For more than forty years, Dr. Diane Pomerantz has worked as a psychologist, teacher, supervisor, speaker, and writer. Her career has taken her from psychiatric hospitals and therapeutic preschools to schools, residential treatment centers, private practice, and the classroom.
Although the settings have changed over the years, the questions that have guided her work have remained remarkably consistent. How do our earliest experiences shape who we become? Why do some wounds remain hidden for decades? What helps people heal, and how do they find their way back to themselves after trauma, loss, or emotionally destructive relationships?
Dr. Pomerantz’s professional journey began at NYU-Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where she worked with children and families through a comprehensive pediatric psychiatric program. There, she learned that no person’s story can be understood in isolation. Children’s emotional lives are intertwined with family relationships, development, culture, and the circumstances in which they grow.
While earning her doctorate in Berkeley, California, she served as clinical coordinator of the Children’s Trauma Center at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, a therapeutic preschool for abused children. Those years deepened her understanding of childhood trauma and personality development and led to the publication of professional articles exploring the effects of abuse.
After completing her doctorate, Dr. Pomerantz moved to Baltimore for a postdoctoral fellowship at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, where she specialized in intensive inpatient psychotherapy with adults. She remained on staff for ten years before continuing her work through private practice, consultation, teaching, supervision, and public speaking.
Throughout her career, Dr. Pomerantz has worked with children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. Teaching and supervising other mental health professionals has been an important part of that work, allowing her not only to share knowledge but also to encourage thoughtful clinical judgment, curiosity, and the willingness to look beyond symptoms to the stories that lie beneath them.
Writing has become another extension of her life’s work. In addition to publishing professional articles and writing for Psychology Today on parenting, emotional abuse, relationships, forgiveness, and healing, Dr. Pomerantz has written books that bring decades of clinical experience to a broader audience.
Her memoir, Lost in the Reflecting Pool: Surviving Narcissistic Emotional Abuse, weaves together her personal experience and professional understanding to explore how emotional abuse can gradually erode a person’s identity and independence. Dr. Pomerantz writes not only as a psychologist, but also as someone whose professional knowledge did not make her immune to manipulation, attachment, or self-doubt.
The second edition expands on those experiences by offering more direct information about identifying abusive characteristics within relationships and considering how those issues may be addressed. The memoir remains a personal story, grounded in the difficult gap between understanding emotional abuse professionally and recognizing it within one’s own life.
Her recent ebook, The Narcissist as an Identity Thief: Understanding Mirroring; Reclaiming Your Self, continues her examination of narcissistic relationships. It focuses on mirroring, the erosion of identity, and the process of reclaiming a more authentic sense of self after emotional abuse.
Today, Dr. Pomerantz continues to provide psychotherapy and facilitate Healing through Writing Groups. Whether she is working with a client, teaching a professional, or writing a book, her goal remains the same: to help people better understand themselves, the relationships that have shaped them, and the possibility of creating a different future.
