5 golden years

my thoughts

  • living in borderland: crazy making

    [This is part of the series, “Living in Borderland,” in which I describe my experiences living with my Mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder; covering psychological criteria, manifestations, effects on children, family and sibling reactions, and finding help.] ————— My therapist introduced me to the term, “Crazy Making,” a psychological concept that perfectly described the world in…

  • living in borderland: helping yourself

    [This is part of the series, “Living in Borderland,” in which I describe my experiences living with my Mother’s Borderline Personality Disorder, covering psychological criteria, manifestations, effects on children, family and sibling reactions, and finding help.] “Be gone.. you have no power here.” Visiting the Land of Oz, we hear these words from the good…

  • clinical aspects of addictive families

    [This is for those interested in the psychological underpinnings of families living with addiction; focusing on abusive relationships, and on etiology and treatments, drawing on my personal and professional experiences as a family therapist, along with current research.] “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”(Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)…

  • dissociating

    Where do I start? Throughout my childhood I was just surviving, not attempting to make sense of what Mother was doing or why was she doing it. With all of the physical and verbal abuse, I quickly learned to distance myself, dissociate, although I was not able to label it as such until as an…

  • something’s wrong

    In the words of my sister, “Growing up I knew something was wrong, I didn’t know what, but I got out of there as soon as I could.” She was smart and went away to college. Me, not so much. Going through Mother’s pathological hoarding (details in another blog), I found family photos from our…