Personality Disorders
Personality Disorders Therapy in Santa Monica, CA
You’ve spent so long feeling different, misunderstood, or have been labeled as “too much” — “too rigid, too intense, too particular, too sensitive.” What if none of that meant something was wrong with you?
If you’re living with obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), or traits of both, you likely know what it feels like to move through the world slightly out of step with everyone around you. Not because you don’t care — often, it’s the opposite. You care intensely, you notice everything, you feel things deeply, and you hold yourself and your relationships to standards that matter enormously to you. And still, somehow, that intensity keeps getting labeled as a flaw rather than understood for what it actually is.
I offer personality disorders therapy in Santa Monica, CA, for people who are ready to feel less alone in their own experience, and ready to build real, lasting tools for navigating relationships, emotions, and change with more ease.
Feeling chronically misunderstood — and it’s costing you your relationships. Over and over, you try to explain how you feel or why something matters so much to you, and it lands wrong. People misread your intensity as anger, your need for structure as control, your emotional pain as overreaction. Over time, this creates a painful pattern: you reach for connection, you get met with confusion or distance, and you end up feeling hurt and alone — even in relationships where you desperately want closeness. That gap between how deeply you feel and how little others seem to understand it can be one of the loneliest experiences there is.
Emotions that feel too big, too fast, or impossible to understand. Sometimes emotion arrives like a wave that’s already crashed before you even realized it was coming — intense, overwhelming, and hard to make sense of in the moment. Other times, you might struggle to identify what you’re actually feeling at all, left with only a vague sense of distress and no clear way to name it or work through it. Either way, this can lead to dysregulation, conflict with people you love, or a retreat into isolation just to keep from feeling out of control.
Shame, anxiety, and loss of control when things don’t go as planned. Big changes, unexpected disruptions, plans falling through — these can bring a level of distress that feels disproportionate to the situation, but is entirely real to you. The loss of predictability can trigger genuine panic, and the aftermath often brings shame — a feeling that you should be able to handle change more easily than you do, which only adds another layer of suffering on top of the original distress.
Hyperfixation on details that makes finishing anything feel impossible. A project that should take an hour stretches into an entire day, because every detail needs to be perfect before you can let it go. You notice things other people miss — small errors, inconsistencies, things that aren’t quite right — and it genuinely troubles you to let them slide. The problem isn’t that you care too much about quality. It’s that this fixation can trap you in an endless loop of revising, checking, and redoing, until “finished” starts to feel like a moving target you can never quite reach.
Feeling fundamentally different, and confused by other people’s behavior. Social rules, unspoken expectations, and the way other people seem to move through relationships so effortlessly can feel like a language you were never quite taught. You might find yourself genuinely confused by why people react the way they do, or feel like you’re constantly translating your own instincts into something more socially acceptable. That constant sense of being “other” — of not quite fitting the mold — can wear you down in ways that are hard to name out loud.
Masking that leads to real burnout. Constantly adjusting yourself to fit in — softening your reactions, hiding your need for structure, performing an ease you don’t actually feel — takes a real toll. Over time, that effort compounds into genuine exhaustion: burnout at work, burnout in relationships, burnout in social situations that should feel enjoyable but instead feel like something to survive. And the more you mask, the further you can feel from the people around you, even while trying desperately to fit in with them.
Struggling to trust that others will do it right. You’ve learned, often through painful experience, that if you want something done well, you have to do it yourself. Watching someone else handle a task carelessly — cutting corners, missing details, treating something you care about as no big deal — can bring a wave of frustration that’s hard to explain to people who don’t share your standards. You find yourself wondering, again and again, why doesn’t this matter to them the way it matters to me? — and that gap can leave you feeling isolated even when you’re surrounded by people.
Being told you’re “too rigid, too perfectionistic, or even selfish.” These words sting precisely because they miss what’s actually happening underneath. Your rigidity isn’t about control for its own sake — it’s often protecting you from an anxiety that feels unbearable without it. Your perfectionism isn’t vanity — it’s a genuine fear of falling short. Being labeled “selfish” when you’re actually just trying to manage overwhelming internal experiences can leave you feeling both unfairly judged and even more alone in trying to explain yourself.
If any of this feels familiar, please hear this: none of this makes you broken, difficult, or unlovable. It means you’re carrying real patterns that deserve real, targeted support — and those patterns can shift.
The Pain That Bring People to Therapy
How I Can Help
As a therapist offering personality disorders therapy in Santa Monica, CA, my goal is to help you feel less overwhelmed by distress, more understood in your relationships, and more capable of navigating change without it derailing you. I draw from several evidence-based approaches, tailored specifically to your needs:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT helps you build a different relationship with the anxiety and shame that show up around change, imperfection, or feeling misunderstood. Instead of fighting against these experiences, we’ll work on making room for them while still moving toward what actually matters to you — clarifying your real values, so your choices are guided by what you care about, not by fear of losing control.
Radically Open DBT (RO DBT)
RO DBT was developed specifically for the patterns so common in OCPD and certain presentations of BPD — over-control, rigidity, high personal standards, and difficulty trusting others or tolerating unpredictability. This approach teaches concrete skills for increasing openness and flexibility, especially in situations and relationships that are out of your control. Rather than asking you to abandon your values around quality, fairness, or doing things right, RO DBT helps you hold those values with more flexibility — reducing the isolation, exhaustion, and conflict that rigidity so often creates, without asking you to become someone you’re not.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
DBT offers concrete skills for managing emotional dysregulation in real time — how to tolerate distress without becoming consumed by it, how to identify and name what you’re actually feeling, and how to communicate your needs in relationships without the conflict or shutdown that so often follows big emotions. These are tools you can use in the exact moments they’re needed most.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT helps us identify the specific thought patterns driving isolation, relationship conflict, and self-criticism — the assumptions, the all-or-nothing thinking, the beliefs about yourself and others that quietly fuel painful cycles. By naming these patterns clearly, we can begin to interrupt them before they lead to the same hurtful outcomes again and again.
Together, these approaches let us work on multiple levels: understanding the thought and behavior patterns that lead to relationship turmoil and isolation, regulating overwhelming emotion, and building genuine flexibility for the moments when life — and people — don’t go according to plan.
What This Can Look Like for You
Clients I work with often find that:
- Relationships feel less like a source of constant misunderstanding and more like genuine connection.
- Tasks and projects feel more manageable, without perfectionism dictating every step.
- Big emotions become easier to identify, tolerate, and communicate.
- Change and unpredictability feel less threatening, with real tools for staying grounded.
- Masking decreases, replaced by a steadier sense of being able to show up as yourself.
- Shame softens into self-understanding, and self-understanding into self-compassion.
You Deserve to Feel Understood
You’ve spent long enough believing that your intensity, your standards, or your emotions make you too much or not enough. They don’t. They’re part of a real, treatable pattern — and with the right support, navigating relationships, stress, and change can genuinely start to feel easier.
Let’s build a life where you feel less alone in your own experience, and more capable of handling whatever comes next.