Jennifer Mann, LCSW

10/30/2026

“I know” is to vulnerability and sharing as the pin is to the balloon. 🎈

10/30/2026

The more you learn the less you know. There’s a heaviness I am feeling for months. Perhaps it’s stress. Middle age. Or the deeply soulful journey I am (sort of) convinced I now feel. Feeling less and less attached to my “human” and more and more of my very own soul.

Constructs like family, career, relationships, home, errands, social norms… sometimes feel almost cartoonish. Like these basic universal foundations are so silly or small.

We go through a lot of pain on Earth. Some of us more than others. There are so many different cards or hands dealt in this game of life.

Some people come here born into an attractive package. Physical, family, health, security, perhaps luxury. And some people arrive with a much harder package. Trauma, hatred, abuse, blame, illness, generational trauma, narcissistic family system, scapegoated, divorce, impact on children, mental illness. Sometimes it is a smattering. Sometimes it’s everything. And some people truly are spared. I am no one to speak on such things, but as a human being with my limited human brain I can safely say that none of this is “fair.”

There is nothing new under the sun. I don’t have a flashy Instagram account with the same regurgitated information floating around. The more of that I see, the more my brain rots, the more isolated I am while I share it with friends. It’s so sad.

Here’s the good news. We are all having this human experience. I am letting my spiritual side out here on this little tiny platform. (I really don’t when I’m working with someone unless they enjoy this sort of thing and it resonates.) Some of us believe that our souls have chosen this experience we are having. We hand picked our parents. Handpicked our lives. And our children handpicked us. There is absolutely nothing. I repeat absolutely nothing that is out of alignment.

Everything we go through can be for ourselves. To feel more of ourselves. To grow. Pain catapults growth but only if you choose to see it that way. Otherwise it is destructive. Just like fire. 🔥 Just like water. Just like air. Just like earth. 🌍

Every element when contained is gorgeous and beneficial to us. When out of control it can destroy.

The only thing we can do with our pain is what we choose to do with it.

If you are going through “it” right now… please know that you are truly not alone. As for me, I feel as though I am living a brand new life. Sometimes it feels completely unrecognizable and leaves me breathless. I am seeing so clearly who is good and kind and who simply… isn’t. I am truly for the first time in my life starting to not need the understanding of the not good people. To leave people with their thoughts of me. Whatever they are. It’s actually so exhilarating (after the fear passes…. Which only took about 45 years, lol.)

Anyway, I just enjoy writing. I don’t have anything new to say. But this isn’t AI. It’s real. It’s raw. They’re my thoughts 💭. It’s scary to share. And I’m doing it anyway. Letting life happen. Letting myself happen.

Jen

09/22/2026

09/20/2026

You. Beautiful you. Loved you.

Did you know you are worthy of love? That seems almost silly to say. You are love. Created by The Creator in His image, from love.

If you suffer here on Earth (as I do too), I wanted to share some ideas swirling around in the brain inside my gigantic forehead. I’m sitting in my car outside Ezra Pharmacy listening to Cyprus Avenue by Van Morrison, seeing all the neighborhood people feel the same feelings I have after seeing the sign that they open at 11 today, and it is 10:37. (IYKYK…. Ooooh! I never use that. I feel weird about using it.)

I don’t know why there is pain. Abuse. Addiction. Disease. Death. Financial lacking. Inability to feed children. Fighting. Alienation. Cutoffs. Pain!!!!!! And it does seem that something is going on in Shamayim that is being reflected here on Earth. So much suffering begs so many questions, and is no distraction from the pain itself.

Mitzvah gedola lihiyos b’simcha tamid. The greatest mitzvah is to be happy. When things are given to us (financial security, happy/safe, fulfilling relationships, nachas from children, health, parnassah etc etc.) the mitzvah of being happy is not complicated. When there is lacking, the mitzvah becomes much more complicated. I have to believe that the schar in Olam Haba is that much greater. This world is nothing but a blip in the Master’s grand plan and I don’t believe he puts us here to suffer and that that suffering has no purpose. That suffering is also beautiful and pure.

How to be happy? Spoiler alert. I don’t know. Gratitude, focus on what is good, journaling, taking care of the self is all beautiful and important. For many of us, that simply won’t do. It isn’t enough. It doesn’t take care of us during those breathless moments in the night when panic and sweeping sadness and despair settle deep in the chest or the pain becomes so unbearable, the mind allows for disassociation, repression and all the other defense mechanisms we employ for protection.

We suffer here. We are human. Suffering is part of the human experience. We do the best we can, we learn, we cry, we experience, we numb, we rage, we laugh and we release and surrender and we repeat. And hopefully we are able to make peace with the journey of life.

On this erev Yom Kippur, I wish you true teshuva; returning to yourself. Feeling who you are. Feeling your neshama. Feeling how precious you are. Who you are. Without the faulty messaging you were given and the trauma you have been through that separated you from your essence. I wish you reunification with yourself. To trust your intuition. To feel grounded inside of your soul. To grant yourself forgiveness. To have the strength to apologize to those we’ve hurt. To own our part in other people’s pain; even if our experience was entirely different. To let go of whatever you can. To feel excitement for potential and possibility. To remain open through the pain. May we all be written and sealed in the Book of Life.

Sincerely,
Jen

09/18/2026

They Are Sitting Next to Us in Shul

There is something happening in our community that I don’t think we are talking about nearly enough.

And before I say another word, this is not a piece about men.

It is not a piece about women.

Women can abuse men. Men can abuse women. Parents can weaponize children against mothers and against fathers. If we turn this into another battle of the sexes, we will have missed the entire point.

This is about abuse after separation.

Because sometimes a marriage ends and the abuse doesn’t.

It just gets new tools.

The court system can become one of them.

Money can become one of them.

The children can become one of them.

Schools can become one of them.

Community can become one of them.

Even the language of therapy can become one of them.

And unless you have lived this—or sat closely enough with someone who has—I don’t know that people understand the terror of it.

I mean terror.

Imagine knowing that another human being can decide, essentially whenever they feel like it, that your life is going to blow up this week.

Another email from an attorney.

Another allegation.

Another court date.

Another demand.

Another several thousand dollars you don’t have.

Another accusation you have to defend yourself against.

Another threat involving your children.

Another ordinary parenting decision turned into a federal case.

You start living in a state of waiting.

You see the name on your phone and your body reacts before your brain does.

Your heart pounds.

Your stomach drops.

You can’t concentrate.

You can’t sleep.

You think, What now?

And that’s the part I don’t think we understand.

The individual issue may look ridiculous from the outside.

A pickup time. A doctor’s appointment. A reimbursement. A school decision. A text message. Fifteen minutes. A pair of sneakers.

So everyone looks at the content and thinks, This is what they’re fighting about? These two need to grow up.

But sometimes the content isn’t the point.

The point is that I can still get to you.

I can still make you answer me.

I can still make you spend money.

I can still force you to explain yourself.

I can still threaten the thing you love most.

I can still make sure you never completely exhale.

That is a very different thing from two divorced people who can’t get along.

And sometimes there isn’t a court document anywhere.

Sometimes the weapon is the child.

This one is almost unbearable to me.

Because there are ways of separating a child from a parent that leave no bruise and produce no police report.

You tell the child too much.

You make them your confidant.

You let them know who you believe destroyed the family.

You raise an eyebrow when Mom calls.

You become wounded when they want to see Dad.

You tell them adult information they have absolutely no business carrying.

You don’t even necessarily have to say, Don’t love your mother.

You just make loving her complicated.

You make loving him feel disloyal.

And slowly, sometimes almost invisibly, a child learns where allegiance belongs.

That can happen to mothers.

It can happen to fathers.

And we need to be very careful here, because not every estrangement is parental alienation. Sometimes children have legitimate reasons to distance themselves from a parent. Sometimes a parent claiming “alienation” is actually avoiding looking at what happened in that relationship.

Again: look at the pattern.

That’s what I want us to get better at.

Not: Which one do I like more?

Not: Who presents better?

Not: Well, he has always been lovely to me.

Not: She’s such a wonderful mother.

And please, not:

“There are two sides to every story.”

I cannot tell you how devastating that sentence can be to someone experiencing abuse.

Of course there are two human beings.

Of course both people have flaws.

Of course a victim has said things she shouldn’t have said. Or he has screamed. Or sent an awful text. Or completely lost it after the 900th provocation.

Abuse does not require one perfect angel and one cartoon villain.

And abuse is not suddenly mutual because the person being terrorized eventually reacts.

The question is different.

What is the pattern?

Who is trying to resolve things and who benefits from keeping them going?

Who can say no safely?

Who controls the resources?

Who is afraid?

Are the children allowed to love both parents freely?

Does conflict eventually settle—or does one issue simply get replaced by another?

Is the court being used to solve a problem, or has keeping the other person in court become the point?

And here’s where this becomes our problem.

Because these people aren’t somewhere else.

They’re sitting next to us in shul.

They’re at the kiddush.

They’re at the school dinner.

They’re our friends.

They’re our neighbors.

They’re our siblings and cousins.

We do business with them.

We give them aliyos.

We ask them for donations.

And sometimes they are delightful.

That’s another thing we need to understand about abuse.

Someone can be incredibly generous to you and terrifying to their former spouse.

Someone can be beloved in a community and controlling at home.

Someone can be a wonderful friend and an abusive ex.

Human beings are complicated like that.

And meanwhile, the person on the other side may be drowning.

Financially.

Emotionally.

Physically.

They may be trying to parent while terrified that their children are being slowly turned against them.

They may be working simply to pay legal bills.

They may have been divorced for five years and still organize their nervous system around the next attack.

And we say:

I don’t want to get involved.

It’s messy.

They’re both difficult.

There are two sides.

Or my personal favorite:

Let’s make shalom.

You cannot make shalom with coercive control.

You cannot mediate somebody out of needing to dominate another human being.

And asking a terrified person to compromise harder is not necessarily peacemaking.

Sometimes it is handing the person who is hurting them another tool.

So what do we do?

I genuinely don’t have the complete answer.

But I know silence cannot be our entire communal policy.

And I’m not advocating for mobs. I’m not advocating for destroying someone’s reputation because an ex made an accusation. That would be reckless and dangerous and could itself become another form of abuse.

But surely there is an enormous space between public humiliation and pretending we don’t see anything.

I want rabbis learning about coercive control and post-separation abuse.

I want therapists learning it.

I want schools learning how children get triangulated into divorces.

I want attorneys and advocates helping us recognize when litigation stops functioning as dispute resolution and starts functioning as harassment.

I want legal funds for people who are being financially buried.

I want responsible systems for evaluating allegations rather than community gossip deciding who is guilty.

I want communal leaders willing, when there is a credible and established pattern, to call someone in and say:

We see what is happening.

You need to stop.

Maybe sometimes what stops abusive behavior is knowing that there will finally be consequences.

Not humiliation for sport.

Accountability.

Maybe it’s private intervention first.

Maybe it’s financial or legal advocacy.

Maybe it’s refusing to lend communal prestige to someone whose conduct has been responsibly substantiated.

Maybe it’s rabbis, attorneys and mental-health professionals working together instead of everybody staying inside their own silo.

I don’t know exactly what the structure should look like.

That’s why I’m writing this.

I want to hear from you.

If you’ve lived this, what would have helped you?

If you’re a rabbi, what would help you intervene responsibly?

If you’re an attorney, what can communities do when someone with greater resources appears to be using litigation to exhaust the other parent?

If you’re a therapist, what signs do you wish rabbis and schools understood?

If you’re a judge, advocate, educator, parent or someone who has watched this happen up close—what are we missing?

How do we create accountability while protecting due process?

How do we intervene without becoming another weapon in somebody’s divorce?

How do we protect children without automatically believing whichever parent tells the more convincing story?

And perhaps the hardest question:

When does staying out of it stop being neutrality?

Because there are people in our community living in terror of someone they divorced years ago.

Some are women.

Some are men.

Some are mothers watching their children disappear from them.

Some are fathers.

And the person causing that terror may be sitting two seats away from us in shul.

We don’t need to become a mob.

But we do need to become a community that knows what it’s looking at.

And once we know what we’re looking at, we need to decide what we’re willing to do about it.

09/17/2026

Some lives read like one book, while others read like a series of short stories; with clear endings and beginnings and new characters.

Death, divorce, abuse, trauma can lead to that stories feeling. When a new story starts, no matter how painful the last was, we miss the familiar. Starting over (and over and over and over again) is utterly exhausting and sometimes leaves a girl or fella breathless, panicked, depressed, numb, grieving, down or with a case of existential anxiety and dread. What is the purpose of my life? There’s too much pain here on Earth.

The answer is always the same. Accept and surrender. I’ve been talking about acceptance and surrender for years. That doesn’t mean I can do it. It’s one of my greatest personal struggles.

A little silver lining offering…

When we live through pain, and somehow choose life, we meet other souls who have lived pain and chosen life. We are still on the same planet, go to the same supermarkets and maybe have the same job, and yet our entire universe changes.

We can no longer live contained in what cannot contain our expansive soul. We find others who understand. We get to experience connection with other souls. And feel them in a way we wouldn’t have been able to before. What a beautiful thing!

We also have lots in store for us that we can’t even comprehend or fathom simply because it hasn’t happened… yet.

This is all possible with acceptance and surrender. What I am learning from some pretty wise souls who orbit me is that we suffer (we actively suffer) when we fight what is. When we accept and surrender, we feel sadness (yes!) and we also stop suffering. It is an active practice. It does not just come. And it is so beautiful! And it is something we take with us through every story. It becomes a part of us. It is an awakening.

If you are in pain as you read this, please know that you are not alone. Pain is a part of being alive. I’m so sorry for your pain. There are no definitive answers. We are not in control of much here. We do get to decide what we do with the pain. Wishing you healing and feeling good in your mind and body and the ability to feel how beautiful and worthy of love you are.

Jen

09/15/2026

And in the spaces you don’t fit neatly into, in the tears you repeatedly shed over what is broken, what is lost and what cannot be fixed, is where the soul can be felt.

09/04/2026

An Ode to the One Who Is Always the Problem

(Written by me and Chat GPT)
This is for the person who has learned to rehearse conversations before having them.

Who thinks about the tone.
The timing.
The wording.
The facial expression.

Who has learned that one wrong sentence can become the whole story.

This is for the person who lives with someone—or loves someone—who needs there to be a good guy and a bad guy.

And somehow,
you keep getting cast as the bad guy.

Your intentions don’t seem to matter.
Your history doesn’t matter.
The hundred loving things you did before this moment don’t matter.

There is only what you did wrong.
What you should have known.
What you should have done differently.

And when you try to explain your side, you’re told you’re defensive.

When you say you’re hurt, suddenly the conversation becomes about how much you hurt them.

When you set a boundary, you’re selfish.

When you finally get angry after being pushed and pushed and pushed, your anger becomes proof that they were right about you all along.

And maybe the hardest part isn’t even the fighting.

Maybe it’s the absence of repair.

The apology that never comes.

The simple:

I can see why that hurt you.

I misunderstood.

I was wrong.

I’m sorry.

So you end up doing something profoundly lonely:

You repair relationships you didn’t rupture.

You consider perspectives no one considers for you.

You apologize for your part while quietly knowing there were two people in the room.

You carry nuance in a relationship that keeps handing you absolutes.

And after enough years of this, you may begin to wonder:

Am I actually the difficult one?

Maybe I really am too sensitive.
Maybe I’m selfish.
Maybe I expect too much.
Maybe I should have said it differently.
Maybe if I could just explain myself better, they would finally understand.

But there may be nothing wrong with your explanation.

You may simply be standing in front of someone who cannot—or will not—make room for a reality in which they hurt you and are still a good person.

And so they need you to be wrong.

Please hear this:

Someone misunderstanding you does not make you unknowable.

Someone being certain about your motives does not make them correct.

Someone experiencing your boundary as rejection does not make your boundary cruel.

And you do not have to keep abandoning your own reality just because someone else is more comfortable when you do.

You are allowed to know what happened to you.

You are allowed to stop presenting evidence.

You are allowed to stop auditioning for the role of “good person” in someone else’s courtroom.

You are allowed to love someone and recognize that they are difficult to love.

You are allowed to grieve the apology you may never receive.

And you are allowed to become the person who finally says to yourself what you have spent years waiting to hear from them:

I believe you.

I understand why that hurt.

You didn’t deserve all of the blame.

Your side of the story matters too.

And maybe, after all this time, being seen begins there.

08/11/2026

Life is bumpy!