Mirel Goldstein, MS, MA, LPC is an award-winning, licensed therapist with 20+ years of clinical experience and is a published author.
You’re not cold, you’re scared: when love feels like danger
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Let’s talk about something that doesn’t get said enough: We do it to survive. To feel safe. To stay in control. We tell ourselves we’re “independent,” or that we “don’t need anyone,” but beneath all that distance? There’s often a much younger part of us saying: “Please don’t hurt me like that again.” Because sometimes, connection hasn’t felt safe. Maybe love came with conditions. Maybe it disappeared when you needed it most. Maybe it was intense, confusing, smothering, or just… not trustworthy. So your nervous system did what it had to do: It learned to associate love with danger. Intimacy with threat. Vulnerability with pain. And now—even when someone shows up with real care, you might feel the impulse to shut down, pull away, or pretend you don’t care. Not because you’re broken. Because that pattern once protected you. You can unlearn that wiring. It helps to get to know the part of you that flinches at closeness—not to get rid of it, but to understand it. To slowly show it that this time might be different. That safety can feel quiet. Steady. Real. You weren’t meant to go through life on emotional lockdown. You were meant to connect, and be met, and feel safe in your own skin. Let’s make space for that. Take care- Mirel |
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...