Internal reference system that wasn't wrapped up in the emotion of trauma? When I read that, it sounds like someone who became further desensitized to what happened.
I'm sure you're more functional now, but know that being more functional doesn't equate to actually having healed anything. It can just mean the person learned to cope better.
In fact, the initial stages of healing from childhood trauma are expected to be less functional, less productive, and yes, more depressive, because for the first time in the person's life, they're feeling, in a compassionate way, what they've been pushing down all their lives, because they had no one safe to go to, and often there's a lot to unpack. It definitely is tiring and often just exhausting.
But it's the only way. Because without feeling you can't heal.
Also, childhood trauma doesn't create "pathologies" it creates coping mechanisms which any healthy person would develop in the same circumstances, which need to be understood, and which will subside on their own without the need for behavioral approaches (aka symptom fixing) like CBT.
We are all humans, so we can't keep saying "what works for me may not work for others", at the core we do have many things in common, we all have feelings, we all have similar needs. And we all get traumatized in similar ways. So while there might be some differences, at the end of the day, some things will work for everyone, and those things are the ones that relate to the things we ALL have in common.
The reason it became so ingrained in psychology the mentality of "what works for you may not work for others" is because we've been in the equivalent of the middle ages of psychology for trauma treatment.