"In my experience, people do a lot of the 'roping off' themselves. They don't move past the things that bother them, the things that haunt them, even when they thing they have. It lingers--always." She was talking, of course, about repressed memories--those were what caused nightmares or bad dreams. The things that people left to sit and fester. She knew this from her own experiences, dealing with--and unfortunately dwelling on--the death of her sister. She thought herself paranoid, a lot of the time, that nothing seemed to add up about her sister's death. She would never admit to someone she'd just met how personally important her research was, but it was what drove her onward.
Although she wanted to find a way to literally remove bad memories from other people, though, it was never something she wanted to do with her own . She was driven by her demons and she knew that losing that might mean losing a lot of her purpose.