I don't know if it will help but this is how I describe childhood trauma;
When something bad happens, a part of our mind gets the job of working out why it happened so we can work out how to avoid a similar event in the future. It's a protection mechanism, not one that's meant to torment us but part of that 'working out' involves rerunning the event from every angles, hence the flashbacks, nightmares and intrusive thoughts.
However, when we suffer a traumatic event in our lives (especially early trauma) there isn’t always an answer. Trauma can be so unexpected (and is always undeserved) – the truth is we didn’t do anything wrong to cause it and certainly couldn’t have avoided it; no matter what others might say.
The need to make some sort of sense of the experience can often lock us into that moment. A part of our subconscious becomes unable to move on until we can fully understand it and put it to rest in our minds. It becomes like a jigsaw puzzle with some vital pieces missing.
However, if we had a jigsaw puzzle that we knew didn’t have all the pieces, we would stop trying to solve it. Our mind only engages with things it thinks it has the possibility of achieving. Once the subconscious mind knows that this traumatic event – or series of events – was never meant to make sense (because not everything in life is going to make sense), and anything we
were going to learn from it was learned at the time, it can let go of the search for resolution.
You don't forget what happened but the emotional bond is broken so that you are no longer affected by it. One client described it as though when she tried to grasp the feelings associated with the trauma, it slipped harmlessly from her hands, as if covered in oil.