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But I ignore the momentary shock to my system and lean back, letting the water run over me while I fight the panic bubbling under my skin.

I am a doctor, dammit.

I have delivered devastating news to strangers and stayed on my feet through it. I have held a woman’s hand while her son died in front of us.

I do not fall apart.

I don’t have the luxury to do so.

I am the person other people fall apart in front of.

I don’t recognize the woman who is falling apart in this shower. I try to think my way out of it.

When something goes wrong in the OR I make a list and I logic my way through it.

So I start doing that now.

One: trauma bonding is real. I have seen it in patients.

Women who bring their abusers flowers in the ER waiting room. Men who take the blame for their own beatings.

The brain under sustained threat will do anything, anything, to survive, and one of the things it will do is convince you that the person hurting you is not really hurting you.

I have written about this phenomenon in continuing-education modules and done presentations on it.

Two: captivity creates false intimacy.

Same principle.

Small worlds shrink further, and when they shrink far enough there is only one other person in them, and eventually your brain will start reaching for that person because it has nowhere else to reach.

Three: sexual coercion is not always overt. You can consent enthusiastically to something you would never have chosen under other circumstances.

The consent is real.

The circumstances are not fair.

Both things can happen at once.

I have literally told this to women in exam rooms.

I know all of this and it does not help me because knowing about trauma bonding does not stop trauma bonding, any more than knowing about a rip current stops you from being swept out to sea. Neurochemistry is neurochemistry, and knowing my own biochemistry apparently does not save me from being a woman standing in this shower thinking about how his hands felt on me.

I hate myself. I hate myself in a way that I am not used to. I am not a person who wallows or beats herself up over decisions. I make a call in the OR, and if it was the wrong one I learn something from it, then I move on.

That’s how I have survived.

But I don’t know how to move on from this.

This wasn’t a wrong call in a bad moment.

This was me, on his kitchen counter, with my hands in his hair, choosing him with my whole body.

There is no rationalization for that.

There is no unavoidable circumstance. There is only me and what I wanted, and what I wanted last night was him, and I don’t know what to do about that.

Eventually I turn the water off, but I don’t immediately get out of the shower because that feels too difficult. When I do get out, I wrap myself in a towel but I don’t look in the mirror this time. I have already seen what I look like. I don’t need to see it again.