Honestly that’s just not how child sex abuse works at all. The detail provides people who’ve never been victimized with the closest thing to understanding what their experience was like. The reason a lot of victims of CSA struggle with shame and self-loathing is literally because of the utter confusion that is sexual abuse. Sometimes it doesn’t feel bad and that causes even more shame. A lot of victims blame themselves even though they were only children. Responses to trauma don’t just include fight or flight. Sometimes children surrender to the trauma because they know it’s inevitable. They know it’s coming. They’ve resigned themselves to it. In some circumstances, resistance is dangerous and the word no isn’t even an option. In this excerpt, Alice describes a dissociative response better than I’ve ever been able to—it gives readers a real picture of what dissociation can be like. She knows it’s coming. She copes with it in the only way she knows how. Like Toni said, your interpretation is your interpretation.