Mourning the Person One Could Have Become: On the Road from Trauma to Authenticity

This book introduces the concept of the “Person One Could Have Become” and shows the importance of mourning for individuals with traumatic experiences. The Person One Could Have Become is conceptualized as personality and physical characteristics that could have emerged if an individual, at the right time, had received or opted for an appropriate quantity and quality of stimuli and experiences, which in turn would have enabled the person to make more mature and independent choices. Consequences of potentially traumatic events bear non-linear, meta-folding, and multicontextual meaning unique to each being-in-the-world. Many people with a history of trauma tend to mystify their existence in order to survive.

This book contains an overview of the ramifications of abuse and neglect on personality, as well as the consequences of pregnancy loss and the specific loss of possibility and its co-occurrence with abuse and neglect. It looks at examples from daily life and two cases of traumatized individuals who differ in their background and experience of trauma, as well as in their struggles during psychotherapy. This book is not intended as a treatment manual, nor does it advocate for any particular therapeutic approach. It is, rather, an encouragement of a way of living. Indeed, a reasonable mourning of the Person One Could Have Become may set the individual free—also such with the history of trauma—for the road beyond the traditional psychotherapy outcome, the road toward authenticity.