Our Story
Welcome and thanks for visiting our page! Atlanta Center for Self-Compassion (ACSC) provides individual and group therapy, workshops and courses. ACSC founder, Diane Hilleary, LCSW, CEDS-S, has been teaching mindfulness and emotion regulation skills for over 10 years. She is passionate about teaching these skills and believes in their potential for healing and change.
In private practice, Diane provides psychotherapy for individuals, families and groups with a specialization in women's issues, eating disorders, anxiety, and depression. She is trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). She has been involved in the Atlanta chapter of the International Association of Eating Disorders (iaedp) since its formation in 2014 and is currently the President.
Diane says, “In 2016 I read the book Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff and was excited by her research on the benefits of self-compassion. The skills and practices in her book are very similar to the skills I was teaching in my DBT groups. I knew right away that I wanted to learn as much as I could about self-compassion so I could share these skills with my clients and larger groups. In 2017 I completed the Mindful Self-Compassion course and teacher training. I have taught several rounds of MSC and am on the road to becoming a certified teacher.
I founded the Atlanta Center for Self-Compassion because I believe so strongly in the profound transformative power of the MSC program. All of us struggle with an inner critic that nags us about all the ways we are falling short. Our brain is even evolutionarily designed to pay close attention to these negative thoughts. Mindful self-compassion can be a critical step in emotional healing—being able to befriend oneself, turn inwardly and acknowledge our difficult thoughts and feelings with a spirit of openness, curiosity and love, rather than self-judgment, or self-criticism.”
