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This is really not something I'm qualified to talk about. However, I wanted to include one thought by Hans-Georg Gadamer which is also relevant more generally.
Gadamer writes that we may try to spare children from this or that experience but that,
experience as a whole is not something that anybody can be spared.
This is true for our own, adult selves too. We may try to avoid difficult or unpleasant experiences, we may retreat into familiar comfort zones or into addictions or bad habits, but what we are trying to 'escape' from can never be fully escaped from. We can never avoid the simple fact of existence and all the joy and suffering that it entails.
Another way of saying this is found in the movie Inside Out. The main character, Riley, when confronted with difficult, negative experiences (moving across the country as a child) begins to 'shut down'. She enters a depressive phase, her 'personality centers' are forcibly stripped from her unconscious, since these are the features of her self that define her existence in the world. In other words, she flees from existence.
The lesson at the end of the movie is that her 'sadness' is an integral part of her identity. Sadness and negative experience are (if you're lucky like her, I guess) what build community, since when others sense sadness and negativity they reach out and form connections.
For Gadamer, the self is formed through negativity. When things are going normally, we are 'invisible' to ourselves. We behave automatically (indeed, Riley's unconscious is a well-oiled machine, aside from that niggling character Sadness). It is only when things fail, start to break down, that we are forced to turn inward and reflect on ourselves. In this way, our self first 'appears' to us, as a self, through these negative experiences. Through this reflection we learn and evolve and grow.
This cycle of negativity and growth is a natural feature of experience, and one we should struggle to embrace instead of pushing it aside with 'distractions'.