She was 16, he was 40. She told herself it was a romantic affair.

But her body and mind would do strange things when they were together. Sometimes she felt as if she was separate from her body, which would shake and shake after seeing him. This was a full-body shaking, more like a quake than a shiver.

She hadn’t experienced these things before – but neither had she ever been with an older man. This must just be how it was, she thought. She dismissed them.

It took Marissa Korbel more than a decade to view what had happened to her not as an affair, but as assault. “I really took all of the blame for it for at least nine or ten years,” she says. With years of therapy behind her, she’s now a mother and an attorney for an organisation in Oregon that advocates for survivors of sexual assault.

Even today, Korbel finds herself sometimes re-experiencing the bodily dissociation that she first encountered with her assaulter. Revisiting this trauma is a way for her to try to understand it. “I’m seeking sexual experiences that overwhelm me, and that make me basically leave my body,” she explains matter-of-factly. “I have a very complicated relationship with dissociation because I understand that it’s a marker of a trauma. And I know that when I learned to do it, it wasn’t a good thing.”