Britney Spears, like anyone, can use the facts of her fractured life, especially the most painful ones, to make her way back to stability and real self-esteem.
She should note that fame and money and applause and false friends are intoxicants, like drugs. They're meant to hide the facts when someone feels unloved and unprotected, particularly from an early age. They are no different from alcohol or illicit drugs, in that regard, and detoxing from all of it, under the care of a psychiatrist or psychologist who keeps her confidence and protects her privacy is the way out.
Part of the way out may mean surrendering to the fact that behaving like a child sometimes means a legal guardian -- someone to make legal and financial and medical decisions for a time -- could be a necessary, temporary shield from a hostile world.
She should see for what it is her parents recently reported booking on a television special about her: a window on the apparent reality that they cannot separate her value to them as a celebrity from her being an invaluable and cherished member of the family. Maybe they never could.
She should know that wondering whether anyone in your life is (or has ever been) trustworthy is enough to make your moods shift from high to low, to leave you untethered and searching for love anywhere you think (wrongly) you might find it -- in the arms of one sexual partner after another, in the lens of the next camera, in the feeling of giving birth, even when mothering is something you might not have learned by example.
She should understand that psychiatric medication can be an extraordinary tool for healing, but that soul searching with the right guide is indispensible, that finding the sources of suffering is the first step on the path out of suffering.
And she should know that all is still within reach. A genuine life. A true and balanced relationship with her kids. True love. Because the capacity to suffer as she has is tied to the capacity for growth and a sure sign that her heart, while raw and vulnerable, still beats.
She should know that the truth always wins, and that hers can still be about early chapters filled with conflict, but later chapters all about the power of the human spirit to heal.
Keith Ablow, MD is the Fox News psychiatrist and the author of Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty.
