Compassion Matters

How to save a life

Lisa Firestone Ph.D.

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 Things You Can Do Today 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.

Is Cynicism Ruining Your Love Life?

Being open-minded and optimistic can enhance our well-being and mental health as well as our interpersonal relationships. Cynicism will often do the opposite.

Suicide in the Media

Talking about suicide is essential to getting people the help they need. However, the way in which we discuss, depict, and report on suicide is extremely important.

Are You the Pursuer or the Distancer in Your Relationship?

In most relationships, one partner has more desire for closeness, while the other has more need for distance. If you are part of a couple, which one are you?

Secrets to a Less Stressful Life

No matter what it is that’s making each of us anxious, we can all arm ourselves with the tools to help us stay calm, centered, and feeling strong in the face of challenges.

What Goes On in the Mind of Your Therapist?

Good therapists aim to see their clients without the overlays on their personality generated by the past, and they take steps to help people eventually see themselves the same way.

Creating a More Positive Identity

What keeps us from truly being ourselves? When we side with our inner critic, we accept a prescription for our identity that was written by our past but limits us in the present.

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