The Blog

Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder Do you feel manipulated, controlled, or lied to? Are you the focus of intense, violent, and irrational rages? Do you feel you are 'walking on eggshells' to avoid the next confrontation? If the answer is 'yes,' someone you […]

Emotional maturity is not about being above your emotions and no longer having mental turbulence, it is about being able to sit with the rawness of every feeling without letting them take over your mind and actions.  You can face storms more skilfully without getting blown away. -Yung Pueblo

From Dr. Laura O’Loughlin, Psychologist at GTLA Recently, I stumbled on the classic episode of Seinfeld called “The Opposite,”  where George Castanza, in a fit of despair about how poorly his life has gone, vows to make all future choices in the opposite manner. In doing so, everything goes magically and comically right for him. […]

Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder & Beyond With the recent Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial, Borderline Personality Disorder is a hot topic. Many people are wondering…. “Do I have Borderline Personality Disorder?” Or “I think my friend, family member, lover, or coworker has it”. What is Borderline Personality Disorder? Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is […]

By Dr. Cara Gardenswartz and Dr. Arezoo Esfahani Self-compassion has been shown to strengthen the parts of the brain that make people happier, more resilient, and more attuned to others. It helps comfort negative emotions in the present, permanently heal painful memories from the past, and change negative core beliefs. Three components of self-compassion: Self-Kindness […]

Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way Divorce is painful and confusing. Perhaps now more than ever, you want to give your child all the love, support, and guidance he or she needs, but everything seems harder and more complicated. Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way can help. Based on […]

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as […]

Children have a natural state of wonder and fun. They love to laugh, see new things, they like to be self-sufficient and will try again and again to walk and will not get mad at themselves for falling again and again as they learn new skills. They cry easily when they are upset. You were […]

If you were asked to list all of the “things” you want in life, it would be easy. That’s because love, money, security, a bigger house, more time, health, are tangible things we can see with our eyes and experience. If you were asked to list all of the things you would like to be…that […]