Mirel Goldstein, MS, MA, LPC is an award-winning, licensed therapist with 20+ years of clinical experience and is a published author.
What if nothing about you needs fixing?
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The Parts We Push Away I wanted to share something I often say in therapy—and that I’ve had to remind myself of many times too: Therapy isn’t about fixing you. It’s about making space for the parts of you that got pushed aside just to survive. We all have parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at. Maybe they feel too needy, too angry, too vulnerable, too unpredictable. So we exile them. We hide them away, sometimes so deeply that we forget they’re even there. But here’s the thing: Those parts don’t disappear. They just wait. And often, they find ways to leak out—through shame, irritation, overreactions, self-sabotage, or exhaustion. And then we judge ourselves for it, layering more shame on top of the pain we were already carrying. In psychoanalytic work, we talk about this as splitting—dividing ourselves into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” parts. And while splitting can protect us in the short term, the long-term cost is steep: We lose access to our wholeness. To our spontaneity. To parts of ourselves that hold creativity, truth, desire, and even joy. You’re not alone. You’re not broken. And you don’t have to push those parts away anymore. Warmly, Mirel P.S. If this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. What’s one part of you that you’re just beginning to make room for? |
Goldstein Therapy
Mirel Goldstein, MS, MA, LPC is an award-winning, licensed therapist with 20+ years of clinical experience and is a published author.
Grieving is really hard. To grieve something, to truly mourn it, means acknowledging that something has happened that we cannot undo. It means facing what we miss, what we regret, what we wish had been different, and sitting with the reality that time cannot be turned back. A loss cannot be made up for, it leaves a void by its very definition. Not all losses are traumas, some are ordinary painful moments in life of missing something, regretting something, not having or getting something that...
When transitions happen, some of us can feel unanchored or destabilized. Change can feel like a leap into the unknown, and with it can come a loss of orientation, identity, or familiarity. In the process of things changing, we may be leaving something we know behind, before whatever we’re replacing it with feels solid or familiar. There’s a gap or void that has to be managed. Even positive change can feel disorganizing. A bridge helps us feel supported while things change, by anchoring us to...
Dear Readers, As we move toward the end of Chanukah, I find myself reflecting on the idea that sometimes we need to gradually create a container within ourselves to hold more and more light. Many of us are familiar with the work of building our capacity to hold pain and struggle (often referred to as a "capacity for containment" in psychoanalysis), learning to lean into the hard times, to regulate our affect, to use relationships and attachments to soothe ourselves, and to build the ability...