‘I Love Me More: Lessons from a 20-something Therapist’

Which stage of life presents the most challenging transitions?

Kids move yearly from one grade to the next. Many adults go from raising a family to empty-nesting. Seniors become grandparents and retire. Talk to therapist Jennifer Leigh Coren, and you’ll realize the transitions people face in their 20s and 30s are particularly hard.

“You see all of these options, and you’re just so overwhelmed, and nobody’s telling you what it is you should be doing. Nobody’s giving you a map to these transitional 20s you’re about to embark on,” Coren explained, rattling off a list of changes that show up at that life stage: job, housing, dating, marriage, and parenthood.

Coren writes about all of this in her new book, I Love Me More: Lessons From a 20-Something Therapist , published by Biograph at the start of the year. “Transitions are so difficult to digest because they are so abrupt. They take us off course. They force us to adjust our obligations and roles,” she writes. She knows quite a bit about the topic from her own life.

Growing up in north suburban Riverwoods, Coren attended Deerfield High School and was deeply involved in theater. After graduation, she entered the University of Miami conservatory, but by the end of freshman year, she realized the program wasn’t right for her, and her interest in psychology grew. She finished college with a plan to pursue a graduate degree in counseling, but before the first day of classes, she deferred. “My mind and body told me I needed to explore somewhere else first: New York,” she states in the book.

She spent a year at Bloomberg in New York City, moved back to Chicago, completed her counseling degree at Loyola University, and began seeing her own clients in private practice. That’s when she discovered she wasn’t the only one living through those turbulent 20s and feeling pressure to make decisions and move forward in life.

“Our indecision is rooted in a fear of making the wrong decision-not of making a decision. This fear comes from our fragile, tentative grasp on our own identities,” she writes.

To help people learn to cope with transitions, Coren created The Caterpillar to Butterfly Affect , based on the metamorphosis of a caterpillar finding its wings and emerging from its cocoon. “Human beings are the same. We’re living organisms that are waiting to emerge out of and through transitional spaces,” she said.

Throughout the book, Coren illustrates the stages of the model by sharing stories about her clients along with details from her own life including her struggles as a newly-minted therapist.

“I believed a therapist was bland, unenthusiastic, indirect, slow. But that’s not who I am,” she writes. Now, when she meets a new client, she breaks the ice, stating right away, “I’m a white, Jewish woman.” That opens the door for clients. “It’s important to recognize who we are and that [we] may have been influenced by race, religion, and culture,” she said.

Coren also recognizes the hurdles that many people experience, particularly the ongoing pandemic. “A lot of people think that they should be feeling a different way right now. No, we’re still in it, and we get hope that we’re about to get out of it, and then there’s grief,” she explained, “We’re going through these repetitive cycles of grief, loss, and hope.”

While I Love Me More focuses on the transitions of the 20s and 30s, Coren says there are lessons in the book for all ages. “Life is full of transitions,” she said, adding, “we never know how anything in life is going to unfold, so, we need to think about how we can lean into now and love ourselves more.”

Coren’s Theory of Transitions: The Caterpillar to Butterfly Affect

Stage One: Shedding

Evaluate who you are, gain clarity about your values, and decide what you want to leave behind as you move to a new phase.

Stage Two: You in Context

Collect information about the world around you and ask yourself how it makes you feel.

Stage Three: Radical Acceptance

Accept who you are, the context you’re in or the inability to change whatever troubles you.

Stage Four: Making a Decision

Put it all together and make a decision that aligns with your values.

Julie Mangurten Weinberg is a journalist with more than 20 years of experience in broadcast, print, and digital media. She is a member of the JUF Women’s Board and lives in Northbrook with her husband, two teenage children, and three cats.