Do you believe this might be true for someone developmentally disabled? Do you think there is hope for all people to heal?

I think I do. I'm not saying everyone reaches some standard level, but I do think many conditions can be improved either through direct mediation or by the development of alternate routes. I think the changes can be more dramatic the earlier the intervention. Also adults may have less plasticity in the brain, but they have developed other skills, so maybe it balances out.

I know that appropriate, competent, empathic therapy works from my own experience. In the depths of my worst depression, I was pretty agoraphobic (and I had those tendencies since childhood, inherited from my mother). Now I'm an ex-pat!

More specifically, a couple of months ago I went through a pretty traumatic experience (everything is fine now). But that experience triggered an onslaught of feelings from childhood that I hadn't experienced in more than a decade. I really felt like I was thrown back to square one. But those feelings, intense as they were, lasted one night. They didn't take hold of me. I didn't spiral. It was more like they just passed through me. I reacted differently in that I did things to take care of myself that I never knew or could do before.

What made the difference? I believe it is because those new pathways were in my brain and allowed me to react differently. Without being conscious of it, I was able to process what had happened and how I was feeling and separate the echoes of the past from the present in a felt way, not just a talking to myself way.

I couldn't have imagined that ever being possible 15 years ago.