After Everything Changed: A Daughter's Memoir Of Loss And Recovery

by Rhonda Findling

In the late 1960s, thirteen-year-old Rhonda Findling’s world shatters when her charismatic father confesses that he’s in love with another woman—and soon abandons the family altogether.

Forced from a comfortable suburban life into poverty and instability, she grows up navigating heartbreak, bullying, her mother’s struggles and depression while searching for her own romantic love.

Set against the backdrop of Brooklyn, Long Island, and the turbulent cultural shifts of the late 60s and early 1970s, After Everything Changed is a deeply intimate memoir about loss, survival, longing, and reinvention. Through painful family secrets, moments of dark humor, music, psychotherapy, and resilience, Rhonda Findling traces the teenage and young adult experiences that ultimately led her to become a psychotherapist, author, and performer.

Written in vivid, scene-driven prose, this memoir explores how childhood abandonment shapes adult relationships—and what it takes to reclaim a sense of self after everything changes.

Perfect for readers of emotionally honest memoirs about family dysfunction, trauma, resilience, and personal transformation



Rhonda Findling has re-enthroned herself by writing this beautiful forthright After Everything Changed Out of a troubled family – especially one with an irresponsible abandoning father as well as a panic-stricken mother – Rhonda eventually emerged miraculously gaining the ascendancy in her life, and became a highly respected professional psychotherapist as well as a successful published author. She did this largely because of her intelligence, and with an iron will to stay cohered in the midst of an incoherent environment. She also made and kept an irrepressible, irrevocable self-promise to succeed.

This book is an essential reminder that the human spirit to never give up is still quite alive even in the face if significant emotional and physical privations. Rhonda’s life reflected in this book is a testimonial to optimism itself, and to the love of life.

-Dr. Henry Kellerman, Ph.D., ABPP

(Psychologist/ Psychoanalyst, Author of Dictionary of Psychopathology; and, The Psychoanalysis of Symptoms)

168 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 10, 2026

About the author

Rhonda Findling, MA,CRC is an internationally acclaimed psychotherapist and author with a private practice in Forest Hills and Manhattan (New York City). She has been in private practice 17 years(full time 10 years). She was a staff psychotherapist at Postgraduate Center for Mental Health in New York for 15 years. She taught courses on psychology and counseling at Marymount College. Rhonda has worked as a psychologist for the State of New York for three years . She was a counselor at Victims Information Bureau where she counseled victims of rape, sexual assault and spouse abuse.

Rhonda has appeared as a relationship expert on several national talk shows including Ilanya, Ricki Lake, Geraldo, Maury Povitch, Good Day New York, Judith Regan Tonight , and Eye Witness News. Rhonda has also been featured on radio shows nationwide.

Rhonda has led "Don't Call That Man!" workshops and seminars throughout the world including Paris, Berlin, Leeds and Glastonbury,England. She has also presented at the Learning Annex, 92nd St. Y and Hazelden. She has been featured in the "New York Post", "Newsday", " Los Angeles Times", "Cosmopolitan Magaine","Denver Rocky Mountain News", and "Today's Black Woman." Her articles have appeared in "Essence" magazine, "Complete Woman" and "Mouthpiece" (the newsletter for the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers).

Rhonda is a member of the National Speakers Association, the Dramatist Guild, the New York State Psychological Association, the American Screenwriters Association and is recognized in Who's Who in America.

Rhonda is the author of the play "The Psychic" that was produced by Caicedo Productions and Doubletime Productions at the American Theatre of Actors in New York City November 1996. The Psychic also had a staged reading at the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe in New York City August 1997. She has taken classes in directing, screenwriting, and filmmaking at New School University and Film and Video Arts Inc. She studied acting at HB Studios, Stella Adler Studio Of Acting in New York City , and with William H Macy in Chicago. She's appeared in several community theatre productions on Long island, New York and two off-off Broadway productions in Chicago.