Understanding The Haunted Self
When the Body Becomes the Keeper of Secrets
There are some wounds so deep they don’t bleed. Yet, they still split us into pieces.
For many survivors of incest, that split becomes the quiet architecture of their entire being. On the surface, life may look functional, careers built, families raised, smiles practiced to perfection. But underneath? There’s a house divided. A body that flinches at softness. A heart that doesn’t quite trust the hands that reach for it. A mind that forgets, not because it wants to, but because remembering would mean reliving the unbearable.
This is the paradox of incest trauma:
The person you became to survive had to abandon the person you were born to be.
Psychologist and trauma researcher Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis dedicated his life to understanding this invisible fracture. Through decades of study on trauma-related dissociation, he gave language to what so many survivors had only ever felt as a haunting, the sense of living beside oneself rather than inside one’s life.
As he once wrote in The Haunted Self,
“Traumatized individuals are, in a sense, haunted by their own minds; they are divided into parts that remain stuck in the trauma and parts that go on with daily life.”
That haunting isn’t madness, it’s memory.
It’s the body’s ingenious way of saying:
We were hurt, and we are still protecting ourselves.
The Scholar Who Saw the Split
In a world that often silences incest survivors, Nijenhuis listened, not only to their words but to the quiet tremors beneath them. He recognized that trauma isn’t just a psychological experience; it’s biological, neurological, and deeply embodied. His development of tools like the Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-20) and the Traumatic Experiences Checklist (TEC) helped reveal that trauma doesn’t just live in flashbacks or nightmares, it lives in muscle tension, in numbing, in sudden collapses, in the chronic ache of a body that remembers too much.
While many mental health professionals once dismissed dissociation as a “defense gone wrong,” Nijenhuis reframed it as a defense gone right, a brilliant adaptation to overwhelming threat. He argued that the psyche divides itself into parts to allow survival when integration is impossible.
Nijenhuis explained it like this:
“Dissociation is not a failure of the mind; it is the mind’s best attempt to keep unbearable experiences from destroying the self.”
For incest survivors, this statement lands like truth finally spoken aloud. Dissociation wasn’t cowardice. It was genius. It was sacred protection wearing the mask of confusion.
The Haunted Self and the Anatomy of Survival
In his co-authored book The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization, Nijenhuis and his colleagues Onno van der Hart and Kathy Steele described structural dissociation, the division of the personality into parts that perform daily life and parts that carry traumatic memories.
To the incest survivor, this framework feels less like theory and more like autobiography.
There’s the part that gets up, showers, goes to work, and pretends everything’s fine. And then there’s the part that hides in the dark when a smell, sound, or facial expression sends terror flooding through the nervous system. The adult self might not understand why, but the child self does, because for that child, danger was love, and love was danger.
Nijenhuis described these parts as the Apparently Normal Part (ANP) and the Emotional Part (EP). The ANP handles ordinary life, while the EP remains frozen in the trauma, reliving the pain, fear, or helplessness of the original event. The two coexist, often unaware of one another. The result? A person who feels both hyperfunctional and hollow. Someone who can excel at everything except feeling safe in their own skin.
In Nijenhuis’s words:
“The traumatized individual lives in a haunted house, where different rooms hold different times, feelings, and selves.”
For incest survivors, that haunted house is the body itself.
When Safety Was Never Safe
It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never lived it what it means to grow up in a home where danger wears a familiar face. Where “I love you” is followed by betrayal. Where bedtime isn’t rest, it’s risk.
When safety was never safe, the nervous system learns that vigilance is love and dissociation is peace. The child learns to disappear not as rebellion, but as devotion, to protect the abuser’s secret, to preserve family loyalty, to survive the unendurable.
Over time, that survival becomes identity.
As one survivor once told me,
“I don’t know who I am when I’m not managing someone else’s emotions.”
That’s the residue of structural dissociation, the separation of the self that felt, from the self that functioned.
Nijenhuis called this “trauma-related phobia of inner experience.” Survivors fear their own emotions, memories, and sensations because touching them feels like re-entering the fire. He wrote,
“Avoidance of traumatic memories is not a choice. It is a phobia, a learned fear that continues to govern the survivor’s life long after the danger has passed.”
The Science of Disconnection
One of Nijenhuis’s most fascinating contributions came from his work on the neurobiology of dissociation. In a groundbreaking PET scan study of individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), he and his colleagues demonstrated that distinct parts of the self correspond to measurable differences in brain activation.
When the Emotional Part relived trauma, brain regions associated with emotion and threat (like the amygdala) lit up dramatically. When the Apparently Normal Part took control, those regions went quiet, replaced by activity in areas linked to cognitive control and detachment.
This wasn’t imagination, it was evidence. The brain was literally showing the separation the survivor felt internally.
In one interview, Nijenhuis explained,
“These parts of the personality have their own psychobiological reality. Dissociation is not merely a mental phenomenon, it is embodied.”
For incest survivors who’ve spent years doubting their own sanity, this validation is profound. The body wasn’t betraying them, it was bearing witness.
Chronic trauma alters not only the mind but the chemistry of existence. Prolonged cortisol dysregulation, changes in pain perception, even digestive and immune disturbances, all ripple from a nervous system that never had the chance to return to baseline.
It’s as if the body remains stuck mid-breath, always half-expecting the next betrayal.
Healing the Haunted Self
Nijenhuis’s treatment approach, phase-oriented therapy, honors the slow, sacred process of reintegration. He believed that healing required three essential phases:
- Stabilization and Safety
- Processing Traumatic Memories
- Reconnection and Integration.
Too often, survivors are rushed into confronting their memories without first building the inner safety needed to hold them. But Nijenhuis emphasized that stability isn’t avoidance, it’s preparation. He wrote,
“A person must first feel safe enough to feel at all.”
For incest survivors, that means learning that emotion itself isn’t dangerous. Tears don’t cause punishment. Anger isn’t betrayal. Need isn’t shameful. These realizations can take years to embody because the body remembers differently than the mind forgives.
He also spoke of overcoming the phobias that maintain dissociation:
- The phobia of inner experience (fear of emotions and sensations)
- The phobia of attachment and intimacy (fear of being close)
- The phobia of loss and change (fear of letting go of trauma’s identity)
Healing, then, becomes less about “getting over” the trauma and more about befriending the inner parts that once protected us. To the survivor who has lived divided, integration feels less like victory and more like coming home.
The Cultural Amnesia Around Incest
Nijenhuis didn’t only explore personal dissociation, he also recognized societal dissociation. Cultures, he argued, avoid collective trauma the same way individuals do: through denial, minimization, and forgetting.
Incest is perhaps the deepest collective amnesia of all.
Families forget. Communities excuse. Institutions silence. And so the survivor carries not only her own fragmentation but also the weight of a world that refuses to look.
Nijenhuis’s work, while scientific, carries a quiet moral courage, it calls out the collective blindness that keeps survivors isolated. The world wants neat diagnoses: depression, anxiety, BPD. Few want to acknowledge that behind these labels often lies a history of incest and betrayal trauma.
As he once observed,
“Society itself may be structurally dissociated—split between knowing and not wanting to know.”
That is perhaps why so many survivors struggle to find help that feels safe. When clinicians haven’t faced their own fear of the unspeakable, they risk pathologizing the survivor’s coping instead of validating their pain.
Embodiment: Reclaiming the Self Beneath the Split
Healing from incest is not about remembering every detail of what happened, it’s about reclaiming the parts of self that were exiled in order to survive it.
In the body, this looks like thawing. A survivor might feel tingling in their limbs, sudden waves of grief, or even anger that feels too big to belong to the present. These are the emotional parts finally daring to speak.
As Nijenhuis wrote,
“Integration means that the individual becomes able to act as a whole human being in the present, rather than as fragments living in the past.”
This integration doesn’t erase the scars, it reclaims the soul that was hiding beneath them. Each survivor must learn to listen to their own haunted self not as an enemy, but as a messenger. The trembling, the flashback, the numbness, all of it is sacred communication from a body that once had to split to stay alive.
Overcoming the Phobia of Aliveness
One of Nijenhuis’s most powerful insights is that survivors often fear life itself. After years of associating aliveness with danger, stillness with threat, and closeness with pain, even joy can feel foreign.
He explained this as “a phobia of aliveness,” a learned fear of emotional intensity. Survivors might self-sabotage love, success, or peace, not because they don’t want it, but because the body still equates calm with vulnerability.
To unlearn this, healing must be somatic. We cannot think our way back to safety; we must feel our way there. Through slow breath, grounding, gentle touch, and relationships that honor consent and choice, survivors retrain the nervous system to believe that presence no longer equals danger.
As one might say in the language of Holey House: Your body is not broken, it’s just been holding its breath for decades. Healing is the exhale.
The Long Road Home
Ellert Nijenhuis once reflected that dissociation is both “a tragedy and a triumph.” A tragedy because it reflects a childhood no one deserved. A triumph because it reveals how fiercely the psyche fights to survive.
For incest survivors, this duality is sacred truth. The child who split was a genius of survival. The adult who heals is an artist of integration.
Healing isn’t linear. It’s cyclical, like walking through the same haunted rooms, only this time turning on the lights. There will be days when the silence of dissociation feels safer than the noise of feeling. There will be nights when the inner child trembles at the sound of your own heartbeat. But every time you stay present a moment longer, you reclaim a piece of yourself once lost to the shadows.
A Call to Wholeness
If Ellert Nijenhuis taught us anything, it’s that dissociation is not the end of the story, it’s the beginning of a sacred reunion. His research gave survivors the validation science could offer, but the true work belongs to us: learning to live as one whole, embodied self again.
To the incest survivor reading this:
You are not broken. You are divided, and division is reversible.
The parts of you that feel too much, or nothing at all, are not symptoms to be erased; they are messages to be heard.
Your haunted self is not your enemy. It’s the map home.
And as Nijenhuis once said,
“The goal of treatment is not to eliminate the parts, but to help them cooperate and become part of a cohesive whole.”
Wholeness is not who you were before the trauma, it’s who you become when you welcome every part of you back home.
Final Reflection
At Holey House, we believe healing is an act of sacred defiance. It’s choosing to remember what the world wanted you to forget. It’s rebuilding trust in a body that once betrayed you, and realizing, it wasn’t your body that betrayed you. It was the world around you that did.
Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis helped survivors name the fracture.
Now it’s our turn to embody the repair.
Because when one incest survivor comes home to themselves, the whole world becomes a little less haunted.
If you are ready to begin your journey of integration, explore the resources and survivor-centered programs at Holey House. Healing is not forgetting, it’s remembering who you were before the silence.