You're running into exactly what makes dealing with childhood trauma so difficult. It's normal. When we're kids, what happens in our family is what we assume happens in everyone's family so why would it be a big deal. But for some of us (and I don't want to presume to include you) that's really not true. It has taken me a long time to come to grips with just how bad what happened to me is. And the problem is that there was no one there to help me cope with the feelings that resulted from the abuse because they were the ones abusing me. Left a lot of crap to clean up (pardon my language, but that's really how it feels.)
One thing that really hit me about your post was the "looking at the gaping abyss below."
That resonates so strongly with me, I really understand what you're saying.
Looking at and working through trauma is a difficult, painful process. My T has talked about the fact that people go to therapy to make things better but often in the beginning things get worse because you're moving towards painful stuff. Since you mentioned about growing up, I'm assuming some of this happened when you were little. Often, when a child is subjected to traumatic events within the family, there are NO resources to cope with the emotional fallout, so as a matter of survival, we learn to look away, to not see, to put it out of mind. It's called denial and it's a lovely place to spend a lot of time. I have a vacation home there myself.
It makes sense that trying to go towards something we fear would kill us would be hard to do. And one way of avoiding going towards it is to minimize it. If it wasn't a big deal, why the big fuss about looking at it?Please take all this with a grain of salt, I'm basing it mainly on my experience connecting with a few phrases you used, so this may really not apply. But I wanted to offer it as a possible insight.
AG