If she had the sort of childhood you describe, her problems are not with her apparatus of rational thinking, but with her emotional brain. If the problem is not with her cognitive apparatus, it cannot be solved there.
It is very common for people who had toxic childhoods to become very interested in psychology. See for example Alice Miller’s book “The Drama of the Gifted Child” which explains that children who grow up in toxic environments often become psychologically “gifted” out of necessity, and end up as psychologists.
Unfortunately while they may gain knowledge, it usually does not help. It does not help any more than knowing that you are frightened of dogs because several dogs bit you as a child. This insight does not solve the problem.
What to do?
Psychotherapy has a very poor track record. There are some good therapists and many poor ones. A lot of therapists are themselves the walking wounded. Irvin Yalom seems to be one of the good ones—see for example “The Gift of Therapy” for how it can work.
Time is a slow and ineffective healer. Many people go to their graves still terribly wounded.
One reason people with traumatic childhood seem to end up in bad relationships is that they feel compelled to replay the experiences until they solve them.
Successful therapy seems to involve replaying the experiences and reprogramming the emotional mind with new ways of processing the experience.
The problem is that often the person cannot actually go back to the original experiences in their full intensity because they were too traumatic. If the person can go back and reprocess the original experiences emotionally, they are likely to have a moment of realization and restructure their emotional reactions. The rational work follows this and is usually relatively simple.
EMDR is one technique that can help in this regard. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing . The eye movement technique mutes the overwhelming intensity of the experience, allowing the adult brain to reprocess the traumatic events and deal with them with the full resources of the adult brain.
A technique is in some ways quite similar is Ed Seykota’s Trading Tribe process. This was developed to help traders deal with the intense psychological challenges of trading, such as 60% drawdowns, and losing 10% of your net worth in 15 minutes. I personally have had a few major breakthroughs with this process. As with EMDR the focus is on providing a means for the person to fully experience the original traumatic events and reprocess them.
If she had the sort of childhood you describe, her problems are not with her apparatus of rational thinking, but with her emotional brain. If the problem is not with her cognitive apparatus, it cannot be solved there.
It is very common for people who had toxic childhoods to become very interested in psychology. See for example Alice Miller’s book “The Drama of the Gifted Child” which explains that children who grow up in toxic environments often become psychologically “gifted” out of necessity, and end up as psychologists.
Unfortunately while they may gain knowledge, it usually does not help. It does not help any more than knowing that you are frightened of dogs because several dogs bit you as a child. This insight does not solve the problem.
What to do?
Psychotherapy has a very poor track record. There are some good therapists and many poor ones. A lot of therapists are themselves the walking wounded. Irvin Yalom seems to be one of the good ones—see for example “The Gift of Therapy” for how it can work.
Time is a slow and ineffective healer. Many people go to their graves still terribly wounded.
One reason people with traumatic childhood seem to end up in bad relationships is that they feel compelled to replay the experiences until they solve them.
Successful therapy seems to involve replaying the experiences and reprogramming the emotional mind with new ways of processing the experience.
The problem is that often the person cannot actually go back to the original experiences in their full intensity because they were too traumatic. If the person can go back and reprocess the original experiences emotionally, they are likely to have a moment of realization and restructure their emotional reactions. The rational work follows this and is usually relatively simple.
EMDR is one technique that can help in this regard. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing . The eye movement technique mutes the overwhelming intensity of the experience, allowing the adult brain to reprocess the traumatic events and deal with them with the full resources of the adult brain.
A technique is in some ways quite similar is Ed Seykota’s Trading Tribe process. This was developed to help traders deal with the intense psychological challenges of trading, such as 60% drawdowns, and losing 10% of your net worth in 15 minutes. I personally have had a few major breakthroughs with this process. As with EMDR the focus is on providing a means for the person to fully experience the original traumatic events and reprocess them.