Victims of traumatic events such as torture or life threatening assault often turn to a specific set of metaphors when trying to explain what it is like to be in the world afterwards. Spatial descriptions such as displacement, exile, homelessness and alienation occur repeatedly as significant terms for how living now differs from what it was like before. These spatial metaphors regularly occur in such first-person narratives along with descriptions of what can be called disturbances of the self: it seems that the feeling of being a self, of being this someone, suffers with such displacement. The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between spatiality and selfhood by way of how it feels when it is disrupted, or, in other words, to make sense of the claim raised by trauma survivors that they are exiled and that their selves are shattered