BPD and Infidelity: Understanding the Pattern Without Excusing It
When Borderline Personality Disorder intersects with infidelity, the aftermath is rarely simple to sort through, for either partner. This post walks through the clinical patterns researchers and clinicians most often see connecting BPD traits to infidelity, why those patterns exist without excusing the harm they cause, and what a genuinely both/and path toward accountability and healing can look like for both people in the relationship.
- The Message That Wouldn’t Stop Loading
- What Do We Mean by BPD and Infidelity?
- The Nervous System Underneath the Pattern
- How This Shows Up in Driven Women’s Relationships
- Betrayal Trauma: The Wound Underneath the Wound
- Both/And: The Explanation Is Real AND the Harm Is Real
- The Systemic Lens: Why This Gets Misread So Often
- What Healing Actually Requires
- Frequently Asked Questions
- BPD-related infidelity usually traces to three patterns: impulsive infidelity, triangulation and attention-seeking, and identity-seeking infidelity, all rooted in emotion dysregulation, abandonment fear, and an unstable sense of self.
- A BPD diagnosis explains why the pattern happens. It doesn’t excuse the harm or shift responsibility for repair away from the person who caused it.
- Betrayed partners often carry symptoms consistent with betrayal trauma: intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and a shaken trust in their own perception.
- Real accountability looks like sustained treatment (Dialectical Behavior Therapy is the most researched option), not a single apology or promise.
- Couples work is appropriate only after the partner with BPD has shown months of observable, sustained progress in individual treatment.
- Staying and leaving are both legitimate outcomes. Neither is a verdict on your worth.
The Message That Wouldn’t Stop Loading
It’s 11:40 on a Tuesday night, and Kellye is standing in her kitchen holding her husband’s iPad the way you’d hold something that might go off. She’s 44, a director of clinical operations at a Bay Area hospital system, the person her whole team calls when a regulatory audit lands with no warning. The iPad screen is frozen on a message thread that’s still loading, one gray bubble stacking under another, a name she doesn’t recognize attached to a string of texts that go back four months. Her tea, chamomile, the same mug she’s used since her daughter was born, has gone cold on the counter behind her. She’s been standing here for six minutes. She counted.
“I kept waiting for it to make sense,” she tells me two weeks later, sitting across from me with her knees pulled up under her, which isn’t how she usually sits. “Like if I read the messages one more time, in the right order, I’d get to the part where it explained itself. I have never in my life not been able to solve a problem by reading it more carefully. I read cardiology discharge summaries for a living. I can find the one missing signature in a 40-page consent packet. And I read those texts maybe eleven times and I still don’t understand how the man who cried at our wedding is the same man who wrote, and I quote, ‘you make me feel like myself again,’ to someone named Dani he met at a conference in March.”
Sitting with Kellye that first session, I felt something I’ve felt with a lot of driven women across the years I’ve been doing this work. Not surprise, exactly. Something closer to recognition of a shape I’ve seen before, even though every version of it looks different on the surface. Kellye’s husband has a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis he received three years into their marriage, after his second hospitalization for what he called, at the time, “just a bad week.” The infidelity wasn’t the first crisis. It was, in Kellye’s words, the one she couldn’t file under “the illness” anymore.
What I’ve come to think of as the double betrayal is what happens when someone you love causes you real, specific harm, and you also understand, clinically or intuitively, that the harm came from a place of genuine psychological suffering. Both things are true at the same time. Your partner’s pain was real. So is the wound they left in you. Neither cancels the other out, and the work of sorting through infidelity when Borderline Personality Disorder is part of the picture almost always starts right here, in the space between explanation and excuse.
What Do We Mean by BPD and Infidelity?
Infidelity is a breach of an agreed-upon relational boundary, sexual, emotional, or both. When it happens inside a relationship where one partner has Borderline Personality Disorder, the shape of it often looks distinct from infidelity in other contexts, not because BPD makes betrayal inevitable, but because certain features of the disorder create specific pathways toward it.
The Marsha Linehan, PhD, psychologist and the researcher most responsible for developing Dialectical Behavior Therapy, has spent decades documenting the core features of BPD: pervasive difficulty regulating intense emotion, a fragile and shifting sense of self, a terror of abandonment that can feel, physiologically, like a survival threat, and impulsivity that shows up across multiple areas of life, not only relationships. I think about her framing often, because it reorients the question. The question isn’t “why would someone do this to a person they love.” The question is “what happens in a nervous system that experiences ordinary relational friction as an emergency.”
It’s crucial to say clearly, before going any further: a BPD diagnosis explains a pattern. It doesn’t excuse the harm the pattern causes. Those two sentences have to sit next to each other for the rest of this piece to make sense. In my work with clients on both sides of this dynamic, I consistently see three patterns of infidelity emerge when BPD is part of the relational picture.
1. Impulsive Infidelity
This is the pattern most directly tied to the emotion dysregulation at the center of BPD. Something happens, a fight, a perceived slight, a wave of the emptiness that so many people with BPD describe as chronic and unbearable, and the person acts before the urge has a chance to pass. It’s rarely premeditated in the way infidelity in other contexts sometimes is. It’s closer to a pressure valve releasing. The aftermath tends to bring intense shame, self-loathing, and a fresh, acute fear that the abandonment they were trying to outrun is now guaranteed.
2. Triangulation and Attention-Seeking Infidelity
Fear of abandonment can drive a specific and painful behavior: bringing a third person into the emotional orbit of the relationship, sometimes without full awareness of what they’re doing, to test a partner’s commitment or to feel, briefly, like the most wanted person in the room. This isn’t usually a calculated power move. It’s closer to a smoke test. Will you still choose me if I make you afraid of losing me.
3. Identity-Seeking Infidelity
The unstable sense of self that Otto Kernberg, MD, the psychiatrist whose work on borderline personality organization shaped decades of clinical thinking about the disorder, described as one of BPD’s defining features can make new relationships feel like access to a version of the self that feels more solid, more alive, more real. Each new connection can offer a temporary sense of coherence, until the underlying instability resurfaces and the cycle repeats somewhere else.
None of these three patterns describe malice. They describe dysregulation. But I want to be exact here, because this is where a lot of well-meaning content about BPD goes soft in a way that ends up hurting betrayed partners: the absence of malice doesn’t mean the absence of harm. A person can act from genuine psychological pain and still owe the person they hurt real accountability. Both things are true. We’re going to keep coming back to that.
The DSM-5-TR defines Borderline Personality Disorder as a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affect, combined with marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present across a range of contexts (American Psychiatric Association 2022).
In plain terms: BPD means the emotional weather inside a person can shift from clear sky to hurricane in minutes, and the systems most people rely on to ride out that shift, a stable sense of who they are, a felt-sense that people who love them aren’t about to leave, are often the exact systems that don’t hold.
The Nervous System Underneath the Pattern
Here’s what I keep coming back to when clients ask me, usually somewhere around the third or fourth session, whether their partner “chose” to do this. Stephen Porges, PhD, the neuroscientist whose polyvagal theory reshaped how clinicians think about the nervous system’s role in relational behavior, has spent his career documenting how threat detection can hijack a person’s capacity for reasoned choice long before conscious thought gets a vote. Borderline Personality Disorder involves a nervous system that registers ordinary relational distance, a partner working late, a delayed text response, a disagreement about dishes, as a five-alarm fire.
Neuroimaging research has consistently found heightened amygdala reactivity in people with BPD, alongside comparatively reduced prefrontal cortex regulation of that reactivity. Think of it like a smoke alarm wired directly to the sprinkler system, no delay, no filter, no moment where a person gets to ask “is this actually a fire.” The alarm goes off and the water comes down before anyone has checked the toast. That wiring doesn’t just affect mood. It affects the split-second decisions people make under emotional flooding, including decisions about fidelity.
Disruptions in serotonin and dopamine signaling, both implicated in BPD research, compound this. Serotonin dysregulation is linked to impulsivity and mood instability. Dopamine dysregulation is tied to reward-seeking and a chronic, gnawing sense of emptiness that many people with BPD describe as one of the disorder’s most unbearable features, worse, some tell me, than the anger or the fear. Infidelity can function, neurochemically, as a fast and temporary flood of relief against that emptiness. Which means in practice: a person can feel, in the moment, not like they’re betraying someone they love, but like they’re barely staying alive.
None of this removes responsibility. A compromised capacity for impulse control isn’t the same thing as zero capacity. People with BPD build impulse control skills in treatment every day, and I’ve watched clients do it. What the neurobiology gives us isn’t an excuse. It’s a more accurate map of what actually has to be treated for the pattern to change.
How This Shows Up in Driven Women’s Relationships
Ambitious and driven women show up in my practice on both sides of this particular pain. Some are the partner living with a BPD diagnosis, driven and capable at work, barely holding on at home, terrified that the version of themselves their team sees on a Tuesday board call is a performance that’s about to crack in front of the one person who’s seen the parts underneath. Others are the betrayed partner, and this is where I want to slow down, because there’s a specific flavor of shame that shows up in driven women whose partners have been unfaithful in the context of BPD, and it deserves its own naming.
Naomi is 39, a supply chain VP for a logistics company, someone who tells me in our first session that she’s “spent her whole career being the person who catches the thing everyone else missed.” Her husband, who received a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis in his mid-twenties, had been having an emotionally involved relationship with a coworker, one he framed, at first, as “just a work friendship,” for five months before Naomi found the pattern in his calendar. Group meetings that weren’t on anyone else’s calendar. Late nights that didn’t match the project timelines she happened to know cold, because managing timelines is, professionally, the exact thing she’s best at in the world.
“I run a department of 40 people,” she said, “and I didn’t see this in my own house. I keep asking myself what that says about me.” I felt the weight of that sentence land the way it always does when a driven woman turns her own competence into evidence against herself. Naomi hadn’t missed anything. She’d trusted someone whose diagnosed abandonment fear and identity instability, in that season, had led him to build a second emotional life to manage feelings he didn’t yet have other tools for. Her professional radar wasn’t broken. Her husband’s transparency was.
What I see consistently in driven women navigating this particular betrayal is a collision between two identities that were never supposed to touch. The competent, in-control professional self, and the blindsided, gutted partner self. Of course you’re disoriented. You have spent your entire career being rewarded for catching what other people miss, and you’re now being asked to accept that the person closest to you built an entire parallel narrative you had no access to. That’s not a failure of perception. That’s what happens when someone you love is managing an unregulated inner world by hiding it from you.
Betrayal Trauma: The Wound Underneath the Wound
I recently reread Jennifer Freyd, PhD, the psychologist and researcher who coined the term betrayal trauma, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one specific idea in her work: betrayal trauma isn’t just about pain. It’s about the collapse of a survival-relevant assumption. Freyd’s research names what happens when the person or institution you depend on for safety is also the source of harm, and your nervous system has to hold both facts without being able to fully process either one, because processing the betrayal fully would mean acknowledging a threat you can’t easily leave (PMID: 30058958).
When infidelity happens inside a relationship shaped by BPD, betrayal trauma often compounds in a specific way, because the instability doesn’t stop at the affair itself. The cycles of idealization and devaluation that characterize BPD relationships, the intense highs followed by sudden withdrawal or rage, mean the betrayed partner has often already been living inside a kind of chronic relational unpredictability before the infidelity is even discovered. The affair isn’t always the first rupture. Sometimes it’s the one that finally has a name.
For the betrayed partner, this can produce something close to the symptom picture Judith Herman, MD, the psychiatrist whose work on complex trauma reframed how clinicians understand prolonged interpersonal harm, describes in survivors of ongoing relational trauma: intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, a persistent sense that the ground isn’t stable even in calm moments, and a specific kind of grief for the version of the relationship they thought they were in. Shirley Glass, PhD, the psychologist whose decades of clinical research on infidelity remain some of the most cited in the field, wrote that infidelity is rarely just about sex. It’s about secrets and the erosion of a shared reality. When BPD is part of the picture, that erosion can feel bottomless, because the narrative of what happened may genuinely shift from one conversation to the next, not always from manipulation, but sometimes from the same identity instability that drove the affair in the first place.
Kellye told me, in month two of our work together, that the hardest part wasn’t the affair itself. It was losing the ability to trust her own memory of their marriage. “I keep asking myself if the good years were real,” she said, turning her wedding ring the way she does when a session gets close to something. “I know they were. I have pictures. But some mornings I wake up and I genuinely don’t trust what I remember, and that scares me more than the texts did.” That’s betrayal trauma doing exactly what betrayal trauma does: making a person doubt the reliability of their own perception, because the person who was supposed to be a stable witness to their life turned out to be an unreliable narrator of it.
Betrayal trauma occurs when a person is harmed by someone or something they depend on for survival or well-being, a caregiver, a partner, an institution, and the need to preserve the relationship interferes with the mind’s ability to fully register the harm (Freyd 1996).
In plain terms: It’s the specific kind of wound you get when the person who’s supposed to keep you safe is also the person hurting you, so your mind can’t file it away cleanly the way it might file away harm from a stranger.
“Infidelity is not just about sex. It’s about secrets and lies. It’s a shock to your fundamental assumptions.”
Shirley Glass, PhD, psychologist and infidelity researcher, author of Not “Just Friends”
Six months into her own individual work, Kellye came in one Thursday and sat down before she’d even taken her coat off. “I think I finally believe both things,” she said. “That he was drowning, and that he still chose the person he drowned with.” I felt the room shift a little. Not because she’d arrived somewhere final. Because she’d stopped needing the story to resolve into one simple version in order to keep standing.
Both/And: The Explanation Is Real AND the Harm Is Real
Here’s the truth I want you to leave this piece holding onto, more than any single clinical fact about BPD. The explanation is real, AND the harm is real. Holding both is the entire task, and it’s harder than it sounds, because our culture generally wants one clean story: either the diagnosis excuses the behavior, or the diagnosis is irrelevant and the person is simply cruel. Neither of those stories is accurate, and both of them let everyone off the hook from doing the actual work.
A BPD diagnosis explains why a nervous system might reach for infidelity as a way to manage abandonment terror, chronic emptiness, or an unstable sense of self. It doesn’t, on its own, undo the damage done to the person who was betrayed, and it doesn’t transfer responsibility for repair away from the person who caused the harm. I won’t argue you out of either half of that sentence. In my work with clients, I hold this line firmly: understanding isn’t the same as absolution, and empathy for a partner’s suffering isn’t a substitute for their accountability.
What accountability actually requires, in the cases where I’ve watched couples do this work successfully, starts with acknowledging the full scope of harm, not just the factual act of infidelity, but its ripple effects on the betrayed partner’s sense of safety, memory, and self-trust. It also means taking ownership of choices without leaning on the diagnosis as a shield, which sounds obvious and is remarkably rare in early recovery. From there, it requires committing to sustained, structured treatment. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the modality Marsha Linehan built specifically for BPD, remains the most researched and effective option for building the skills that reduce this pattern’s recurrence. And underneath all of it, trust has to rebuild through consistent, observable behavior over time, not through the force of an apology, however sincere, but through months of a nervous system doing something different than it did before.
Naomi’s husband entered intensive outpatient DBT treatment four months after she found the calendar pattern. She told me recently that the thing that finally moved something in her wasn’t an apology. It was watching him call his own therapist during a moment of escalation, mid-argument, instead of shutting down or spiraling into the old pattern. “He used the skill,” she said. “In front of me. That’s the first time I believed the treatment was real and not just something he was saying to keep me in the house.” That’s what accountability sounds like from the outside. Not a speech. A behavior, repeated, under pressure, when no one’s grading the performance.
The Systemic Lens: Why This Gets Misread So Often
This pattern isn’t happening in a vacuum, and I want to name the structural forces that make it so hard for both partners to get accurate support. Our culture tells two competing stories about mental illness and harm, and both stories fail people in this exact situation. One story says diagnosis excuses everything, which leaves betrayed partners feeling like their pain doesn’t count if there’s a clinical explanation attached to what caused it. The other story says personality disorders are just a label for being manipulative or cruel, which leaves the partner with BPD facing a level of stigma that actively blocks them from getting the treatment that could change the pattern.
The mechanism matters here. Stigma around personality disorders, and BPD carries some of the heaviest stigma of any psychiatric diagnosis, keeps people from disclosing symptoms early, seeking treatment before a crisis, or being honest with partners about what they’re experiencing internally. That silence doesn’t reduce the underlying dysregulation. It just removes the partner’s ability to see it coming or name it accurately when it shows up. Meanwhile, our broader cultural romance with intensity in relationships, the idea that a love that swings between euphoric highs and devastating lows is somehow more passionate or more real, can quietly normalize instability that would otherwise register as a warning sign.
For driven women specifically, there’s an added layer. The same professional identity that makes you excellent at your job, pattern recognition, decisiveness, the instinct to solve problems before they escalate, can become a source of self-blame when it doesn’t prevent harm at home. You’re not broken for missing what your partner worked hard to hide. You’re not naive for trusting someone who was, in that season, telling you a version of events shaped by their own dysregulation rather than by malice. That’s not a personal failing. That’s what happens when a system, a marriage, a family, absorbs untreated psychiatric symptoms without either partner having the language or support to name what’s actually happening.
Here’s how that inheritance lives in a Tuesday. It’s the calendar you now check compulsively, the way Naomi still does sometimes, even months into a stable stretch. It’s the way Kellye flinches slightly when her phone buzzes at an unfamiliar time, not because she still expects betrayal, but because her body hasn’t fully unlearned the association yet. Healing this pattern isn’t only about the two people in the relationship. It’s also about building a wider cultural fluency around personality disorders that lets people seek help before the crisis, rather than only after.
What Healing Actually Requires
Healing from this specific combination, BPD and infidelity, asks a lot from both people, and it asks different things depending on which side of the betrayal you’re standing on.
For the partner with BPD, the path forward requires sustained, structured treatment, not a single hard conversation or a temporary surge of remorse. Dialectical Behavior Therapy remains the gold-standard intervention, built by Marsha Linehan specifically to address the emotion dysregulation, impulsivity, and interpersonal instability at the center of BPD. The skills DBT teaches, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, aren’t abstract. They’re the literal tools that let someone reach for a phone call to their therapist instead of a text to someone who isn’t their partner. Without consistent, long-term engagement in this kind of treatment, the underlying pattern that produced the infidelity is very likely to produce it again, regardless of how much genuine remorse a person feels in the moment after being caught.
For the betrayed partner, healing means processing betrayal trauma directly, often through trauma-focused modalities like EMDR or somatic work, rebuilding a felt sense of trust in your own perception, and making boundary decisions from clarity rather than fear. It also means giving yourself permission to grieve, even if you decide to stay, and permission to leave, even if you love the person who hurt you. Both are legitimate outcomes. Neither one is a referendum on your worth or your capacity to love well.
If both partners want to rebuild together, couples work becomes appropriate only after the partner with BPD has demonstrated real, sustained engagement in their own individual treatment. Not promised it. Demonstrated it, across months, in ways the betrayed partner can actually observe. Couples therapy that starts too early, before that foundation exists, tends to become another arena for the same dysregulated patterns to play out, just with a therapist in the room as an audience.
Not every relationship should be salvaged, and I say that to every client I see in this situation, regardless of which side of the betrayal they’re on. Sometimes the healthiest outcome is leaving, even when you understand exactly why the harm happened. Understanding your partner’s inner world doesn’t obligate you to keep living inside the consequences of it. That decision belongs to you, and it deserves to be made with real support, not in isolation and not under pressure from anyone, including a well-meaning therapist, to arrive at a particular answer.
Kellye is, as of this writing, fourteen months into her own individual work. She and her husband separated five months ago, after what she describes as “watching and waiting to see if the treatment was real, and deciding I couldn’t keep waiting indefinitely for it to be.” She still keeps the mug from that Tuesday night on her counter. She uses it now. “I don’t need it to mean something anymore,” she told me last week. “It’s just a mug I like. That took a while.” Her hand doesn’t shake when her phone buzzes anymore, not most nights. The vigilance is quieter than it was. It hasn’t disappeared. It’s become something she carries instead of something that carries her.
If you’re in the middle of this right now, still standing in your own version of that kitchen, still rereading the same messages hoping they’ll finally make sense: they may not, not fully, not for a long while. That doesn’t mean you’re failing to understand something you should already get. It means you’re a person metabolizing something genuinely hard to metabolize, and that takes whatever time it takes, with real support around you along the way.
Warmly, Annie.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does BPD cause infidelity?
A: BPD doesn’t directly cause infidelity in a mechanical sense, but core features of the disorder, impulsivity, intense fear of abandonment, chronic emptiness, and identity instability, can significantly raise the risk of it happening. These behaviors usually function as maladaptive attempts to manage overwhelming internal pain rather than deliberate cruelty. That said, the explanation for the pattern doesn’t erase the harm it causes.
Q: Can a relationship survive infidelity when one partner has BPD?
A: Some relationships do, but it requires sustained commitment from both people. The partner with BPD generally needs consistent engagement in evidence-based treatment, most often Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and the betrayed partner needs dedicated support for betrayal trauma. Trust rebuilds through months of consistent, observable behavior, not through a single conversation or apology.
Q: How do I know if my partner’s infidelity is connected to their BPD?
A: Patterns connected to BPD often include impulsivity, a sense that the affair filled an internal void, or triangulation aimed at testing your commitment. It may come with intense emotional swings or a shifting account of what happened. Only a licensed mental health professional can make that clinical connection with any confidence, and regardless of the underlying cause, the breach of trust still needs to be addressed directly.
Q: What’s betrayal trauma, and how is it different from regular heartbreak?
A: Betrayal trauma happens when the harm comes from someone you depend on for safety, which is what makes it different from ordinary grief. When BPD is part of the picture, this can be compounded by shifting narratives and emotional unpredictability, sometimes producing symptoms similar to what’s seen in survivors of prolonged relational trauma: intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, and a shaken sense of your own perception.
Q: What kind of therapy actually helps with this?
A: For the partner with BPD, Dialectical Behavior Therapy is the most researched and effective option for reducing the emotion dysregulation and impulsivity that often drive this pattern. For the betrayed partner, trauma-focused approaches like EMDR or somatic therapy can help process betrayal trauma directly. Couples therapy can be valuable, but generally only after the partner with BPD has shown sustained progress in their own individual treatment.
Q: Am I wrong to stay, or wrong to leave?
A: Neither choice is inherently wrong. Staying with clear eyes and real boundaries can be a legitimate path if your partner is doing sustained treatment work you can observe. Leaving, even when you understand exactly why the harm happened, is also a legitimate path. This decision is yours to make with real support, not a test you pass or fail.
Related Reading
- Freyd, Jennifer J. 1996. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Glass, Shirley P. 2003. Not “Just Friends”: Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity. New York: Free Press.
- Linehan, Marsha M. 1993. Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
- Fonagy, Peter, and Anthony W. Bateman. 2008. “The Development of Borderline Personality Disorder from Childhood Trauma to Adult Disorder: A Mentalizing Approach.” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 62 (2): 201-205.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.
- American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Publishing; 2022.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Glass, Shirley P. 2003. Not “Just Friends”: Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity. New York: Free Press.
- Linehan, Marsha M. 1993. Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. New York: Guilford Press.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
It’s for educational purposes and isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed mental health provider. Composite client stories in this piece are illustrative composites, not descriptions of real, identifiable clients.
