Are We Severed?

What happened to their Innie?

That was the big question my wife and I asked after we finished season 2’s finale. What would happen to Mark and Helly’s Innie? We can ask this of ourselves as well: are we severed from our Innie?

In my first blog, I mentioned that "Connexion Matters" is about learning to reconnect with lost parts of ourselves, others, and the world. In today's blog, I want to talk about reconnecting with ourselves and learning to understand ourselves.

Spoiler Alert: The following might contain spoilers for the show Severance. If you haven’t watched it yet, give it a try—it’s pretty good.

Side note: For those who haven’t watched Severance, the main characters undergo brain surgery that splits their consciousness into two distinct personas: the "Outie" and the "Innie." The change occurs when they enter the severed work floor. The characters chose this procedure for different reasons, but our protagonist Mark chose severance because he wanted to forget the death of his wife for part of the day.

In Severance, there was a unique scene in the season finale where Mark is having a conversation with his Innie. During this conversation, I noticed that Mark’s Innie was acting very scared because he thought his life would end. As I was watching, I also thought that Mark’s Innie acted young. In the scene between Helly’s Innie and her father, Helly’s innie acted younger, less inhibited, more emotionally reactive or in touch with her emotions. These scenes made me think that the Innies are a persona of their young selves before the pains and hurt of the world caused them, especially Mark, to build barriers protecting their inner self from heartache—much like Mark is avoiding the experience of pain caused by his wife’s death.

This is us. We start out in the world as young, innocent children, and inevitably, as time goes on, we get hurt, we experience heartbreak, and we build walls. Often, our hurt is caused by those closest to us. Sometimes hurt is caused through obvious means—neglect, abuse, trauma. Other times, hurt is caused by more subtle means—unfair expectations, or expectations to be something we are not, religious experiences. Even the most well-intentioned parents can cause hurt; it happens because we are human.

Hurt comes from other areas as well—school experiences, loss of loved ones, moving around—and I could go on and on. The point is, we will all experience hurt, pain, and heartache in our lives, and this will cause us to be be severed from our inner authentic self. The severance creates barriers, or chasms meant to protect us. Some people’s barriers are low, and some are high. The question we need to ask ourselves is: are these barriers/protectors helpful to us now in the present time, or do they prevent us from having the life we really want to live? In other words how do we reverse the severance process, and reconnect.

Part of reconnecting with ourselves is understanding our protective system and discovering if what it is doing is helpful or hurtful. The first step is beginning to reconnect with our emotions, understand our emotions and where they are coming from. Emotions can be layered and we can have multiple, almost contradictory emotions all at the same time, which can be very confusing. However, the more that we practice identifying our emotions, connecting those emotions to our thoughts and behaviours then we can begin to understand the severed process.

My challenge for you this week is to notice when you are feeling defensive, angry, or sad, and see if you can identify a pattern of behavior. Are there common incidents that anger you or make you sad? Reflect on these situations to help you reconnect with yourself.