ABSTRACT
The ideas in this chapter are drawn from clinical work with a series of people who were emotionally, physically and/or sexually abused during childhood and who also have a dysfunctional sense of self as adults. These people say such things as ‘I don’t know who I am’, ‘I’m a non-person’, ‘I don’t exist’, ‘When I look inside there’s no one there’, ‘There’s no real me’, ‘I’m just an object’. The precise meaning of statements such as these is often not taken seriously or explored by cognitive therapists, possibly because it is quite clear that the person speaking knows that they exist, otherwise their suffering would not have brought them to treatment, and possibly also because existence is quite a difficult thing to talk clearly about.
