Jennifer Mann, LCSW

01/19/2026

There’s always a latest trend or fad; whether it comes to fashion, food or therapy. I wonder why we are fad driven; “this is it!” obsessed. I think it’s because we are looking for “the cure” or answer to the discomfort or existential anxieties of life. It’s the belief that there’s an answer out there that will make us not feel or feel a certain way.

01/13/2026

12/28/2025

12/28/2025

Tikkunim Are Deeply Annoying
A letter to anyone who has ever tried to fix

There is a truth most of us brush up against eventually, usually with tenderness and resistance at the same time.

Love cannot fix another human being.

Not a partner.
Not a child.
Not a parent.
Not a friend.

And knowing that doesn’t make it easier.

Most of us come into love wanting to help. We give perspective, patience, empathy, steadiness. We listen deeply. We explain gently. We hope that if we love clearly enough, consistently enough, something in the other person will soften or shift.

This isn’t manipulation. It’s humanity.

We want to give. We want to ease suffering. We want our love to matter.

And sometimes it does. Love can soothe. Love can inspire. Love can create safety for growth. But there’s a quiet line we cross without realizing it, where love stops being love and starts doing work that doesn’t belong to it.

Love cannot do someone else’s inner work.

It cannot replace accountability.
It cannot override avoidance.
It cannot mature someone on their behalf.

When we forget this, love turns into fixing. And fixing, no matter how well intentioned, eventually costs us something.

I’ll share this personally, briefly. I’m a Four on the Enneagram. That means I tend to believe that if we just understand each other deeply enough, things should move. That insight itself is transformative. That emotional truth is a kind of medicine.

That lens has given me depth, empathy, and meaning. It has also taught me, slowly, that understanding alone is not the same as shared effort.

If you’re curious about your own patterns in love, it can be illuminating to look up your Enneagram number. Not as a label, but as a mirror. It often helps people see where they over give, over carry, or over function in relationships without realizing it.

And here’s the invitation I want to offer gently.

Ask yourself:
• Am I trying to help, or am I trying to fix?
• Do I believe my love can compensate for someone else’s lack of readiness?
• Am I staying engaged with who this person is, or who I hope they’ll become?
• Do I confuse empathy with responsibility?

These aren’t accusations. They’re human questions.

The idea that love cannot fix doesn’t mean love is powerless. It means love has limits. Sacred ones.

Sometimes the most loving act is letting someone be exactly who they are, without fusion, without carrying, without rescuing. And that opens the door to some very real, very brave questions:

Can I love this person as they are, not as I wish them to be?
Can I stay connected without abandoning myself?
If I stop fixing, what remains between us?
Is there mutual effort, or only mutual feeling?

Here’s the part people don’t talk about enough.

Sometimes, when fixing stops, something beautiful happens.

Without fusion, intimacy can deepen. Without pressure, desire can return. Without over functioning, two people can meet freshly, as equals. There can be a rekindling. A new romance. A lighter, truer connection because no one is being carried.

And sometimes, something else happens.

The relationship clarifies. Without the glue of fixing, the gap becomes visible. And while that can be painful, it can also be honest. Clarity is not cruelty. It’s information.

None of this is a failure of love.

In fact, it may be love in its most mature form.

Love that doesn’t control.
Love that doesn’t rescue.
Love that doesn’t disappear into effort.

Maybe the ultimate expression of love is allowing someone to be who they are, and then answering, with courage and care, the questions that truth brings forward.

That work isn’t easy.
It’s deeply human.
And yes, it’s often deeply annoying.

But it’s also where real relationship begins.

12/28/2025

12/28/2025

On Being Unwelcome

Sometimes being unwelcome isn’t about something big or dramatic.
Sometimes it’s small. Ordinary. Almost absurd.

Maybe it was a skirt you wore.
Maybe it was the person you’re dating.
Maybe it was a belief you hold, a question you asked, a boundary you wouldn’t soften, a disagreement you didn’t smooth over fast enough.

Nothing explosive. Nothing that should exile you.
And yet, slowly, you feel it.

The room doesn’t quite open when you walk in.
The invitation doesn’t come.
The silence stretches just a little too long.

And what rises in you isn’t anger at first. It’s confusion. You replay the moment. You wonder what you should have worn differently. Said differently. Believed more quietly. You scan yourself for the flaw that must have made you harder to include.

This is the particular ache of exclusion. It doesn’t scream. It whispers. It asks you to shrink.

What it does to the person being excluded is subtle and deep. It makes you second guess your own presence. It teaches your body to brace before entering spaces that are supposed to feel familiar. It plants a question that is hard to uproot: Am I too much? Or not enough?

Most people don’t stop showing up because they don’t care. They stop showing up because caring starts to hurt. Because walking into a place where you have to edit yourself, apologize for existing, or pretend not to notice the chill eventually becomes unbearable.

And here is the part that is uncomfortable to name.

Exclusion often says more about the excluder than the excluded.

Sometimes it comes from fear of difference.
Sometimes from a need for sameness.
Sometimes from a system that can tolerate harmony but not honesty.
Sometimes from confusing loyalty with agreement, or love with compliance.

When exclusion happens inside families, children are always learning from it.

They notice who is welcome as-is and who is welcome only conditionally.
They notice who has to bend to belong.
They notice who disappears and how no one names it.

They learn whether silence is safer than truth.
They learn whether discomfort is something to face or avoid.
They learn whether love has room for complexity.

And they learn what to do with their own pain someday.

For the person being excluded, hope begins with this remembering:
Being unwelcome is not proof that you are wrong. It is not evidence that you failed some moral test of likability or loyalty. Sometimes it simply means you are unwilling to disappear in order to stay.

Choosing distance can be an act of self respect.
Choosing not to chase belonging where it is withheld can be a way of protecting your dignity and your children’s nervous systems too.

And for families who notice that someone doesn’t come around anymore, there are better questions than blame.

Not “Why are they so difficult?”
But “What became unsafe to say?”

Not “Why did they pull away?”
But “Did we leave room for their truth, or only for ours?”

Not “Why can’t they just let it go?”
But “What did we ask them to carry alone?”

Silence is rarely neutral.
More often, it is a message.

Connection does not require agreement.
It requires curiosity.
It requires humility.
It requires the courage to say, We may not like what we hear, but we want to understand.

Families don’t break because someone wears the wrong skirt or loves the wrong person or holds an uncomfortable belief.

They break when difference is treated as danger instead of dialogue.

And healing begins when silence is replaced with listening, and belonging is made wide enough to hold real people, not just convenient ones.

12/21/2025

The Act of Making Meaning

Have you noticed humanity slowly slipping away? Chat GPT and Gemini have replaced us on social media. People (if not already AI) are using AI to write their content; posting it on a screen and reading off a teleprompter; they then have an AI voice superimposed over their own and edit their videos to perfection. A face can be distorted to perfection, a body and we can now plaster our face onto a fake body and put it in a fake environment to live out a fantasy we have and have people actually believing this fantasy is true and liking us for it. And none of it is real. It’s all an illusion. Sometimes I find it cute, and sometimes my neshama feels allergic and I find it hurts my soul.

I am not immune to the temptations of AI. I was going to use it to help me make this post. And then I had a moment, sitting here on my beautiful and meaningful sofa, in the beautiful and meaningful home, looking at the messy remnants of my beautiful and meaningful family Chanukah party last night (I do plan on cleaning up… soon. Maybe a part of me isn’t ready to emotionally wipe away the energy.)

I notice that the happiest or even unhappiest people are making meaning. Trying to find the lesson. Trying to grow from it. Moving forward. Struggling with feeling stuck. They are all trying to make meaning. I have a lot of respect for that. I notice that everyone assigns a different meaning, though there are some universal, human themes. And while we may disagree about meaning, it seems it is the act of making meaning that may be most important. Let’s try this out… I have a hard time with my own typo’s. When I send a text, I automatically scan for mistakes and then need to hit edit and correct myself. This is wrapped up in my own ego and need for people to perceive me in a certain way. Deeper than that, it has to do with my own inner shame I carry. It’s really hard for me when I fail at something. I feel so much shame! So trying becomes hard. Taking risks is hard. Subjecting myself to the embarrassment of failure is hard. And yet, I can share this. I know it’s human. (I am leaving a typo here to push myself out of my comfort zon.) Was that my way of controlling the way you see me? Maybe!

The act of making meaning is part of what we do as humans. We’re always busy assigning meaning. I imagine it has something to do with survival. Without it things can feel pretty hopeless and we can lose our drive and our will to go on. So it’s very important to find meaning. Sometimes the circumstances in which meaning grows absolutely stink! (Truly truly stink!) And yet, the only choice we have sometimes is the meaning we assign to it. (I am talking about those immovable, fundamentally unchangeable situations we did not ask for.) sometimes we can change things. And we aren’t. And we’re assigning old or unhelpful meaning. And we can take a look at why that may be and assign a new meaning, but only if we really want to.

Jen
And I see that “s” sitting there and it’s driving me nuts!

12/19/2025

Where Do I Put It?

Sometimes something is so heavy, so painful…
And we want the whole thing, but the part(s) feels like too much to bare. Maybe it compromises our values, our safety (the part, that is), our ability to connect and be intimate.

And so, we ask ourselves, “Where do I put it?”

Do I put it in the recesses of my mind? Buried away…
Like a jack-in-the-box, it pops out and scares us; sometimes taking our breath away.

Do I put it front and center? Like the star of the show… spotlight and all. Then I can’t see anything else.

Do I juggle it? Flying in the air, scared to drop it, going back and forth between the burial and the stage.

Where exactly do I put it?

What if….
What if….
What if I put it down?

What if I stop taking responsibility for it, or trying to figure out the answer. What if I try to simply notice it? (Whatever it is.) Notice. What if I notice how I feel? What if I notice what that part does to my body? The way it lands? I may begin to notice some space between myself and the part or the thing I’ve been burying, spotlighting or juggling.

I can’t hold what isn’t mine to hold.
I can’t fix it.
I can’t control it.
I can’t make it better.
I can put it down.
I can feel myself.

💖 Jennifer Mann LCSW

12/18/2025

There’s Been a Mistake
By Jennifer Mann

When life goes wrong, I freeze. I don’t understand. I fight it with denial, suppression and my personal favorite; trying to make it go my way by insisting external factors are well within my control. (Ha!) When life goes wrong I cry. It feels unfair. It feels like there’s been some terrible mistake. I throw myself not a pity party because I have too much Aquarius dignity for that… I do not take out my violin. The thought of anyone having “pity” for me makes me want to crawl out of my skin. When I was in seminary billions of years ago, I needed a fridge for my dorm room. My friend and I put the refrigerator on my back and we climbed two flights of stairs; sooner than ask for help.

When life goes wrong, we meet people we never would have met. When life goes wrong, we have experiences we never would have had. When life goes wrong, I believe it can never be right again… until… until… life introduces me to myself.

When life was right, I can also remember the cost and the price I paid (sometimes… sometimes it’s a bit foggy and I can’t remember.)

When life goes wrong we are thrown into new challenges. Things we never dreamt we’d face. Things we feel completely unprepared for and do not want to do! We cry. We are also hopeful. We also start to breathe… eventually.

When life goes wrong, we develop empathy and an understanding of people that we never could have possibly had when life was right; before the “mistake.” Not because we weren’t kind before things went awry, but because we simply didn’t know. When life goes wrong, we have a moment (many many moments) of realization and awareness and appreciation of others and their realities.

When life goes wrong and there has been a terrible mistake; and we live in that “mistake” over time, we start to contemplate our old life as we slowly settle into the new one; maybe there was no mistake. Maybe there are no mistakes. Maybe there is the reality we lived in and believed that was all there could ever be so it seemed there was a mistake.

When life goes wrong, we are called to surrender. We are called to accept. We are called to humility and modesty. We are called to compassion and kindness. We are called to mercy, as we fall to our knees. When there has been a mistake, we are called to TRUTH. Emes! When there has been a mistake, we are called to the thirteen attributes of Gd, as we are created in His image. This is why I feel that people who have lived through, or are living through the “mistake,” have the highest potential to feel close to Gd. When there has been a terrible mistake, You get to feel Him and how He feels about you.

With all that being said, when there has been a terrible mistake, most days are a struggle. Or an offshoot of a struggle. We can’t usually get away from when things were right for too long. When things were right has a way of sending reminders.

When things have gone wrong, most days can also be joyful. Things go wrong. It is not a moral failure. It is not a reflection of some ugly image of yourself. Life is so much bigger than my genes, my upbringing, my input. Much of life is out of my hands. What is in my hands is focusing on the me I was introduced to and am still and always will be becoming. When life went wrong, over time, I learned that there are no absolutes, that holding two truths is the truth most of the time (except when there is abuse), that everyone and their mother has an opinion, I met a lot of “experts” and people who think they are somehow above it all. I have also met kindness and wisdom. And most of all, after life went wrong, I met myself. I am getting to know her. I am getting to know how people perceive her. I am getting to know her feelings and how she thinks and how she loves and how she cries and how she carries responsibility on her own. She breaks down and she is scared and she is joyful and she is a big kid.

When things went wrong, there was no mistake. When things went wrong, that chapter had simply come to a close. The characters in the story all moved on to their next chapters. Some together; some separately. Nothing had gone wrong. There was no mistake. The author started a new chapter. I was very comfortable and very uncomfortable in the last chapter. I am very comfortable and very uncomfortable in this new chapter (I think I’ve lived many new chapters as I write this…) The comforts and the discomforts are completely different than in the last. What I know now, as uncomfortable as it feels and with everything it brings up is that there wasn’t a mistake.

Sincerely,
Jennifer Mann LCSW

12/18/2025

I recently read Divorced by Dr. Shalom Augenbaum. If I was forced to choose just one word to describe how it made me feel, that word would be “free.” Free from what society thinks of me. Free from what anyone thinks of me. And to be honest, free from the shackles of my own personal judgments, my own inner critic and emotional residue I’ve carried with me all these years later.

I think Dr. Augenbaum is remarkably brave for sharing his story with the world and with the Orthodox community. His vulnerability reminds me that it is OK to be vulnerable with the public, appropriately. Beyond OK, it is helpful and healing. To know that you are not alone. To know that “it” can happen to anyone, and not a moral failure. To know there is hope and life and growth, and that you have nothing to be ashamed of.

There is still so much stigma in certain communities around certain things. Divorce being one of them. Families who refuse to accept other family members because they aren’t religious. I believe in the good in most people and that this is a perversion of what Hashem wants. I believe that excluding someone, making someone feel othered or less than because they are not as observant, shaming and humiliating them is sinas chinam and Hashem cries.

I do believe in hope. I do believe in change. I do believe in emes/truth. I do believe in love. I also believe in protecting your own sanity, dignity and mental health. Sometimes we outgrow relationships. Sometimes other people outgrow us because we’ve outgrown someone else. Sometimes we outgrow intolerance.

To anyone who has ever felt a moment’s shame or pain due to being divorced, I really encourage you to read this book. It may give you an entirely new perspective.

If you have a friend or family member who is or has gotten divorced, I think you should read this too. It will give you such a deep understanding of what your loved one is going through.

Thank you to my friend for telling me about this. It really touched me.

Jen

12/17/2025

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