ABSTRACT
This short story is about dissociation as a response to trauma. When loss and pain become too difficult to bear, the body takes over expressing what cannot be conceptualised in words. There is also a wider cultural context implicit here about the denial of feelings and vulnerability as a necessary condition for becoming a man. To the degree that one is willing to accept such a context as a given, such as in the example of young children being sent to boarding school and away from their parents and learning to see this as a privilege and not as a significant developmental trauma, it becomes very hard to make space for one’s emotional reality and the integration of mind and body.
