By Michael Ventura - When I was 5 years old, I experienced something that made me feel viscerally, mentally, emotionally, and inescapably connected to everything and everyone around me, while feeling what I can only describe as a sense of privacy so deep and unassailable that "loneliness" doesn't begin to describe it. Thirty-five years later, I felt it again.

By Paul Pearsall - Quantum leaps of thriving sometimes happen. However, most thrivers rarely recognize their invincibility in a short period of magnificent epiphany. Like Ludwig van Beethoven, they have periods of dismal lows and unrealistic highs. Through it all, thrivers maintain the key characteristic of thriving.

By Stephen Lyons - I spent my first weeks in therapy recounting my recently-ended marriage: the spreading contagion of lies, fights, and broken promises. I'd never told these stories to anyone, ever. Each scene seemed a searing indictment of my abilities as a husband and father. But Sara simply listened, asked questions I'd never asked myself. Her role as a protective friend startled me into action.

According to Richard Schwartz, the originator of Internal Family Systems therapy, the natural state of the mind is to be subdivided into parts, which carry the memories, beliefs, and emotions that make up what we call our personality. In the following video from his 2015 Networker Symposium keynote address, he explains how we can become healing attachment figures for these wounded inner parts.

It can be difficult to leave your emotions in the consulting room at the end of the day, especially when a client's story is heartbreaking or horrifying. But being shadowed by a client's pain can leave you depleted and ultimately interfere with your ability to be present and effective in session. Jack Kornfield explains how to keep a wise and compassionate balance.

By Lauren Dockett and Rich Simon - Gabor Maté's TED talk on “The Power of Addiction and the Addiction of Power” has had almost 700,000 views. He insists that addictive patterns of behavior are rooted in alienation and emotional suffering. In the interview that follows, Maté explores the meaning of addictions.

It’s not always easy to tell trauma survivors in the midst of deep suffering that one day they’ll find meaning in what happened to them. But according to trauma specialist Lisa Ferentz, trauma survivors can emerge from their nightmarish experiences stronger than before, and there's a sensitive, measured way to go about planting the seeds for post-traumatic growth.

In its coverage of race-related discord, the media has fixed on lurid images of violence and destruction without providing much context for understanding the conditions of daily life that could possibly spark such explosive rage. Psychologist Ken Hardy understands what fuels it. In the following video clip, he shares how to connect with these kids in a way that validates their experience.

By Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz - While working with child survivors during the 1992 Waco siege, I found that we had a group of children that had essentially been marinated in fear. The only way we could get them the help they needed was to apply our understanding of how fear affects the brain and then consequently changes behavior. We quickly learned that people, not programs, change people.

Imagine the helplessness of being unable to distinguish painful past experiences from present ones. According to Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, this is what happens when a traumatic memory is triggered. Old emotional responses bubble up even when the current trigger has little to do with the original trauma.