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?

Or more subtle—what if one's parents had been more competent and resourced, focused on the child's developmental needs, enabling one to choose a career more out of passion, rather than pure necessity? Sometimes these lives re-emerge later on in development; sometimes we carry them, unlived, to the grave. Somewhere in the space between these selves lies the work of integration: a reconciliation not just of loss, but of identity itself.

Counterfactual thinking—persistent "if only" and "what if" thoughts—is nearly universal, but for many survivors of severe trauma and loss, the intensity is next-level. Research suggests that these thoughts are associated with increased PTSD symptoms and emotional distress, particularly when they highlight the gap between one's actual self and an idealized alternate self (Brancu et al., 2016; Caramanica et al., 2018).

Emotional numbing can be pervasive and associated with emotional dysregulation and loss of a coherent sense of self, tantamount to a fracturing of the personality known as "structural dissociation" (Steele, van der Hart & Nijenhuis, 2005). The simplest is primary structural dissociation, where........

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