I’ve been working with a client who recently realized, and then confided in me, that they were carrying trauma from childhood abuse and it was making their life unmanageable.  What struck me was that they hadn’t known this before - they’d been living this way for so long that it just seemed normal to them.  The experience of constant anxiety, hyper-vigilance for perceived threats, and extreme willingness to blame themselves for anything that went wrong was just the air they’d been breathing for the past 30 years.  They hadn’t been having flashbacks to the trauma, they had been living it every moment of their life.