programme there are not a few occasions that involve tears, and so it is in therapy as well.

All these thoughts played through my mind a couple of days ago when I caught a sugar bowl in my cupboard as I reached for something else and it smashed to hundreds of pieces on my kitchen floor.

The sugar bowl belonged to my mother, and whilst I don’t have an overly strong emotional connection to the object itself, it does connect me to my mother who died 35 years ago now.

It’s a small, relatively cheap and largely immaterial object, but its breakage certainly connected me to a lot of emotional processes within me.

So the therapeutic space essentially becomes another form of Repair Shop.

Right now the many pieces of my mother’s sugar bowl are contained in a bag in a drawer until I decide what sort of repair is required, and whether it’s physical, emotional or both.

What needs repairing in your life today?