It is well attested that emotional dissociation is a symptom/outcome of trauma. Effectively, dissociation creates two “you’s”: there is the hidden, timeless, fog enmeshed secret place, and the social you that has to go on and appear normal. You get the outward appearance of emotional movement, but there remains some part of you that knows that if you cross that line into the fog, all the pain you have hidden will come back at you like a pack of ravenous animals.
The task is to acknowledge, then disempower the emotional images, to disconnect from them. But you must go outside this circle.
I think some people choose to forget about the self that lives in the fog. I think they choose to conflate their self image with what is practical socially. This doesn’t work, of course. This is where cruelty comes in. They know they need to face pain, but they have so disconnected themselves that the part asking for reintegration through emotional processing comes to be seen first as outside them, then as the enemy.
They punish this enemy in the outside world, where they see it as existing. This is the root of sadism. I truly believe this is very close to the reality of the thing.
Rosebud never disappears.