I was watching my two year old daughter play with her doll. The doll has a pacifier and comes with a doll stroller. My daughter put the pacifier in the doll’s mouth, lovingly put the doll in the stroller, and took the doll for a walk through the house while singing to the doll. She was ecstatic in her ability to “take care” of the doll.
My daughter was expressing an inborn, natural, human need. Just as we understand that there is a human need to be loved, there is also just as strong a need to give love. We tend to think of loving and giving as positive character traits, but it’s much more than that. They are actually psychological needs, hardwired into our psyches.
Therapy often tends to focus on the need to be loved, to be accepted, to be seen etc, but it often neglects the other half of the equation. Healing definitely needs to start with being seen, accepted etc, but it doesn’t end there. You cannot fully heal without the other half.
Healing means to be seen and to see another. To be accepted and to accept. To be heard and to hear. To be loved and to love. To receive and to give.
Healing means to be completely and unabashedly who you are. Who are you? You were born with a loving, giving nature. It’s who you are, regardless of how long you’ve been disconnected from that part of yourself. To heal, that part of you needs to be completely and unabashedly expressed too.
If you’ve tried everything to heal but you feel stuck, this may be the missing part of the equation. Have you focused on  your need to be seen, to be heard, to be accepted, and to be loved but neglected your own, crucial need to see, to accept, to hear and to love?
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Chaim Moshe Steinmetz LISW is a psychotherapist in private practice and provides in person and telehealth therapy for a variety of issues. Chaim’s goal as a therapist is to help his clients achieve the change, healing and resolution that they seek in the purest and deepest way, but also in the most rapid way possible. For more info, visit https://www.chaimmoshesteinmetz.com/
Your point is on target 🎯 There is a need for individuals to get involved in resting Shidduchim for divorced men/women.
Should read (redting)
Two comments: please check out if the dolly-pacifier could be a choking hazard for a toddler. ( I had to confiscate one from my little grandaughter. As my mother a.h.used to say in yiddish “better you should cry than I should ch.v. cry)
And on the topic: Although we may be born withba loving giving nature (we do have a neshama tehora) we have a yetzer hara (ra min’urav) and the supposed “real me” could be quite the opposite (a self- centered chaya?) and need to be suppressed/channeled/controled….whatever. In other words….the natural real me is not neccesarily what I should “unabashedly” embrace. At least not without taking it to the next step, and becoming a mench.
what’s the falseness