Personality Disorders

Some emotional and relationship difficulties don't fit neatly into categories like anxiety, depression, or communication problems. Relationships may feel unusually intense or unpredictable. Conflict can escalate quickly, the same painful patterns may repeat despite repeated attempts to resolve them, or family members may find themselves constantly adjusting their own behavior in an effort to keep things stable.

Some emotional and relationship difficulties don't fit neatly into categories like anxiety, depression, or communication problems. Relationships may feel unusually intense or unpredictable. Conflict can escalate quickly; the same painful patterns may repeat despite repeated attempts to resolve them, or family members may find themselves constantly adjusting their own behavior in an effort to keep things stable.

Personality develops over a lifetime and influences how we understand ourselves, experience emotions, interpret other people's behavior, and respond within relationships. When certain patterns become rigid or difficult to change, they can create significant distress for the individual as well as for the people closest to them.

Effective treatment requires looking beyond individual behaviors to understand what drives them. Emotional reactivity, fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting, an intense need for reassurance or validation, defensiveness, problems with boundaries, or rapidly changing perceptions of oneself or others may all make more sense when understood as part of a larger pattern.

The goal of therapy is not to reduce a person to a diagnosis. It is to understand what is happening well enough to identify what can change.

We work with individuals experiencing personality-related difficulties as well as partners, parents, adult children, and other family members affected by complicated relational dynamics.

For individuals, therapy may focus on understanding emotional and interpersonal patterns, increasing the ability to tolerate difficult emotions, developing a more stable sense of self, improving relationships, and creating new ways of responding when old patterns are activated.

For family members and partners, the work may look different. Therapy can help clarify what belongs to you and what does not, understand patterns that have developed within the relationship, establish healthier boundaries, and find ways of responding that do not continually reinforce the same cycle.

In family work, the focus is not on identifying one person as “the problem.” Even when one family member is struggling significantly, relationships develop systems around those struggles. Understanding the entire system can create opportunities for change that focusing on one person alone may miss.

Personality disorders and complex relational patterns can be difficult to treat when therapy focuses only on the crisis or conflict happening in the moment. Lasting change requires understanding the patterns underneath it and knowing when to support, when to challenge, and when changing the larger relational system may be necessary.

Kristin Katz, LCSW, is a Certified Personality Disorder Treatment Provider with extensive experience working with individuals and families affected by borderline, narcissistic, and other personality-related patterns. Her approach integrates a deep understanding of personality and attachment with direct, emotionally attuned therapy focused on helping clients understand not only what is happening, but what can realistically change.