Traumatized Splitting and Fragmentation in Severance and The Substance
Potential spoilers for The Substance and Severance Season 1, but not too many.
Ever feel like you’re living multiple lives at once? Maybe you’ve got your work persona, your home vibe, your social self, and even that private, messy version of you who’s perpetually trying to get it together. It’s a lot, right? Well, welcome to the dissociative theory of trauma, a framework that explains why parts of our personality can feel split off—and how this is more common (and complex) than we might think.
Let’s break it down. Dissociation isn’t just about full-on dissociative identity disorder (DID formally Multiple Personality Disorder), which Hollywood loves to sensationalize and stigmatize. It’s a spectrum. On one end, there’s that feeling of being “not yourself” in certain environments—like how you’re a total people-pleaser at work but blunt as hell with your partner. In the middle, you might find anger outbursts, uncontrollable shame reactions, and hidden vulnerability. On the other end are conditions like Other Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD) and DID, where parts of a person’s personality and memory feel significantly split, a trauma response. Suzette Boon describes traumatic dissociative splitting as, "parts of a single individual that are not yet functioning together in a smooth, coordinated, flexible way."
These splits aren’t random; they’re survival strategies. Trauma, especially chronic or developmental trauma, teaches us to compartmentalize to keep functioning. On the severe trauma end of the spectrum, this may literally include amnesia of certain events or one’s childhood memories feeling “fuzzy.” That’s how we get through—but it’s also how we end up feeling fragmented. When you’ve lived through complex trauma as a kid, your brain gets super creative at keeping you safe—sometimes to the point of splitting off different parts of your personality. These dissociative splits aren’t about being “broken” or “crazy” (ugh, no)—they’re survival strategies. Think of it like creating separate playlists for different moods or situations, except instead of playlists, it’s parts of you. There might be a hyper-independent achiever, a people-pleaser, or a shut-down protector—all working overtime to help you navigate the world, to be “normal.”
“Trauma interferes with the proper functioning of the brain structures that allow us to accurately interpret and integrate sensory input. As a result, traumatic memories are often stored as fragments—isolated images, sounds, and body sensations—rather than as a coherent story.”
“Many trauma survivors have trouble remembering key details of what happened, especially if the trauma was severe or prolonged. The brain, in an effort to protect itself, sometimes suppresses or distorts memory, making it fuzzy, incomplete, or even inaccessible.”
What can cause traumatized splitting and fragmentation:
Physical or emotional abuse
Traumatic experiences that are “too much” to process (like an incident of violence)
Chronic trauma that requires extreme compartmentalization (like a chaotic, abusive, or unsupportive home environment for a child who then goes to school like nothing is happening)
Neglect & emotional abandonment
Medical trauma
High-stakes environments like war, cults, trafficking
Having a marginalized identity that does not feel acceptable or safe to show to others (a racial or ethnic group, being queer, being neurodiverse)
Quite a diversity of experiences, some more severe than others, all potentially lead to splits.
“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
What’s wild is how this spectrum of dissociation feels more relevant than ever, especially in the context of modern life. Our environments often push us into fractured ways of being. Think about it: we’re expected to be hyper-productive at work, hyper-available to our friends and family, and somehow still manage to do yoga, meal prep, and maintain a hot girl aesthetic. No wonder we’re falling apart.
Finding his grief intolerable, Mark chooses a pain-free work life. But, what is the real cost?
This brings me to Severance, the Apple TV show that takes workplace dissociation to the extreme. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is this: employees of a mysterious corporation undergo a surgical procedure to separate their work memories from their personal memories. Basically, their "work self" and "home self" become completely distinct people who never interact. They are literally strangers! What’s fascinating about Severance is how it metaphorically captures the everyday dissociation so many of us feel in unfulfilling jobs. You walk into the office, put on your professional mask, and it’s like flipping a switch. You leave your real feelings, your deeper values, and even your bodily autonomy at the door. Sound familiar? The show takes this to an eerie extreme, but it’s not that far off from how many of us compartmentalize to survive environments that demand productivity over humanity, especially those of us with complex trauma.
“Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible, that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the night child.”
But hey, isn’t normal to leave some of yourself out of the office? Healthy compartmentalization is like putting work stress in a box so you can enjoy your weekend—it's flexible and temporary. Or picking up a family discussion wen you’re off the clock. Dissociative splitting from early trauma, on the other hand, feels more rigid and fragmented, like parts of you are walled off and running their own show, often without your awareness. It’s the difference between organizing your life and surviving your past.
In Severance, the main character Mark eventually runs into a former co-worker who has had the procedure reversed. Petey struggles to bring together his two parts and experiences reintegration sickness, a beautiful metaphor for the difficult work that happens in trauma therapy seeking to heal fragmentation. When Mark, whose “innie” is able to escape his grief and susbtance abuse, rejects reintegration, Petey insightfully comments: “You carry the hurt. You feel it down there, too. You just don’t know what it is.” This is indicative of many trauma responses: having outsized emotional reactions which feel confusing, being in active denial, relying on destruction or substances to numb. The feelings seek through as you start to feel less and less like yourself.
The battle to perfect ironically leads to self-destruction.
Another recent example is The Substance, a horror film that uses a different metaphor to explore dissociation. The movie dives into the beauty industry—an arena where age, appearance, and perfection are fetishized to the point of dehumanization. Without giving too much away, The Substance features a serum that’s supposed to make people look younger and more flawless, but only every other week. The other week, you are old, aging self. Over time, the older self gives more and more, and rage, resentment, and competition between the two selves grows. It’s a sharp metaphor for how cultural pressures around beauty—especially for those of us raised on Photoshop and Instagram—can make us feel split, hating ourselves and treating ourselves like an outside object.
“Who was my other self? Though we had split one personality between us, I was the majority shareholder. I went to school, made friends, gained experience, developing my part of the personality, while she remained morally and emotionally a child, functioning on instinct rather than on intelligence.”
What Severance and The Substance show us is how dissociation isn’t just a psychological phenomenon; it’s also cultural. Our environments—whether it’s the corporate grind or the beauty industrial complex—pressure us to fragment our identities in order to survive. And while this might feel “normal,” it’s worth questioning: what’s the cost of all this splitting? How much of ourselves are we losing in the process?
These splits, while adaptive, need not be permanent. Healing happens when we start integrating those fragmented parts of ourselves. That could mean processing trauma, sitting with emotions to discover what they are communicating to us reconnecting with our values, or simply giving ourselves permission to be whole—messy, flawed, and human—in every context of our lives. It’s about moving from a survival mode that says, “I need to hide away parts of myself to get through this,” to a thriving mode that says, “I deserve to show up fully as myself.”
“Befriending one’s parts is not simply a therapeutic endeavor: it also contributes to developing the practice of self-acceptance, one part at a time.”
So, whether you’re navigating office politics or resisting societal beauty standards, take a moment to notice where you’ve been splitting yourself. What would it look like to bring those pieces together? And, importantly, who benefits when you stay fragmented—and who benefits when you reclaim your wholeness?
Dissociative splitting isn’t a flaw or a failure. It’s a response to environments that demand too much and give too little. But healing starts when we name it, see it, and decide we deserve better—at work, in the mirror, and everywhere else. Many with trauma need outside help! Support is available! Finding a supportive therapist who is trained in trauma is a great first step!
