with Matana
As the Jewish Holiday of Shavuot approaches, Matana faces her Trauma, as this was the date that she had her first panic attack, which was the drive behind creating this podcast and creating a space dedicated to helping those in need, who also suffer from depression and anxiety.
Dr. Kobernick is a licensed clinical psychologist and the Founder and Director of The CBT/DBT Center. DBT stands for Dialectical Behavior Therapy which is a “behavior therapy”. She helps patients target behaviors in order to affect how they are feeling. The additional layer here is Dialectics – which is a type of philosophy that states that there are always multiple truths and more than one way of looking at something in our world. This is important because it helps us to see the grays rather than getting stuck in the black and white.
Lisa Wells is raising a son with Borderline Personality Disorder. As a little boy, her child was diagnosed with ADHD. He was throwing furniture, had to be taken out of school and went through all kinds of treatment. He endured a lot of ridicule, punishment, and rejection from school staff for not behaving in the way they expected. Lisa assumes this contributed to the trauma which led to him to develop BPD and an older teen.
Hannah Galliers has navigated through her journey with Borderline Personality Disorder, known in the United Kingdom as Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD). Although Hannah’s official diagnosis with BPD was recent, she has been on a healing journey through meditation and mindfulness practices and other therapies for several years.
Debbie DeMarco Bennett grew up in a difficult home situation and moved to foster care as a teen. She went through her own Hell, and chose to go back, to help those who live there. For Debbie, recovery started with a diagnosis.
In this short solo episode, Matana outlines the coming episodes dedicated to discussing Borderline Personality Disorder with those affected by it. From being diagnoses to determining the elusive diagnosis, this crippling disorder causes shame, panic and few known treatment options. The stigma is real, but those suffering need not be alone. Join us in upcoming episodes and hear firsthand how those affected are determined to persevere.
Within the next 24 hours, more than 3,000 teenagers in the United States will attempt to take their own lives. Seventeen of them will succeed. Jackie Simmons’ daughter, Stephanie, shared that statistic when delivering a speech which would change lives and inspire teens to come together with Stephanie’s sisters and to create, “The Teen Suicide Prevention Society.”
On December 22, 2020, 24 year old Yocheved Gourarie took her own life. Yocheved was a kind and thoughtful person. Loved by all. She was a top student, always maintaining perfect grades in school and at the time of her passing, was in the process of applying to PHD nursing programs. Posthumously, the family learned that she was accepted at Columbia University in their DNP program on track to becoming a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner. Unfortunately, her battle with mental illness raged, and she succumbed to it, not having fulfilled her dreams.
Sari Dana tells us her story of how she chose to move away from dieting after a long struggle with binge eating. She chose to give her body unconditional acceptance and love, no matter what happened to her size, which put her in a much healthier place both mentally and physically than she had been before. Her passion to empower everyone involved in working with teens, including the kids themselves, is to retrain their minds to see themselves as a whole person, not just their bodies or any other part, and to love every part unconditionally. Once they have started that work in themselves, they can start to guide others as well.
Laura Messner grew up in a typical home until her parents divorced when she was eight years old. After she became aware of how little she got to see her father, she began chasing after perfection in every way she could think of to “earn” his attention… until she developed an eating disorder and eventually attempted suicide. She came to learn self-love and to take responsibility for her own pain and healing journey. As a teenager, she resisted help because she was unwilling to admit that everything inside was not perfect. It wasn’t until her late twenties that she came to understand that her struggles stemmed from the pain she felt from seeing herself as a victim of her father’s abandonment.