Self-sabotage in 4 yo daughter - how to parent?

One of the newer parenting models comes from the premise that all bad behavior is fear based. This can be applied to anyone, not just kids or people with attachment issues. With kids, the "therapy" boils down to loving them through their fear until their stress threshold increases enough to reduce or eliminate the bad behavior. The fact that your daughter is adopted means that in her short life she has already experienced the trauma of the loss of her bio family. Whatever the circumstances surrounding that loss could compound the amount of emotional trauma her brain has had to deal with. Heather T. Forbes' book, "[URL="http://beyondconsequences.com"]Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control[/URL]," introduces something called "The Stress Model," which views all behaviors as stemming from two primary emotions: love and fear. Positive behavior is produced by feelings of love. Negative behavior is produced by fear. At the point at which bad behavior is exhibited, the child is not functioning from their cognitive brain--you're daughter truly doesn't know why she wet herself at the time that it occurred--so consequences typically fail to teach the child anything. In my daughter's case, she doesn't have much more than a rudimentary understanding of cause and effect, so even when I tell her that repeating a behavior will result in a consequence, she can't understand why she receives the consequence after she repeats the behavior. Cause and effect thinking resides in the frontal lobe and is supposed to be established during the first 3 yrs of a child's life; in situations where a child doesn't receive the necessary stimulation for proper neuropathways to develop the child may not learn things like that. That's only one of the basic concepts of life that is supposed to develop in the frontal lobe during a child's first 3 years. They all take a backseat when a child is growing up in "survival" mode due to early childhood trauma. Using the Stress Model as the foundation for parenting takes away the issue of whether the behavior was about control or not, and takes away the parent's stress of trying to always enforce parental control. Instead, you get to lovingly tell your child that you understand that something is causing them more stress than they can cope with but it's ok because you're there to help them deal with it. My stress level has decreased tremendously in the few weeks since I started reading the book. Being able to let things slide without worrying that my daughter will grow up to be a delinquent because I didn't straighten her out and assert my dominance as parent has taken a huge burden off my shoulders.