July 5, 2024
Finding Beauty in Your Broken Pieces:
The Art and Science of Transforming Any Relationship
Samantha Kaaua
Aviva Publishing (2024)
ISBN: 979-8888964378
New Book Teaches Counter-Culture Method for Transforming Relationships
If you are struggling in your marriage, considering divorce, or even having difficulty getting along with a friend or relative, then Finding Beauty in Your Broken Pieces: The Art and Science of Transforming Any Relationship can help you to successfully change your situation. Samantha Kaaua, a marriage therapist and relationship coach, offers practical and sometimes surprising advice about what you can do to change any relationship.
When you read Finding Beauty in Your Broken Pieces, you’ll discover that Samantha really “gets” where you’re at because she’s been there herself. She opens the book with a shocking personal story. The day she went to take her final exam to get her degree so she could become a marriage therapist, she discovered her husband had been lying to her. She pretty much had a meltdown then, wondering how she could help people when her own marriage was on the rocks. Throughout the book, Samantha shares more personal stories of her own marriage and how she and her husband managed to turn around that situation. She admits it wasn’t easy and she is painfully honest about some of the details. Even more surprising, her husband has written the foreword to the book, testifying that the efforts they made did work. In addition, Samantha shares stories of those she helped transform their own relationships.
Samantha refers to her work as a counter-culture approach because, first off, we live in a society where so many people get divorced that we have to question just how committed anyone is to marriage today. Samantha’s own parents divorced when she was still a baby, so she was determined to make her marriage work. But the greater counter-culture approach she offers is to turn the focus off your partner who seems to be the problem and instead look inside yourself. Samantha believes the problems we see in our relationships are a reflection of our own broken pieces, and when we learn to heal those broken pieces, we will learn to heal our marriage and any other significant relationships.
Samantha has created the Inner Mosaic® method to help people embrace their broken pieces as integral fragments in the stunning mosaic that is us. She states, “By acknowledging, accepting, and even celebrating these parts, we open a path to inner peace, harmony, and joy, because we no longer resist but embrace our complete self.” The result is a transformation of the individual and then a transformation of the relationship.
The Inner Mosaic method begins with understanding what Samantha calls The Triple A’s of Transformation—Awareness, Alignment, and Action. The book is divided into three parts, each named for one of the Triple A’s. Each part is then divided into several chapters to discuss the details of that part of the transformation process. While the details of the process are too much to discuss here, below are a few of the nuggets Samantha offers that help the transformation process along.
Awareness is largely about no longer playing the victim and becoming aware of our own role in our relationship. Once we take responsibility for that role and make conscious choices, we have control over what we can create going forward. Some of what keeps us in victim mode is our disempowering beliefs that hold us back. We may not even realize we have these beliefs, but Samantha shows us how to become aware of them and to determine which ones are causing relationship chaos for us. One of Samantha’s biggest disempowering beliefs was that she could not trust her husband. She assumed he was still lying to her even when he had quit the behavior that upset her. Eventually, she realized her unjustified distrust was sending off negative energy that made them both walk on eggshells, which eventually led to conflict.
Improving our relationships also requires looking at our relationships with different areas of our life, such as money, time, and health. For example, Samantha states that “money issues are often the hidden third party in marriages and relationships; they can cause a breakdown of trust, communication, and even love. Money isn’t just energy—it’s a silent partner in our relationship system, capable of creating tension, mistrust, and resentment if not respected as such.” Our beliefs about money may be different from our partner’s so we need to understand those beliefs that may be unique to us and also what our partner’s beliefs might be.
Ultimately, the inner mosaic is made up of all our unique parts or pieces. Once we put all those pieces together, we can access the power of our whole, unbroken self. Samantha spent considerable time developing her Inner Mosaic method, and she discusses the different relationship theories that influenced it. More importantly, she walks us through the steps that help us to work through the method. For example, Step 1 is Identify the Situation. With each step she provides explanation and activities to help us apply the method to our own situation.
In fact, the book is full of helpful activities. One of my favorites is to write a love letter as a forgiveness practice. She walks us through how to write such a letter to a loved one that lets them know we love them and also what we are forgiving them for in a manner that will not make them resentful but remove the block in the relationship. She instructs us paragraph by paragraph how to construct such a letter.
Other topics Samantha covers include the metaphysical or spiritual side of relationships. She is a believer that people in relationships have soul contracts and that she and her husband made one before they came into this life. She defines a soul contract as “a pre-incarnation agreement between two souls. Either one or both want a specific experience in a given lifetime and the other soul agrees to play a specific role to help facilitate the experience.”
For me, one of the most helpful discussions was about intuition and the imagination. Samantha discusses how we need to learn to distinguish between the two so we truly listen to our intuition and not the fears we allow our imagination to create. Too often, she suggests we allow our imagination to terrorize us when we should instead use it for our benefit to imagine best-case scenarios and envision how to make that happen in our relationships. She encourages us to be our “BEST you”—BEST being an acronym for Brilliant, Empowered, Successful, and Transcendent. And she provides action steps to help what we imagine become our reality.
Finding Beauty in Your Broken Pieces has so much more valuable information that I could mention, from discussing the Inner Mosaic Dance to why we should be like bamboo, but you’ll just have to read it for yourself if you want to know more. I do believe Samantha’s Inner Mosaic method will help you put together the broken pieces in your relationship so you can transform it into a thing of beauty.
For more information about Samantha Kaaua and Finding Beauty in Your Broken Pieces, visit Amazon.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of The Best Place and Lilith’s Love
