The story you stopped telling may still shape how you behave.

An account of yourself can go quiet without going away. You stop mentioning the redundancy, the illness, the thing that happened at school, and the caution it produced carries on making decisions on your behalf. Silence often gets mistaken for having moved past something. In practice the story simply stopped being narrated and kept operating underneath.

Look at a habit of avoidance you cannot quite explain and ask which old episode it belongs to. Telling that story once, to somebody safe, is a way of putting it back where you can see it.