Severance and Dissociation

I just finished the 7th episode of season two of Severance. Oh my gosh I have so many thoughts I need to get out into text form. This is going to contain a lot of spoilers for the show. If you haven’t watched, you should close this browser tab. And then go binge the entire show.

Anyway.

In this episode, we get caught up with Gemma, Mark’s “late” wife who we find out isn’t actually all that dead. We knew that she worked on the severed floor as her severed identity, Ms Casey, and we knew she was sent away to “the testing floor”. The reveal in this episode was so much more horrifying than I think any of us thought.

Not only is she alive and well, but she’s kept prisoner in her unsevered state, underground, never seeing the light of day. And every day she’s being led into various rooms where a severed identity takes over and has to endure an unpleasant situation. Over and over again. Like going to the dentist, being on a plane, doing monotonous exercises.

Let’s think about this from the perspective of each of these severed identities. They walk into a room, live through this distressing experience, leave the room and then they are back again as if no time has passed. They have no relief or breaks from this. Their entire existences are repetitive, unyielding suffering. Woof.

This episode has made me think so much about my own experiences with dissociation and it felt painfully relatable in some ways.

There’s a lot of strange, unpredictable and scary things around my CPTSD but I’m slowly getting to understand and sit with all the uncertainty. And no. I still don’t really know what Lumon does either.