We don't learn out of experience, nobody lacks experience except maybe baby's, if experience would be enough by itself to learn, everybody would be self actualized.
The reality is that most people just repeat the same mistakes over and over again for a lifetime all the experience of an entire life sometimes just leads to nothing.
They even repeat some of the mistakes that they used to do since childhood. That is the unfortunate waste of human potential.
In order to learn you need to accumulate new information about reality, which is going to let you know what works and what you are doing wrong. We really learn out of consciousness, the experience it is necessary, but is not the direct cause of learning and positive change. It is the conscious awareness of your experience that it is going to lead you to positive change.
Even if you are doing the wrong thing over and over again, if you are conscious to it you are going to eventually realize it. And then it is going to fell bad, so it is more likely to experiment with alternatives and eventually find what works.
Traumatized people are particularly struggling with this, because they are trapped in pain. And when you are trapped in pain you get in to denial, even if you are not sedating yourself directly, through certain vices like drinking alcohol.
You are sedating yourself by using your mind, because you are in pain and you lost hope that your pain will ever stop, you are absent minded and unconscious. The same way you are when you are a sleep, you have an experience of the world but it is massively distorted, so you can't get an accurate feedback to correct your actions.
A tool that it is design to help with making people more conscious is meditation.
However there is a misconception with the way most people use it, so it remains largely ineffective. Meditation is a tool, learning to meditate is like buying that tool, meditating periodically is like taking care of that tool and maintaining it.
In order to actually get any real benefit from it you have to use it for practical applications in real life. In those particular situation where you struggle, where it is very likely that you are unconscious and become dissociated, bringing presence there is when you truly receive the benefit of meditation.
If you just meditate periodically and expect for the benefits to flow into your life by themselves. That is like saying that buying a hammer and polishing it every day, when it is polished enough it is going to build a house by itself.
