Lives Unlived: Stealing Back the Future After Trauma and Loss

"Judith Herman observed that "the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma" (Herman, 1992). This tension manifests in how many trauma survivors inhabit a kind of psychological superposition-simultaneously experiencing the life they have and the lives they might have had, in world and lives half-real, and half-imagined."

"These alternate universes aren't idle speculation. They're vivid, persistent mental realities that shape self-understanding and recovery, reflecting both the proclamation of loss and the denial of pain. Existing in dissociative spaces of the might-have-been, in fantasy and conflict with real life, in dreams which sometimes feel more real than waking life, running in the background to have real hidden impact. (The quantum mechanics language is purely metaphorical here-this describes subjective experience, not physics.)"

"Consider the person who experiences significant loss in childhood. The self that emerged from that event develops along one trajectory, while an imagined alternate self-the one who never faced that loss-remains a haunting presence. It feels a bit like we imagine the "many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics, the what-ifs of infinite possibility. This can be more overt-who might I have been if my mother hadn't become ill with cancer, and died young, when I was a child?"

Psychological trauma creates a tension between denying horrific events and proclaiming them aloud, producing simultaneous orientations toward concealment and disclosure. Many survivors inhabit persistent mental 'might-have-been' realities that run alongside actual lives, influencing self-understanding and recovery. These alternate universes manifest as vivid fantasies, dissociative states, and dreams that can feel more real than waking life and exert hidden influence. Childhood loss often produces parallel developmental trajectories: the lived self shaped by loss and an imagined alternate self that escaped it. Integration requires reconciling loss with identity by bridging lived experience and unlived possibilities.

Read at Psychology Today