Does severe emotional trauma in late teens ever really heal?

[se142]

My best friend is a very successful woman she is a beautiful, very intelligent outgoing person, a wonderful mother, a successful lawyer with a brilliant career, she has a  wonderful husband and beautiful home. In terms of external appearances she is a success on all levels but she suffers from severe and prolonged boughts of depression that by and large she deals with alone, having tried and failed with therapy and medication on many occasions in the past 17 years. I am ever concerned that  she has never really recovered from a traumatic damaging experience in her late teens. Despite the success of her life my friend is haunted by her experience as an undergraduate where she fell in love with an overseas student who married her and then left her within a few months after a very turbulent and it seems emotionally damaging  time. In some ways I think her will was broken or forever altered and unlike a death she never closed that chapter of her life.  I am convinced that the damage done to her, will follow her throughout her life without some serious changes. How can my friend work through this and alter her outlook forever?

[se142]

I think that the lack of closure has been a constant theme in her life. Someone vanished from her life without saying goodbye, leaving my friend humiliated and lost, facing all her critics who were able to say " I told you so". She felt judged and wronged in the most public way.
It is interesting that your response was that it sounds like my friend blames herself for what happened on some levels.  Why do you say that? Blame is an interesting one - maybe she does feel responsible but then it takes two and the apportioning of blame to her is I think unhelpful. You refer to the details -  you know the kind of story - she was at college, he appeared as an overseas undergrad, they fell in love, or she did and he was having his time away in Europe - what an experience. For some bizarre reason they got married - pushing boundaries - who knows. They were very young. They fought. He left without a further word.  Why the damage is so deep I don't understand.

[Jason Greenberg, Ph.D.]

Thanks for further clarifying your friend's situation more clearly.  First, let me say when I said that your friend could be healed, I meant the "absolutely" as an emphasis that I believed she could be helped, not that the help would be "absolute."   It sounds to me that there are a number of issues your friend needs to address, including but not limited to the difficulty of not having said goodbye to someone in a better way than what seems to have occurred (something that many people experience when they lose a loved one) as well as the negative perception of herself and feeling that she is a failure (As an aside, without knowing too many of the details, it sounds to me like she on some level blames herself for what happened).  

It also sounds to me that your friend is dealing with some more fundamental issues that medication isn't necessarily going to address.  The main one, as you point out, is trust.  Trust as you know provides the foundation for relationships; without it, it is difficult to develop closer relationships.   As you imply this difficulty with trust is going to impact your friend's ability and willingness to trust a therapist just as she seems to have difficulty trusting other people.  And while I cannot say this complete confidence, even as traumatic as the relationship and breakup sound like they were, 1) your friend was able to trust someone enough to marry him; 2) it is highly likely that just as your friend may have had a propensity for an eating disorder, they likely had issues around trust that predate that relationship.  Further, if she developed an eating disorder as a reaction to the stress of the relationship and its aftermath, it sounds that she had (has?) some more serious coping deficits as well.

Finally, your friend sounds like she is a person who needs the help of a therapist to help her develop the capacity to trust others more fully, which requires a more intensive psychotherapy in which the issues of trust that come up for your friend in the outside world are dealt with in the therapy office.  

In summary, I cannot guarantee that your friend will be healed.  Perhaps a better way for me to put it would be that I believe that therapy, if she is connected to a therapist with whom she can form a trusting relationship and who can withstand with her and help her withstand her mistrust of him or her, she can heal.

[se142]

Thanks for your reponse.
Your statement is categorical and I am interested to know why you are so absolutely sure that this sort of deep trauma can be really healed.
Medication - my friend has had a series of medication regimes and without exception she cannot bear the affects that these have on her - she is acutely aware of the impact of medication on her clarity of thought and describes many of the experiences as a veil placed between her and the real world which she simply cannot tolerate. My friend maintains that the medication affects her ability to think and respond sharply which is linked to her fear of her bad judgment.
I think that the experience has deeply affected her ability to trust anyone in a really pure way - consequently this impacts the benefit she has derived from any therapy.
The damage done resulted in a loss of confidence, a huge exacerbation of a propensity to an eating disorder (her weight plummeted in the aftermath at the age of 19 and this stayed with her for many years right up until she had a child), a fear of love and trust, a feeling of huge failure and negativity about her ability to make good judgments and a deep rooted sadness that someone never said goodbye in a civilised fashion. I think the biggest thing has been this void that she could not close. How can you get over it so  "absolutely"?

[Jason Greenberg, Ph.D.]

First, to answer the question in your post -- severe emotional trauma in one's late teens can be healed, absolutely.  I think that you are correct in stating that given the emotional impact of the experience she had in her late teens, without "working through" the trauma with someone she will continue to be haunted by the experience.  I am curious to know more about her "failed" experiences with medication and psychotherapy to the degree that you are aware of these experiences, because if she is connected to a therapist with whom she can form a solid and trusting relationship, therapy gives her the best chance to overcome the "damage" wrought by this experience earlier in her life.  It also makes me wonder -- how does she feel the relationship "damaged" her?