Compassion Matters

How to save a life

Lisa Firestone Ph.D.

It’s Time to Evict the Parents in Your Head

We need to make emotional sense of our experience with our parents in order to be free to live our own lives.

3 Questions that Can Change the Way You Feel About Sex

Here are three questions to ask yourself to help you feel more alive toward your own, honest feelings about sexuality.

5 Truths about Anxiety to Help You Stay Present

Here are five things to recognize about anxiety that can help us stay more present and feel much calmer in our lives.

The Dangers of Separating Children from Parents

There are decades of attachment research showing us just how serious the consequences of separating kids from their parents can be.

How to Reach Out to Someone Who May Be Suicidal

If you want to know how to approach someone you’re worried about, here’s what you can do.

Getting the Love You Want

If we can be open, curious, and willing to explore our patterns and where they come from, we can take a great deal of power over our romantic lives.

It’s Not Your Fault: Overcoming Trauma

Recognizing that you came by your pain honestly and innocently can be freeing and the beginning of healing.

5 Ways to Feel Closer to Your Partner

There are tangible actions you can take today to reconnect you to your own warm, loving feelings and bring you closer to your partner.

How to Fall Back in Love With Your Partner

There are real, proactive actions you can take to reconnect with what you felt when you fell in love.

Who Do You Think You Are? Why You Could Be Wrong

When you get a wrong idea about who you are as a child, you can face a lifetime of trying to prove or disprove that identity. Neither extreme reflects who you really are.

Dealing with Unresolved Trauma

When we don’t deal with our trauma, we carry it with us. We haven’t made sense of our story, and therefore, our past is still impacting our present in countless invisible ways.

The Wait for the College Acceptance Letter

We need to address the emotional state of students waiting on college acceptance letters. How can we help them understand, accept, and cope with the feelings that arise?

Healing from Attachment Issues

Experiencing an insecure attachment pattern as a child can affect us in powerful ways throughout our lives. However, as adults, it’s possible to develop earned secure attachment.

The Secret to Staying Close to Your Partner

Being vulnerable and disclosing our underlying wants, needs, and emotions can create the closeness in our relationship that we say we want.

How Emotions Guide Our Lives

Exploring our emotions is a worthy endeavor for anyone hoping to know and develop themselves, build healthy relationships, and pursue what they want in life.

4 Ways to Choose a Better Partner

Here are four ways to break out of the same dating cycles and choose batter partners and relationships.

Changing Your Sense of Identity

How can we challenge a prescribed sense of identity, peel back the layers, and find out who we really are?

Are You Living With an Accidental Identity?

While we can change our identity at any point in life, in order to live freely as our truest selves, we have to explore the early influences that injured our sense of who we are.

Is Narcissism Shaped by Attachment Style?

Recent research has explored connections between the two main types of narcissism and the early attachment style a person experienced.

Are You Creating Your Own Nightmare in Your Relationship?

In our adult relationships, we often select, distort, and provoke our partners to recreate dynamics from our past. How can we stop this cycle?

What Is Your Role in Your Relationship?

Couples get into trouble when one person takes the role of a parent, and the other the role of a child. Breaking down this dynamic can reveal how it's hurting our relationship.

The Role of Anger in Depression

The more we can take our own side and resist the tendency to turn our anger on ourselves, the more we can challenge our depression.

What Drives Our Loneliness?

Our fight against loneliness is more of an internal struggle than we may imagine. It is primarily a matter of standing up against our inner critic and challenging our core defenses

Be the One to Help Save a Life from Suicide

In a given lifetime, all of us will likely encounter someone in crisis. That's why it’s so important to know what we can do to help.

The Unselfish Art of Prioritizing Yourself

Maintaining a certain regard for ourselves, doing things we want to do, and engaging in self-care are fundamental to creating a good life for ourselves and the people we love.

How to Not Lose Track of What’s Really Important

Between our fantasy of how things should go and an inner critic telling us how awful we are if they don’t, we're often too caught up in our heads to be fully present in our lives.

A Guide to the Fantasy Bond

Many struggles we face in our current interpersonal relationships arise from a core defense formed in childhood known as the “fantasy bond.”

Take Control of Who You Are in Your Relationship

In any relationship, we can never control the other person, but when we change our reactions to triggers, we're much more likely to shift the dynamic and get what we want.

5 Ways for Partners to Get Truly Closer

Many people struggle with vulnerability, but fail to realize the ways they protect or distance themselves from others. Being vulnerable in our actions can save our relationships.

Is Being Proud of Your Kids Really about You?

As parents, we can overly connect to our kids and fail to see them as separate people who own their own accomplishments. This leaves kids longing to be seen for who they truly are.

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