Sometimes you experience a trauma that takes your brain hours, days, weeks even years to process because it is such a shock to the senses.
I have seen guys snap over battle scars years after the actual battle. Some breaker inside the head just seems to trip over seemingly nothing.......maybe a couple of Burkas haunting a Walmart toy isle and whammo....you're back in the **** emotionally even though you're not there and now your brain is processing everything that it wouldn't at the time.
I can completely understand how decades can pass and all of a sudden a women is more affected emotionally by a rape than she was at the time. Additionally, I can think of few things worse for any human being than being raped. These women deserve sympathy and support while Ghomeshi deserves a prison cell.
yes for sure it's a survival skill
we process trauma when we feel safe enough to do so, sometimes that is never, other times it is when we simply are full and can take no more
triggers are peculiar things as you said simply viewing a burka and it triggers a flood
I watched an interesting documentary a few years back on survival and the capability of the human mind and body to compartmentalize a situation, shut it down and just survive. Interestingly it doesn't always work for every one. They used extremes of course to illustrate the research. One was an individual who had fallen out of a window onto a spiked fence. They landed upside down with the spikes completely down their body. A passerby was smart enough to grab them and hold them in place until help arrived. It happened to be at the correct precise moment in the fall, if they had descended further the spikes would have pierced vital organs.
If they had moved, they would have died. Buddy said he had zero pain until they removed him. They explained how the brain had blocked the pain until he was safe. Apparently that can happen with bullets in the body too. The brain will freeze us, or push us to run depending upon how it has processed what the best reaction is for survival.
Psychologically we function the same way, if we are lucky.