Severance, Lost, trauma therapy, and reintegration

The work is mysterious and important

I’m not exactly sure how I want to approach this topic, but it’s been nagging me for a while. So let’s imagine we’re sitting in a quiet corner of a coffeeshop to chat. Or maybe we’re on a long hike, bathed in sunshine and the smell of spruce trees and dirt. Those kind of spacious, easy settings that help you say the things that are hard to say.

I’ll tell you that I’ve been experiencing a PTSD flare-up since January. Don’t worry, I’ll say. I’m doing EMDR¹ and processing it in therapy, and taking good care of myself. I’m fine. I’m just confronting some events in the past when I was not fine.

I won’t go into specifics about the memories that are coming up or what triggered them. Only that they showed up as nightmares and somatic memories without any emotion attached — my body, in a way, physically re-experiencing stuff that happened decades ago while my brain protects me from the emotional pain of it. This is how it’s always been for me². The physical pain and visual memories separate from the feelings. (The feelings eventually come, usually as waves of devastation and grief followed by total joy and amazement that I survived my childhood and get to experience so much beauty, safety, and love in my adult life.)

I’ll also tell you that I’ve been watching the Apple TV series “Severance.” And I’ve been rewatching the early 2000s drama “Lost” with my son Miles. Two smart, cryptic, intoxicating shows that in many ways give shape and meaning to my experience of PTSD and healing from trauma. Shows that feel like the psychoeducation so many of us need to process the collective horrors we’re witnessing in 2025.

The plots are very different. Severance follows employees of a mysterious corporation who undergo a surgical procedure to sever their work selves from their personal selves, thereby distancing themselves from the drudgery of corporate life or the pain of personal losses.

Lost follows the survivors of a plane crash on a lush-but-mysterious island somewhere in the South Pacific. The survivors each have big secrets, told through flashbacks and flash-forwards, and the island itself has its own supernatural secrets. It’s a place that exists outside conventional laws of space and time.

(side note: Watching Lost with a 15-year-old is wild. It’s the second time around for me and the first for Miles. He had no prior knowledge or context for the show at all, and yet he instantly picks up on tiny details, follows fragmented timelines, and makes connections that I struggled to see the first time I watched it nearly 20 years ago.)

Both shows interrogate memory, identity, grief, the things we can and can’t control. To me, they’re brilliant allegories of trauma and all the ways the mind fractures and protects us from stuff that’s too painful to confront. A few recurring themes:

• Scary numbers — both shows have a set of frightening numbers that the characters are forced to examine. To me, this mirrors how traumatic memories emerge as fragmented data that we don’t fully understand. To process it, we have to bring those fragments together and figure out the patterns and story behind them.

• There are profound before-and-after moments, invisible lines that the characters cross that change them forever. In Lost, life before the plane crash and after, the island as an alternate reality. In Severance, the elevator ride to the severed work-floor, separating the worlds of the “innies” and “outies.” Two aspects of the same people, the conscious and subconscious. The unthought known.

• For nearly all the characters, there’s internal conflict between wanting to deny horrible events and wanting to say it all out loud, making the pain visible. The cinematography highlights the dichotomy — visible, invisible. Light, dark.

• Trauma that’s not processed will find ways to emerge. It keeps replaying itself. The record skips. For me, pain loops in my body and nervous system. For the characters, the timelines loop and double back in disorienting ways.

As both Severance and Lost progress, there’s a process of reintegration. The subconscious/metaphysical worlds spill over to the conscious. The characters try to metabolize the traumas that won’t be contained or ignored.

In trauma therapy, reintegration is the goal. Embodying your full story, past and present woven together. The camera aperture adjusts for depth of field, widening your emotional range. You learn to confront your shadows instead of bypassing or exiling them. You get to know yourself well enough that you can understand when/how present-day events echo the past (vs. mindlessly reacting). Above all, you move through life with more curiosity and compassion — for yourself, for others.

I told my therapist last week that I felt like we were time traveling in session, going back to rescue parts of me that were stranded in the years the original traumas happened. Bringing them forward and giving them all the love and safety now that they should have experienced back then.

I’m not sure what to do with all this quite yet. I don’t know how Severance ends, and I can’t remember the ending of Lost (we’re on season 5... Though I do remember the first time I watched the finale it made me angry because it somehow bypassed so much of the pain that it had so beautifully revealed, ignoring many of the lessons it was trying to teach in favor of a tidy wrap-up.)

When I was on book tour last year, some readers asked me how I did it, how I healed from trauma enough to write about it. As if I’d magically landed on the other side of pain or crossed a cosmic finish line. I had to admit that I hadn’t.

There’s no grand finale to trauma healing. In my experience, nightmares and body sensations fade, but the memories remain (only much less haunting or disruptive).

And besides, I told them, a memoir only tells one slice of a story. There’s so much more that happened, stuff I may never share. No one’s life can be contained on a page, or in a screenplay.

But maybe that’s the point of reintegration? It’s ongoing. When facing the neglected pieces of ourselves, the unspoken stories, we choose to gather them up and carry them with us. We can cross the invisible line as often as we need, rescuing ourselves over and over again. Versions of us tuck inside one another like nesting dolls.

Nothing is tied up neatly with a bow. We move forward, grief in one hand, joy in the other.

Are you watching either of these shows? What do you make of it all? Any theories to share?

1. https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/

2. There’s stigma associated with PTSD, the image of a soldier completely lost in a flashback, unaware of who or where or when they are. Unable to function. But that’s never been my experience. My therapist explained to me once that PTSD is not a mental illness but an injury. It’s a healthy response to a harmful event. Trauma, especially repeated trauma, causes the nervous system to misfire. For me, when faced with a trigger, it’s like my brain quietly presses an alarm bell that only I can hear.