By Hannah Davis

Things have happened to my body, but not to me. Dealing with sexual violence, I have historically found this incredibly comforting: the idea that everything is separate and external and impersonal somehow. It’s protective and soothing in the short term, but ultimately incredibly damaging to any sense of an autonomous, healing self. So then why does it make things feel so much better?

In the moment, it creates a barrier. To dissociate from what is happening to you physically can seem like an absolute necessity. Assault is often paralysing. To imagine that you are somehow floating away from the situation – outside of your body and safe – is to sever ties between the corporeal and the mental. It’s about survival. It’s a necessary preservative measure and it’s a direct response to an experience so awful that you often have no choice but to stop feeling.

It also creates a victim. Treating your body like a separate entity can make it easier to have compassion towards it; often we are much better at empathising with others than we are at empathising with ourselves. We can acknowledge that something has been injured without having to reckon with that something being a someone, and that someone being ourselves.

At the same time, it creates a scapegoat. You are not the problem, your body is. You are not damaged, your body is. You aren’t responsible, your body is. Drawing a line between parts of yourself, between the vessel and the real thinking breathing feeling person, allows you to join in with a culture of pervasive victim blaming. You are still able to assume culpability and you can be what they want you to be. But it isn’t all of you. It isn’t the bits that can feel. If you cut yourself into small enough pieces, nothing can hurt as much.

And it creates a punching bag. The combination of suffering and numbness make the ideal conditions for punishment. If you’re in pain anyway, what’s a little bit more? If you need to take it out on something, why not pile on to what is already under attack? If you’ve lost the ability to feel, why not test the limits? Why not push harder? Why not let go altogether?

All of this can be true at one time. In a single moment, we are protecting and attacking and blaming and forgiving and understanding and misunderstanding ourselves. Sexual violence is so isolating. You must be everything to yourself. No one else was there. No one else knows.

Things have happened to my body, but not to me. My body has been hurt, but I have not. My body has suffered, but I have not. Except obviously this is not true. It can’t be. And obviously, it does not help. It’s so incomplete. It attempts to eliminate so much mental pain and yet, in skating over such fundamental and heartbreaking truths, it only exacerbates it.

But how can we really engage with it? How can we let ourselves think about – really, really think about – the magnitude of the suffering we have endured? How can it ever be ok? If the answer is that it can’t, how can we ever be ok? And then what?

I honestly do not know. I really want to be optimistic, but I don’t want to pretend that this isn’t and hasn’t been and won’t continue to be all kinds of appalling. I hope it will get better but I don’t know that it will. I know that it will get different – that it won’t be this way forever, but that this doesn’t guarantee an improvement.

I know that reconnecting with my body is a process and a painful one at that, and that there is a certain amount of facing up to hard realities that I won’t be able to skip over. I also know that feeling things is good. It is terrible too; sometimes I wish I could live on a flatter emotional plain and feel it all a bit less. But whilst the lows are lower, the highs are higher too. That’s something.

Things have happened to my body, and to me. Detachment and healing cannot coexist as I would like. The only way out is through.

 Hannah Davis is a second year Spanish student at the University of Oxford, originally from North London. She writes and edits for the Oxford Blue, a student-run journal, as well as being a College Writing Fellow and contributor at the Jewish Feminist publication Hey Alma.