A milder flight from reality is dissociation. Helen Knott, subjected to sexual exploitation when very young, describes it well: “My feelings left my body. My spirit sat outside of me like an unacknowledged apparition. I didn’t know whose life I was living, whose body I inhabited. This wasn’t my story, my life, my reality . . . I was scared that if I tried to lean into my feelings, I would fall off the emotional edge and I didn’t know what I would do to myself.”[10] What we call a disorder is revealed to be an ingenious means for an assaulted psyche to absent itself from agony.
