Object Relations Theory & The Hollow Spaces Inside Us

When we grow up, the people who raise us become mirrors, our first reflections of love, safety, and belonging. They are our “objects,” as Object Relations Theory calls them, not in the cold, inanimate sense of the word, but as emotional anchors that help us form our sense of self and others.

For most children, these relationships are the scaffolding of security. But for survivors of incest, those scaffolds were built on betrayal. The very people meant to nurture us were also the ones who hurt us in the most intimately personal way. That’s not just confusing, it’s a fracture of reality itself. It results in profound injury to a person’s developing identity.

The Collision Between Love and Harm

Imagine trying to drink from a well that both quenches your thirst and poisons you. That’s what it’s like when your caregiver, your first love object, is also your sexual abuser. Your nervous system learns two opposing truths at once: love is safety and love is danger.

That’s not something you just “get over.” It embeds itself in the wiring of your psyche. It alters a person’s perceptions and experience of love and attachment. It becomes the foundational knowledge you unconsciously reference when you feel love.

You grow up loving people who hurt you and distrusting people who try to love you gently.

This is what we call ambivalence, and results in disorganized attachment, or the emotional tug-of-war between longing and fear. You want to be held, to feel close, loved and crave connection, but being held once meant being harmed. So, whenever you feel close to someone, alarm bells start going off. Hypervigilance and overthinking kick in. You begin to search for any sign of danger, and it’s likely that what you’re looking for, you will find. Then you withdraw, having found the evidence that you were looking for. It becomes confirmation that it was all just a lie, and act they put on just to get close to you, so that they could use you and exploit you. Or at least, that’s what your nervous system is screaming at your from all directions.

It’s a roller coaster. You crave connection, but love is foreign to you. It’s a desperate longing for something you’ve never experienced. It’s like a ravenous hunger partnered with dispair and hopelessness that I call “Love Starved”.

Then, when you finally meet someone, and they start to get close to you, the triggers show up. The connection you feel activates your nervous system into high alert. Because connection is where pain happens. Connection is where danger lies. Connection feels like surrendering your safety.

The Fragmented Self

When a child’s sense of self is shaped inside the chaos of abuse, identity becomes like a broken mirror, sharp, scattered, reflecting distorted pieces of who you think you are. You learn early that your worth depends on someone else’s moods, their touch, their approval.

The secret nature of the abuse trains you to bury your fear, bury your pain, bury your needs. You learn to hide your true self from others, because if they saw you…

So you shrink. You perform. You shape-shift to survive. You become who your abuser wants you to be. You feel only what your abuser allows you to feel. Your needs are abandoned for your abusers needs. Everything that is “You” is unimportant to your abuser. Keeping the secret becomes priority #1. Followed by his needs, his wants, his feelings, his desires. This results in enmeshment, which is an unhealthy emotional bond that denies your autonomy.

By the time adulthood arrives, you may not even know where “you” begin and “they” end. You might feel hollow one moment and overflowing the next, loving too much, giving too much, needing too much, because you never learned what a healthy “enough” feels like.

That’s not weakness. That’s survival intelligence forged in the fire of betrayal.

Concepts like autonomy, independence, and boundaries are lessons you never learned. You stuggle to even communicate your feelings and needs. Being assertive, advocating for yourself, “loving” yourself, or putting yourself first were skills that you were never allowed to practice. Or when they were, you were ignored, or even punished. So, when you’re an adult in a relationship, that anxiety and fear pops up, quieting your voice, and you fall back into the behaviors you learned to survive the abuse. You fawn, people please, abandon yourself and your needs in order to earn love. Yet, never feeling safe in the love you receive.

And since you were a child when the abuse happened, you didn’t have the luxury of knowing better. This is the way you were “trained,” so you likely have no idea what’s going on, or why. It just is what it is. You just feel how you feel. You just do what you do. You didn’t know any better, and now you have no idea on what it would look like to feel or behave any different.

The Fear of Attachment

For incest survivors, intimacy is both the deepest hunger and the greatest threat. When early love equals pain, your brain learns that attachment is a trap. So even when someone safe shows up, there’s a part of you that wants to push them away. You are naturally suspicious of intimacy, connection, and anyone trying to get close to you.

You might test them, ghost them, or wait for them to prove they’ll leave. A part of you hopes that they do, because that feels safer than the terrifying possibility that they might just stay and hurt you.

To love safely after incest is to rewire your entire internal system, the one that was programmed to confuse danger with love. To loce after incest means that you must ignore the “warning signs”. You must postpone judgment, ignore the panic, and learn to stay present in a place that doesn’t feel safe. Not because it isn’t safe, but because your perception of what’s safe has been severely altered. You’re overly cautious and highly sensitive. A minor hiccup to someone else feels like World War III to you. To love safely after incest means you must sit quietly, while sirens are going off around you, and trust that bombs will not fall from the sky.

When There Are No “Objects”: The Ache of Objectlessness

Some survivors don’t just have distorted relationships with their early caregivers, they have no internalized safe figure at all. This is what psychologists call objectlessness, a haunting emptiness where a nurturing bond should have been. The fear experienced in objectlessness is often referred to as existential dread. It’s a terrifying experience resulting from the anxiety felt when facing your own nothingness, emptiness, unimportance, and purposelessness.

It feels like walking through life without a compass. You don’t feel that you have a place in this world, or feel that you belong anywhere. These feelings are referred to as depersonalization and derealization.

Objectlessness is what happens when you never internalized a steady, loving “good object,” no inner parent, no reliable emotional anchor. When stress hits, the psyche still protects you. Without an inner anchor, it often does so by disconnecting: from yourself (depersonalization) or from the world (derealization).

Plain-Language Definitions

Depersonalization (DP)

Your self feels far away. You might think, “I’m watching myself from the outside,” “my voice sounds unfamiliar,” or “my body feels robotic, numb, or not mine.” It’s a self-to-self disconnection.

You may feel detached from your own feelings, watching life from a distance, as though your emotions belong to someone else. That numbness isn’t indifference, it’s armor. Your psyche decided that feeling nothing was safer than feeling everything.

Derealization (DR)

The world feels unreal. Rooms look flat or foggy, sounds feel distant, time goes syrup-slow. It’s a self-to-world disconnection, like life behind glass.

How to tell them apart (fast check):

• “I feel unreal, like a puppet or echo.” → Depersonalization
• “The room feels unreal, like a movie set.” → Derealization
• “Both me and the room feel off.” → Mixed DP/DR (common)

You’re not “crazy,” broken, or possessed. These are protective states of dissociation, your nervous system’s emergency brake when danger (or memories of danger) overwhelms capacity.

Why They Show Up in Incest Survivors

Love equaled danger.

Early “objects” (caregivers) both nurtured and harmed, so your brain learned: being close to someone is painful. When closeness or conflict stirs now, the body may cut the fuse to keep you safe.

No inner anchor.

If no safe caregiver was internalized, there’s no sturdy inner hand to hold during stress. So the system either floats away from self (DP) or pushes reality back (DR).

Survival circuitry.

Under threat, the dorsal vagal “freeze” pathway and stress hormones dial down sensation and presence. That numbing once reduced pain; today it also blunts joy, intimacy, and clarity.

Common triggers (know your pattern)

• Emotional intimacy, conflict, not being believed/seen, shame cues
• Sleep debt, hunger, low blood sugar, dehydration, illness, menstrual shifts
• Caffeine, THC, certain meds or alcohol
• Sensory overload (fluorescents, crowds), smells linked to trauma

The Missing Blueprint

Without a healthy model of love, your brain doesn’t know how to internalize warmth or security. You may understand love intellectually, but not know how to feel it in your body. You might attract chaos simply because it’s familiar, and familiartiy can feel safer than something that’s unknown. If you’ve never experienced a healthy love, then the uncertainty can leave you fearful of the unknown, the calm feels alien.

The Important Impact on Your Health

Unresolved trauma keeps your stress system idling hot or shutting down. Over time, that can fuel anxiety and depression, attention and memory glitches, headaches/migraines, IBS or other gut issues, pain flares, sleep problems, and higher allostatic load (wear-and-tear on the body). Dissociation reduces felt safety, which strains relationships, weakens co-regulation, and reinforces isolation—the very thing that keeps objectlessness alive.

A Helpful 3 Step Plan to Re-Anchor Yourself

Body

Give your nervous system a here-and-now to hold

• 90-second reclaim: name 5 things you see, 4 you feel, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, 1 you taste.
• Feet + pressure: press the balls of your feet into the ground; add a weighted object to your lap.
• Temperature shift: cold water on wrists/face or hold an ice cube to snap back into the present.
• Breath that works in fog: inhale 4, hold 2, exhale 6; add a hum on the exhale to stimulate the vagus nerve.
• Eyes lead the brain: slow side-to-side eye tracking while turning your head slightly, signals “no predator here.”

Relationship

Borrow a regulated nervous system

Co-reg scripts:

• “I’m getting floaty, can you sit beside me and squeeze my hand 10 times slowly?”
• “Please say my name, the date, and three things we can both see.”

Safety cue kit:

• A friend’s voice memo
• A pet’s steady breathing
• A therapist’s grounding track.

Remember, repetition matters more than perfection.

Mind

Translate what you’re feeling into it’s meaning.

Label it.

“This is depersonalization/derealization. It’s protective, not permanent.”

Orient reality.

State your name, the date, your age now, and one choice you can make in the next 5 minutes.

Post-episode note.

“What triggered it? How intense (0–10)? What helped (top 2)?”

Track to spot patterns, and wins.

Helpful, Healing Micro-Routines

Daily Anchors (10 minutes total)

• Morning light + glass of water
• Protein at breakfast
• 3 minutes of breath or humming
• Ashort walk.

Boundaries that Stabilize

• Reduce alcohol/THC for a month
• Cap caffeine by noon
• Protect sleep like medicine

Somatic Practice (5–10 min)

• Shaking
• Sentle stretching
• A body scan to reacquaint sensation with safety

Meaning-Making (once daily)

“Today my body protected me by ___. I thanked it by ___.”

How to Explain it to Others

To a partner

“If I go foggy, I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving sensation to feel safe. Please say my name, tell me the date, and place a warm hand on my upper back until my breath slows.”

To a therapist/doctor

“I experience depersonalization and derealization, episodes last about __ minutes, triggered by __. I’m tracking intensity and want a trauma-informed plan that includes somatic grounding and pacing.”

Treatment Pathways that Respect Survivor Wiring

Evidence Based Therapies

• EMDR
• Somatic experiencing
• Sensorimotor psychotherapy
• IFS/parts work
• Trauma-focused CBT with pacing
• Skills from DBT (distress tolerance).

Pacing is sacred.

1. Go slow.
2. Build resources first (grounding, co-reg, containment).
3. Then touch memories in tiny, titrated doses.

Medical check-in.

• Rule out contributors (thyroid, anemia, vestibular issues, med effects).
• Treat sleep problems early; everything works better when you’re rested.

When to seek extra support… Now, not later

• When episodes occur daily or last hours, impair work/parenting/driving, or come with panic, self-harm urges, or substance reliance.
• You feel stuck “outside yourself” most of the day.

Getting a trauma-informed clinician on your team is not a luxury; it’s nervous-system first aid.

Bottom Line

Depersonalization and derealization are the nervous system’s way of saying, “No inner lifeguard on duty, I’m keeping you from drowning.” Objectlessness means you didn’t get that lifeguard early on. Healing is how you hire and train one now, through body anchors, borrowed calm, and consistent, safe relationship with yourself and others. You are not a hologram; you’re a human rebuilding a home inside your skin.

The Path to Reconnection

Healing from incest isn’t about “forgetting” the past, it’s about rebuilding what was stolen.

It begins by learning to become your own “good object,” a reliable, nurturing presence inside yourself. The parent you needed. The protector you never had.

This is where therapy, somatic work, and trauma-informed connection help. Each safe, consistent relationship you build, with a friend, a therapist, a romantic partner, or even a pet can become a new internal model for safety.

Slowly, your brain begins to trust that love can exist without harm.

Over time, what once felt hollow begins to fill with warmth. You start to sense your own aliveness again, the soft hum of “I exist,” the quiet miracle of “I matter.”

The Sacred Work of Reclaiming Wholeness

For survivors of incest, healing means daring to believe that love doesn’t have to hurt. That intimacy can be chosen, not endured. That safety is not a fantasy, it’s a birthright.

You are not “objectless.”

You are not broken.

You are rebuilding the inner architecture of your soul, one safe connection at a time.

And that, my dear, is holey work.