Severance as Grief and Dissociation
Most people who watch Severance talk about it as a satire of corporate life or a dark allegory about work and home balance. And it is that. But what struck me after just a few episodes, (3 if we’re being precise) and what has grown the more I have thought about it after watching the first 2 seasons, is how much deeper it runs.
What if Severance is actually a story about a fractured mind trying to survive grief?
When trauma becomes unbearable, the brain has a built-in survival tactic: dissociation. It is not always dramatic, but it can feel like a splitting of the self. One part goes through the motions of life. Another part remains trapped in the moment of loss, unable to let go.
That is exactly what the innies and outies represent. The outie is the self who carries the burden of grief, weighed down by memories of the dead wife. The innie is severed from that pain, existing in a kind of numb void where the trauma does not intrude. The severance procedure literalises this split. It is dissociation turned into architecture.
The refinement process as forced moving on
Take the Break Room. On the surface, it is corporate discipline. But symbolically it looks very much like the unhealthy way society treats grief.
The refinement process is a brutal attempt to erase the grieving self. The repetition of confessions, the forced recitations, the correction by authority figures all echo the pressure mourners face: “Have you not moved on yet?” “You cannot keep living in the past.”
Instead of processing grief with care, Lumon demands forgetting. Refinement becomes obliteration. It is the destruction of the self that still clings to the dead wife. Therapy stripped of compassion, grief counselling turned cultic.
The work self versus the home self
This also plays into a universal truth. Everyone presents different versions of themselves at work and at home. At work, we perform roles, often numbing or cutting off parts of ourselves to survive. At home, our vulnerabilities and grief surface.
Severance exaggerates this everyday truth. Two selves, literally unable to share memories or feelings, trapped in their separate worlds.
And then there is Lumon itself, with its eerie resemblance to Scientology and Dianetics:
The Break Room as an auditing session
The handbook as sacred text
The endless, meaningless levels mirroring Scientology’s OT stages
The total isolation of members from the outside world
Lumon functions as both corporation and cult, exploiting the vulnerable fracture in its workers’ minds.
This is why Severance resonates beyond satire. It is not just about capitalism or creepy corporations. It is about the way grief divides us, the way trauma can split the mind, and the way institutions, whether workplaces or cults, exploit that fracture.
The show becomes a metaphor for surviving loss: the part of us that still loves and still clings, versus the part that tries to carry on. Dissociation as protection, refinement as erasure, cult as cage.
That is why it feels so raw, so much more than workplace commentary. It is about what happens when grief becomes unbearable, and how a person, or even a whole system, tries to sever it away.
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