Jennifer Mann, LCSW

02/16/2026

Do you ever get really intense déjà vu? I’m having coffee, hanging out on what’s app and social media a bit, before I meet my mom (and possibly) sister for a belated birthday lunch on my day off from work, and I’m texting with a good friend about something really challenging and emotional in my life, and I JUST experienced intense déjà vu. The kind that gives you more than pause. The kind that takes your breath away and makes you question your sense of reality and if you’re “normal” or “OK.” And because it’s an inside job and you’re left alone with it, you don’t know if you’re going crazy because it didnt happen to anyone else and you were alone in it. So, there are parts of my life I struggle with and of course the feelings that come along with those parts, and for the briefest moment I felt that I’ve lived this before. And it felt so familiar and right. This recognition that maybe I’ve done this already. And suddenly I feel so planted in this reality and this feeling of being able to do it. I do believe that I’ve lived past lives with many of the people I travel this world with. So who knows??
Have you ever had Déjà vu??
Jen

02/15/2026

Living in truth is glorious. Its recognizing and make space for who you are. Part of that is listening to your nervous system and honoring that it is your internal wisdom and knowing speaking to you. Listening is self love.

02/06/2026

Knowing that holding two realities at once is wisdom. Doing it feels terrible. Releasing the idea that there comes a time when we are “healed” and no longer feel pain is grief. Maintaining and/or cultivating play and child like euphoria and fun is where the magic is.

Jen

01/29/2026

Grief. Loss. Gasping for air without. Pain. Sobbing. Weepy. Unexpected. A hibernation. No longer feeling human or connected to life. Consuming. Allowing it is hell. Not allowing it isn’t a choice. Forced. Trapped.
The other side of love, lost. There’s beauty here too. Slowly coming back to yourself; changed forever. Returning to life. Slowly. Laughing. Appreciating the laughing. Deeply. Feeling. Feeling everything.

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