Warning: SPOILERS for Clarice season 1, episode 1, "The Silence Is Over".
In Clarice, FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling (Rebecca Breeds) is avoiding Catherine Martin (Marnee Carpenter), the final victim of the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. However, Clarice's stance on Catherine isn't that odd when one understands Starling's own fragile mental state and how she regards the sole survivor of Buffalo Bill's rampage.
In The Silence of the Lambs, Jame Gumb AKA Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) was well-into his bloody rampage before FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) was sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) for Hannibal the Cannibal's insights into how to catch the serial killer on the loose. Buffalo Bill kidnapped six women, murdered them, and then skinned them. Bill specifically targeted "larger women" and his last victim was Catherine (Brooke Smith), who happened to be the daughter of Senator Ruth Martin (Diane Baker). Through Hannibal, Clarice learned that Buffalo Bill was a failed transvestite who was fashioning "a woman suit" for himself. Starling followed clues her own FBI superiors overlooked and found Buffalo Bill's house in Belvedere, Ohio, where Catherine was being kept. When Clarice realized she had found her quarry, she descended into Bill's literal house of horrors and was able to shoot Bill dead. Catherine was rescued alive.
Clarice is set in 1993, a year after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, and the series premiere, "The Silence is Over", reveals that Agent Starling had not spoken to Catherine Martin since the day she saved her from Buffalo Bill. In fact, Catherine had reached out to Clarice multiple times and was ignored. Rubbing salt in Catherine's wound was that Starling met with the families of Bill's other victims on the one-year anniversary of the killings, but she still avoided Catherine on purpose. In "The Silence is Over", Catherine used a bit of guile to finally get Clarice on the telephone, but their conversation only worsened the PTSD both are suffering from since their common ordeal against Buffalo Bill.
The fact they have shared trauma is a prime factor as to why Clarice stonewalled Catherine's attempts to reach her for a year. Clarice revealed that Starling didn't escape her ordeal with Buffalo Bill unscathed; she suffers from her own trauma that she's not fully addressing, despite being mandated took seek therapy by the FBI. Clarice is definitely haunted by her encounter with Buffalo Bill, and she has the nightmares to prove it, but Starling is not disclosing her problems to her therapist (Shawn Doyle), because she neither likes nor trusts him.
Meanwhile, another reason why Clarice isn't addressing her PTSD or commiserating with Catherine is that Starling doesn't consider herself to be a "survivor" of Buffalo Bill. Clarice's mental image of herself as an FBI Agent is in the mold of her late father, who was a town marshal in West Virginia. Clarice adored and hero-worshipped her father, and she was permanently scarred by his death by gunshot. But Starling also pursued a career in law enforcement to emulate her father. So, in Clarice's mind, she can't be a "survivor" of Buffalo Bill because to be a "survivor" means she was first a victim of the serial killer, and Clarice doesn't see herself as one of Bill's victims. Starling was the one who found and killed Bill, after all, so she doesn't accept she has as much in common with Catherine as Martin believes.
Yet that triumph doesn't ease or erase Clarice's terrifying experience inside Buffalo Bill's house when she rescued Catherine, who truly was Bill's victim. Catherine was never the same; she has lost weight (because Bill targeted her because of her size), she is purposefully isolated, and she even kept Bill's poodle Precious, which is disturbing. Clarice was able to meet with the families of Buffalo Bill's other victims because those women are dead, and the families see Clarice as a hero who brought them justice and a measure of peace. But Catherine is Bill's only living victim and she sees herself and Clarice as one-and-the-same, an equation that Special Agent Starling rejects. Clarice loathes the truth that she does have more in common with Catherine Martin than she wants to admit.