On a different tack, you have an incredible number of sections. Are you by any chance changing your margins on a regular basis? This inserts a section break, an unnecessary one. It is something done by a person used to using Word Perfect. If so, try changing to a different style with paragraph indents set differently.

Or, is this a document converted from Word Perfect?

If so, the best way to make it work in Word may be to export to plain text (.txt) and then copy that text into Word. Reformat it using Styles.

Yeah I thought about plain text but I couldn't do that because I would have lost too much other important formatting. It's not my document, I'm helping someone out with this. I tried the various paste options too.

In the end, for whatever reason, Word was showing all of those sections but they weren't actually there. I've never seen that before. After closing and opening the document the sections were gone (one of the numerous things I did must have worked, I just can't believe the sections were still showing).

Anyway for future reference if anyone runs into this very whacky issue, try completely closing out of all Word windows and signing back in. Sometimes it's the simplest solution haha...