A woman once told Chava Shmilovitch, almost apologetically, that she did not know how to be warm with her children. She loved them fiercely. But when a child climbed into her lap, something in her went stiff. Nobody had held her that way, and she had no idea where the warmth was supposed to come from.

Many of us carry some version of this. We want to give our families what we never received, and we quietly suspect that it is impossible. How do you set a boundary when you never saw one modeled? How do you raise a confident child when you were raised by anxious parents? How do you give what you do not have?

Torah-based emotional growth answers with surprising confidence: you can. The answer begins with the first Jew.

Weak Roots and Emotional Muscles

Chava uses the image of roots. Some of our emotional struggles come from a disconnected root: a feeling of not belonging, from birth or from rejection along the way. Others come from a weak root, a trait or capacity that never had the chance to grow strong because the conditions were not there.

Picture a woman who is taken advantage of again and again. Look a little deeper and you often find a weak root around boundaries. Somewhere along the way she became the “pleasing child,” the one who took responsibility for everyone else’s needs while quietly abandoning her own. It was a survival strategy, and a clever one. It kept the peace. But it never built the muscle of saying no.

Chava calls these emotional muscles, and the name is deliberate. A muscle that was never exercised is not missing; it is simply undeveloped. And muscles can be built at any age.

Lech Lecha: The Son of Terach

When Hashem first speaks to Avraham, He tells him, “Lech lecha,” go forth, “from your land, from your birthplace and from your father’s house” (Bereishis 12:1). Chava reads these three departures as the shape of inner work: the unrefined traits, the difficult experiences, the deficiencies that come from childhood.

Think about where Avraham came from. He grew up in the home of Terach, who sold idols for a living. There was no model of emunah in that house, no father of faith to learn from. And yet Avraham became the father of faith for all of us. He introduced into the world values he had never received from his own parents.

Chazal tell us that Avraham had no teacher; he recognized his Creator on his own. This is not only a story about one man’s greatness. It is a promise written into the Jewish neshama. Every one of Avraham’s descendants has the power to create and develop new traits and strengths, even without having seen them at home.

Building an Inner Educator

How does this actually happen? Chava describes helping a woman build what she calls an inner educator: a nurturing, idealized inner parental voice that offers what the real one could not.

This is not about blaming parents. Most parents gave what they had, often under real pressure and with their own unhealed hurts. Honoring them and healing honestly can live side by side. But a woman who never heard “you are allowed to rest,” or “your needs matter too,” can learn to say those sentences to herself, and to the frightened younger part of her that is still waiting to hear them.

For the pleasing child, this inner educator says something she has needed for decades: setting boundaries is not only permitted, it is necessary. For the woman who never felt she belonged, it offers belonging from within. And slowly, with support, a new muscle begins to form.

The Muscles Grow in Three Directions

Chava describes this strengthening as work that moves in several directions at once.

• Giving warmth to your children, even if you did not experience warmth growing up.
• Establishing boundaries, even if they were absent in your childhood.
• Developing confidence and resilience, even if you were raised by anxious parents.

Each of these is uncomfortable at first, in the way any new exercise is. The warmth feels awkward. The boundary feels cruel. The confidence feels like pretending. And then, with repetition and with Hashem’s help, it stops feeling foreign and starts feeling like yours.

This is what healing generational patterns looks like in practice, and it is why Chava says the work repairs more than one life. A pattern that ran through three generations stops with the woman who decides, with help, to grow a muscle her mother never had. Her children inherit the muscle instead of the wound.

Connecting the Root to Its Source

There is one more layer, and it is the deepest one. A root that is weak or disconnected can be reconnected to the source of infinite love: Hashem, who chose to bring this particular woman into the world. From that connection a stable emotional foundation can grow, even for someone who has felt unloved her whole life.

Chava is honest about the order, though. Before the reconnection can happen, the pain has to be acknowledged and given voice. When fundamental needs like warmth, respect, empathy or validation were missing, the neshama thirsts for them, and that thirst can show up in ways we do not like in ourselves. Healing means first recognizing the wound, then expressing the pain it caused, and only then tending the need beneath it. A guide walks this road with you so that you are not walking it alone.

The processes themselves belong to the course, not to an article. But the idea is worth holding today: you are a daughter of Avraham, who gave the world what he never received. The muscle you are missing is not missing. It is waiting to be built.

A gentle word: if this touches something heavy, please reach out to a trusted professional, and if you are in crisis, call your local emergency services.

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