In that moment, a part of me died.
If you work with trauma long enough, you hear this sentence constantly. Clients don’t say it lightly. They’re trying to describe something that feels existential and irreversible.
A recent paper by Dorothy and Hughes (2025) asks: what if we took this literally? What if trauma doesn’t just injure the psyche, but actually kills part of the self, leaving the survivor to grieve that loss (Dorothy & Hughes, 2025)? For those of us in therapy rooms every day, this is what we see:
I know I’m technically alive, but it feels like I outlived myself.
She is gone. I am not that person anymore.
My body is still here, but I am not inside it.
What if we treated these as accurate descriptions of what trauma does to selfhood, not cognitive distortions to correct?
Dorothy and Hughes zoom in on how trauma rearranges our relationship to our bodies. Drawing on philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels, they describe the self as fundamentally split. There’s the body you have: flesh that can be cut, assaulted, immobilized, a heart that races, limbs that freeze. And there’s the body you are: the lived sense of “I” moving through the world, acting, deciding, speaking. In ordinary life, these two are so tightly intertwined we barely notice the distinction. You don’t think of your body as an object. You live from inside it.
Trauma exploits the fault line between them. When the body is violated, the gap between the body you have and the body you are gets forced wide open. The survivor feels as if the self that once lived inside has been dislodged or destroyed (Dorothy & Hughes, 2025; Waldenfels, 2011). This is where “a part of me died” stops being poetry and starts being phenomenology.
This is where 'a part of me died' stops being poetry and starts being phenomenology.
Chanel Miller, in describing her sexual assault exam, wrote “I was nothing more than an observer, two eyes planted inside a beige cadaver” (Miller, 2019, p. 8). She watches needles puncture her skin and nothing in her flinches. Her body has become an object. Her self is reduced to two floating eyes.
Philosopher and assault survivor Susan Brison recalls feeling as if doctors were performing an autopsy on her own body. She wonders if she actually died in the ravine where she was attacked. The line between life and death now seems “carelessly drawn and easily erased” (Brison, 2002, pp. 8–9).
These are examples of dissociation and clear expressions of a split self. The self that once animated the body now hovers somewhere else, or feels absent entirely. Clinically, this means repeated exhortations to “get back in your body” can land as violent if we don’t also honor why the body feels like a grave.
Clinically, this means repeated exhortations to 'get back in your body' can land as violent if we don't also honor why the body feels like a grave.
Traumatic events don’t just hurt. They disrupt the systems of meaning that usually let us place life events into a story. The body that was acted upon took in more than the narrating self can metabolize.
Brison calls the traumatic event a “surd,” a senseless entry in the sequence of one’s life (Brison, 2002, p. 103). If the earlier self “died,” then the surviving self needs to be known and acknowledged by others in order to exist. Without this recognition, the self that remains feels ghostly, unanchored, unreal.
Trauma also breaks time. In PTSD, traumatic events aren’t simply remembered. They’re re-lived in flashbacks, nightmares, bodily reenactments. Past events erupt into the present with a force that makes them feel current. Stolorow writes that trauma leaves the person “freeze-framed into an eternal present” (Stolorow, 2015, p. 20). The lived self, the one that usually strings past, present, and future together, loses its organizing power.
I know logically ten years have passed. It still feels like yesterday.
My life before feels like it belonged to someone else.
For clinicians, this is a call to be cautious with our predilection for narrative. Some aspects of trauma may always exceed narrative, and that excess isn’t necessarily a failure. It’s built into the structure of selfhood (Dorothy & Hughes, 2025).
Dorothy and Hughes take seriously that many survivors don’t feel like they can “get back” to who they were, and some don’t want that. They propose working from a grief framework using the continuing bonds model from bereavement research.
In bereavement, many mourners maintain a meaningful ongoing relationship with the dead through memory, ritual, conversation, dreams (Klass et al., 1996; Stroebe & Schut, 1999). Dorothy and Hughes suggest we can transpose this model inside the self.
If a part of the self has effectively “died” through trauma, perhaps the goal isn’t to cut off that part or resurrect it unchanged. Perhaps the goal is to cultivate an intrapersonal relationship between the self who died and the self who remains.
This might look like:
There’s no illusion that the “dead” self can be revived. As in bereavement, the death is permanent. The task is to renegotiate the meaning of that loss over time.
Take “a part of me died” literally. When a client says this, respond as if they’re describing a real psychological death. Explore what exactly feels dead. An entire sense of innocence? Sexual aliveness? The capacity to inhabit the body without fear? This is grief work, not just cognitive restructuring.
Work directly with the split. In EMDR and other trauma therapies, we’re already working with different parts of the self across time. Make it explicit. Talk about the body that was acted on, the self that observed and sometimes left, and the self who is here now trying to live in the aftermath.
Integrate grief frameworks. Using continuing bonds and the dual process model, help survivors oscillate between loss-oriented work (remembering who they were, feeling the pain) and restoration-oriented work (building a life that honors both the dead self and the surviving self).
Honor what cannot be narrativized. Some survivors will never turn their trauma into a coherent story, and some won’t want to. That doesn’t mean they’re failing treatment. Our task is to stay with what appears at the edges of language.
Many trauma survivors are trying to live in a world where they feel they have partly died. The concept of the split self and intrapersonal continuing bonds give us language closer to what survivors actually live. They remind us that therapy isn’t only about exposure or integration. It’s also about mourning a self that will never return, while learning how to stay in relationship with that self as you move forward.
This isn’t cheerful work, but it’s honest work. It honors the violence of what happened without demanding that survivors either forget it or be defined entirely by it. For many of the people we see, that honesty is the first thing that makes them feel even a little less dead.
References
Brison, S. J. (2002). Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self. Princeton University Press.
Dorothy, J., & Hughes, E. (2025). The death of the self in posttraumatic experience. Philosophical Psychology, 38(1), 168–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2294776
Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Taylor & Francis.
Miller, C. (2019). Know my name: A memoir. Viking.
Stolorow, R. D. (2015). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections. Routledge.
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement, rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046
Waldenfels, B. (2011). Phenomenology of the alien: Basic concepts (A. Kozin & T. Stähler, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.
