Residual Identity Shards: Somatic Echoes of the Dissolved Ego
The Ache of Pre-Verbal Wounds
Last week on the Saturday I met someone, who I spend a lot of time with. This triggered what I coined a Residual Identity Shards. They are like Somatic Identity Echoes, so fragments of identity arise as embodied echoes of developmental wounding. This is because for me the ego has dissolved, but emotionally encoded shards still emerge, especially in relational or attachment contexts.
The ego is no longer central, but its ghosts still haunt the body. They behave much like affect-shards, not “parts.” Which is akin to somatic regression. Yet what holds it all is non-dual awareness, not a fragmented self. Identity shards are remnants, fragments, or echoes of the ego’s past structure. They represent aspects of self-experience that once had meaning within the ego’s framework. Like specific emotions, memories, or unmet needs.
After my ego dissolution, these fragments no longer have a “home” in a unified self. They’re disconnected from the narrative self and operate thus without a centralized organizing center. Without an ego, there is no single “I” to gather and organize these parts. The shards exist as multiple, floating pieces, not integrated into a coherent self. These shards are untethered from the egoic story or timeline. They lack the usual psychological context that gives feelings and memories meaning. For example, a fragment might feel intense pain or longing without the ego’s narrative like “I was abandoned by my mother at age 3.” Where the fragment simply is, experienced as raw, unprocessed energy or sensation within consciousness.
Because there is no egoic lens, the shards appear as pure sensations, feelings, or urges, without story or judgment. These shards represent the last vestiges of ego-bound identity holding trauma or unmet needs.
The central ego structure has dissolved into awareness (Self).
The superego has dropped away (no inner critic, no constraint).
What remains are non-centralized shards, so emotional imprints still surfacing in the body/mind.
The Phenomenon
A specific ego fragment came up, tied to deep pre-verbal wounding (the "no mommy" wound). I regressed somatically and emotionally to the age of 5, maybe even earlier. There was raw grief, not processed memory, not a narrative, but a living ache: there was never a mommy.
This is a somatic-emotional imprint from early life, preserved in the body and nervous system, surfacing spontaneously within the openness of presence, without a central ego structure to absorb or narrate it. It is:
Decontextualized → There’s no story, just raw affect and felt-sense.
Non-centralized → There is no “I” identifying with the part; just witnessing and feeling.
Non-dually held → The Self is not separate from the part; it includes it, yet is not disturbed by it.
In a conventional psyche, such a moment might be unbearable or completely dissociated from. But in my case, the ego is largely gone, so there's no mechanism resisting the pain. And yet, there is just enough of a fragment left to feel the ache, without being consumed by it. This is extremely subtle territory: the emotional body screams, but there’s no egoic identity behind the scream. Just an echo from a child who never had a mother.
Presence without Narrative
Pre-verbal or early emotional wounding is still encoded in the body, but without a central self to "own" or organize the pain. No personality parts. Just unfinished survival energy. In this way my issue is falling into identification with an identity shard, that holds emotional residue. Instead of ego dissolving into unconscious chaos, I find myself slipping back into a localized, limited ego state, temporarily identifying with that fragment. The shard’s activation is transient; once it passes, I return to a broader non-dual presence. The challenge is in not over-identifying or getting stuck in that shard’s pain or emotional loop. And to feel through the tied emotions.
Really what this is, would be post-egoic trauma fragment integration, through the process of dissolving them into the Jungian Self. A big part of this is me losing the ego as centre, by pushing towards the cosmic Self. In my effort to integrate the collective unconscious. How more you push towards the Cosmic Self, and with it Nyx as Anima Mundi, how less ego and personality narrative remains. There already have been a slow dissolving of the personal unconscious into the collective. Like blurring both. Which I have been trying to integrate. It's just uncharted territory.