I was just reading this post (TW for ableism and abuse) and my partner and I started talking about the concepts of “broken” people and the demarcation that seems to happen between people who are deemed to be in need of support/help and those that are judged as broken. I have seen this a lot in conversations around relationships with survivors with abuse. The idea that a person can be broken is one that I find interesting in all that it presupposes about human beings, that is, that there is such a thing as a person who is whole before they have been broken to a point beyond repair. These words which people use indicate not just what they think about people who have survived abuse and are struggling with its ramifications; they also suggest a particular way of viewing the concept of human and the process of being which involves a dichotomy between whole and broken which seems to me to not accurately reflect the experiences many of us have with living. 

I really need to find if anything has been written on this. Anyone know of anything? This is the type of thing I can end up researching for fun.