I’ve been enjoying Season 2 of Severance. I remember watching all of season 1 of it in one sitting three years ago during the pandemic. Now it’s every week, and it’s fun looking at fan theories.
The idea of a severed brain is nothing new in the world of trauma work as a therapist. Oftentimes, when people go through a traumatic loss or event, it’s not uncommon to have a symptom of dissociating, which means feeling disconnected from thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Example: Daydreaming. Sometimes, if it is severe and repeated trauma, dissociation can be dissociative identity disorder, where your identity and personality are split into different parts. You may not have memories or even be aware of your other identities.
In season 1, Mark and Ms.Casey met as innies but had no recollection of each other but their bodies (felt sense) and unconscious remember each other. One way Ms. Cobel tried to help them re-trigger the memories was through the candle she stole from Mark’s house to the wellness meeting. Mark was able to mold the same tree as on the night of the car crash. Ms. Casey also said before she had to go back to the testing center that her best moments were with Mark. The body remembers and holds a lot of memories.
Sometimes, when we are feeling an emotion such as anxiety, we can start to have sensations in the body, but people with DID or severe Complex Trauma may skip that and go straight to dissociation, where the mind and the body are disconnected most of the time.
We can see that the innies are the truest, purest form of the characters in the show. In Winnicott’s studies, he writes about the false self, which is a self created to function in society and the pressures and demands of other people. If we look at the character Burt at the dinner table with Irving, he explained that his innie has a chance to go to Heaven but not him because he did a lot of bad things. Also, Mark can be happy-go-lucky as an innie because he doesn’t remember losing Gemma and has to deal with his grief. Helly is also a much different person than Helena, full of excitement, emotions, and warmth vs. Helena, who is cold-hearted and psychopathic. Their innies are their true self before the terrible things that have happened to them that caused them to change.
Integration is an interesting concept that I think is healing in the field of therapy. In Season 2, Episode 7, we see Mark trying to integrate and to find Gemma in the severed floor. True healing is when you integrate and accept all parts of yourself, the good part, the bad part, the innie and the outie. In episode 7, they discuss ego death and the killing of oneself. I think in the past, in DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) treatments, therapists wanted ego death, to get rid of the other identities, but we learned that actually befriending and working together with other identities and allowing each other to coexist in harmony and peace is the right answer. When we have trauma, we try to suppress memories and other parts of our past, but processing, accepting, and allowing yourself to feel the emotions and body sensations and learning to tolerate it so it no longer stays in your body is true healing and integration.
If you felt like you can relate to severance and want to help to integrate your innie with outie, trauma counseling can help. Contact me and let’s chat.
