Having difficulty figuring this one out....

[Unity]

What i think happen sometime with trauma based dissociation when that happen in childhood or teen is that the mind is not able to process some situation, when this kind of flash happenned with me and the girl, it's clear we saw the information is hard to process even for an adult, that this kind of things can happen, and to understand why some situation became dangerous, so the mind dissociate the experience until it's ready to integrate it. I guess the persons who can't dissociate become schizophrenics.

Even if the dissociation allow to compartimentalize the experience, there can still be trends in common interest to deal with a particular kind of situation, or being in places that don't trigger those memories, which can orient many choices, and social environment.

Maybe those flash happen at a particular moment when the mind think the person can integrate this memory into her relation with everyday world when a similar situation of danger will happen to me or another person. It's in those moment there is a mecanism in the mind that will need to take a memory of previous situation to deal with the new one, that will retrigger all the emotions and the state of mind etc

But when this process of reintegration is over, the person will then most likely be much more capable of dealing with similar situation that a person who didn't live through it,

Semantically ok you can say the person 'has an issue with something' that trigger weird reactions instead of saying victim of something :p =)