Are you part of the ‘distraction economy’?
A client once described to me what happened after they had lived through a traumatic assault. For a long time, life stayed busy enough that they rarely had to think about it. Work, obligations, and everyday distractions filled the hours. Whether intentionally or not, staying occupied kept the past at a distance. Then one day things slowed down. There was a rare stretch of quiet. And in that quiet the memory returned all at once, like a tsunami.
We might not have lived through trauma of that magnitude...