My front window faces directly into my neighbor's living room, and it's putting me under terrible stress," a Jerusalem woman recently told Miriam Adahan. "You see, she's extremely organized and efficient, and every erev Shabbat, she's actually ready to light her candles when the siren goes off. She's already dressed in one of her lovely fitted outfits (of course she's thin), the table is set in silver and crystal that no child would consider tampering with, and her three little girls are in their Shabbat finery, shoes buckled, hair bowed, standing beside her as she lights. At that point, I'm just jumping into the shower and my kids are running around in their underwear, pulling the napkin fans out of the glasses. It's gotten to the point where I just close my tris (window shade)".

   "The star mentality has captured our society and is poisoning us," says Dr. Miriam Adahan, referring to those average "non-stars" who are full of self condemnation because they can't compete with Mr. or Mrs. Perfect. She should know. As a psychologist, therapist, prolific author and founder of EMETT ("Emotional Maturity Established Through Torah") ­ a network of self-help groups dedicated to personal growth, Adahan has devoted her life to picking up the pieces of those devastated by what she calls "terrorism of comparison," criticism, and other forms of emotional abuse.

   "I'll ask my group, if one woman's house is a museum, she has a baby every year, she's unemotional and unruffled, her walls are white and her grocery cart is clean on the bottom, does she have more value than the woman whose house is a mess? And most of the group will answer, yes, she has more value. So how does the woman who's a little more discombobulated see herself? As a failure."

Adahan's mission, she says, is to teach people that everyone has value for who he is, that everyone is worthy of love and respect, even if he isn't a star.

   "A couple came to me recently. He's a lawyer, very successful and very organized. She doesn't have such a good sense of time, is a little flighty, yet generous, loving, and very intelligent. When I explained to him that her lack of organization is due to a slight functional disorder, he said, Œso I got grade-B'. How could he learn to love and appreciate such a person, whom he saw as second-rate? I had to help him eliminate the idea that people only have value if they're stars. That everyone is worthy of love was a new idea to him."

   Adahan, who lives in Jerusalem, has penned EMETT: Emotional Maturity Established Through Torah; Raising Children to Care; Appreciating People (Including yourself); Living With Difficult People (including yourself); It's All a Gift; Awareness; and an assortment of "Miriam Adahan Handbooks," on subjects ranging from happiness in marriage to calming your temper. From the beginning of her publishing career, she has made a policy of giving sales profits to charity. This year she is coming out with two new books, one on the subject of verbal abuse, and the other on "30 Seconds to Mental Health" ("30 second exercises, but you have to do them 3,000 times a day," she says). Her writing provides practical guidance, psychological insight, and penetrating examples. But her ultimate goal is a spiritual one, as she deals with the transcendent dimension of pain, suffering and frustration as a means to perfecting character traits and developing spiritual refinement.

   All of life's traumas, no matter how big or how trivial, can hurdle a person into a fit of fury, or even deep depression. Although stressful events are often out of one's control, reaction to those events is one's own choice, and creates a challenge of spiritual growth.

   "Every day we face stressful events from within ourselves as well as from people and things in our outside environment," says Adahan. "Whether the event is a minor inconvenience or a major trauma, we really have only two choices: to sink into temper, rage, bitterness or despair; or to discover how we can use the event for our spiritual growth, which requires forgiveness and compassion."

   Adahan's advanced academic background is in psychology, but her empathy with people's pain comes, she says, from her own suffering. Readers are taken in by her personal style ­ many feel they've never been understood so well. "I've probably experienced everything anyone has gone through. Hashem has put me through the meat grinder in this lifetime."

   At age fifty-four, with a grown daughter and three teenage sons, Adahan says that her personal key to mental health and emotional equilibrium was to find her "center" as she calls it; that core center of worth that doesn't change, no matter what anyone says, no matter what's in the sink, no matter what your house looks like, no matter how your children or spouse treat you. Each of us, she says, has a core center of G-dly value, but it can't come from a therapist; it can only come from you.

   "I realized that mental health means having love and joy in your heart. Yet when you are busy comparing and judging and feeling either inferior or superior, then you don't have mental health. I had to figure out what to do to maintain love in my heart, which is all Hashem wants from us ­ don't hate, don't bear a grudge, don't take vengeance. What's left? Unconditional love."

   The inferiority/superiority comparison rut plays havoc with mental health, especially when things are out of our control. One woman told Adahan that after miscarriage, she felt like she was "losing the baby race," and had a need to explain to everyone, in a society where the number of children is a status symbol, why she wasn't pregnant.

   Adahan is no stranger to that pain. For years, she felt apologetic when people would ask now many children she had. "Four, I would answer, and then have this compelling need to say, BUT, I had difficulty conceiving, I married late, I had a series of miscarriages, etc." At age forty-four, a miscarriage late in her pregnancy was especially devastating. The level of pain, she said, was unimaginable. After two more lost pregnancies, the poison of jealousy and self-pity began eating away at her.

   "I had to find my center, my inner value. I realized that I was in a judgmental place, and that's poison. When it comes to halacha, we can make judgments. When it comes to our sense of value, we can't be in that state."

   Her writing, she says, has been her therapy. "These books saved my life. My personal life has been very painful, so this has been my way of trying to figure out how to gain some sense of value without having grown up with a sense of value, and not having value encouraged by anyone when I got older. Living in a star-oriented society, when I wasn't a star, how could I somehow feel good about myself? I began to shift my thinking from, ŒThis is unfair. Hashem is punishing me,' to ŒWe're all here for tikun, to make repair, and everything that happens to me is part of Hashem's effort to push me in the right direction.' Happiness is the side effect of that process. Happiness is not getting someplace, it's doing the work."

   An unhappy childhood, bouts of depression and feelings of intense loneliness and isolation led Miriam Adahan from one psychologist to another.

   "My search for some way to be a happier person went on until I was thirty-three, when I was introduced to Orthodoxy. I immediately found more chochma there than in all the psychology books I had read. I recognized instantly that I wanted to be observant. My life became more disciplined. I found in Torah the answers that I needed. Torah says that the material world and the people in it cannot give you security, respect, or enduring joy. For that, you need to devote yourself to a transcendent mission. Most of all, I wanted to share that wisdom with other people who were searching and struggling."

   She discovered, however, that many principles from traditional and Chassidic works that assist in spiritual growth and enable people to be happier and more loving were in contrast to modern concepts of secular psychology; which tends to focus on pathology instead of healing.

   "Some psychologists encourage their clients to be free with their emotions, especially with anger. But anger creates havoc in relationships. What people need to learn is how to express their feelings with respect and not to use anger to control. Another misconception is that communication is magic. [Just] State your demands and get what you want. But relationships aren't like that. You often don't get what you want, so you have to let go and accept that what you have is what Hashem wants you to have. Pushing people to change doesn't work. You have to stop complaining that other people aren't satisfying your needs, and start satisfying those needs on your own. Especially in marriage, people have to be more positive and accepting."

   Adahan says that a successful marriage is contingent on both parties understanding each other's needs, even if those needs may be in conflict with modern legitimized ideas of interchangability of male-female roles in a relationship.

   Adahan suggests that if the woman is domineering, and the husband is sensitive and insecure, she has to learn how to feminize herself and make daily gestures to show honor and appreciation. "What women need is understanding and sensitivity, although it's hard for many men to give praise and show appreciation. They have to be taught that it's needed. There was a man that came to me. His wife said that he hadn't complimented her in twenty years. I suggested to the husband that he compliment his wife twice a day. He would actually look at his watch and think, ŒIt's nine o'clock. I have to say something nice to her.' It was so mechanical his wife couldn't bear it. I told him to stick to it. All change begins mechanically. I told him to compliment her more, and then a real change took place. He had no idea that she needed to be complimented. He said, ŒYou know, when I'm nice to her, she's nice to me.' He made the connection. He got more of what he wanted, and she got more of what she wanted.

   Two of Miriam Adahan's books are about personality typing and learning to understand and accept different emotional and intellectual temperaments without judging their worth. Most marriage problems, she says, stem from a lack of understanding of the basic needs of the spouse, based on his/her particular personality type.

   "I once saw a statement from the Zohar, that everyone gets his bashert ­ the person you're meant to grow with, but very few get their zivug ­ meaning a best-friend marriage." This doesn't mean you back out, it just means you have to work harder dealing with the frustration.

   To get what we want out of marriage, or from any other relationship, people must drop what Adahan terms "erroneous beliefs", thoughts and actions that we feel will get us love/power/vindication/understanding, but in reality jeopardize our mental health and create discord in our immediate environments. The most devastating of these beliefs, she says, is something like, "I have to condemn myself to improve," which leads to "I have to condemn/criticize my children to make them improve." If children, or adults, for that matter, feel validated and loved, they will improve automatically. Criticism just destroys them, Adahan emphasizes.

   "A mother came to me recently in a state of despair. She said, ŒI just can't stop criticizing my children. I start attacking them from the time I wake up in the morning. This one doesn't get dressed fast enough. That one is dreaming instead of eating. The other one is still lying in bed after I've yelled at him a dozen times to get up. I'm destroying them and I can't stop.' Instead of motivating her family, which was her goal, she was making them feel humiliated and inferior."

   Adahan is convinced that if children, at an early age, learn that they are spiritual beings and are treated with respect and see self-control in their parents, they too will learn tools of self-control and move into healthy adulthood.

   This, she says, is her most important message to mothers.

   "The mother's task is to show that self-discipline and love are tools for growth for an entire life. Most mothers, for example, hate sibling fights. It drives them crazy. So instead of screaming at them or hitting back, if she thinks, Œhere's an opportunity to teach good midot, then she is in a position of teacher, not of an exasperated ogre.

   "If a child makes a face at the dinner table and says, ŒYuk, I don't like this food,' she can yell Œeat it or go to your room!' or she can give in and give him something else. Then she's caught in the wimp/or witch syndrome. But she has a third choice. She can replay the scene with her child, allowing him to express his feelings but in a positive, respectful manner. They then can reach a practical solution, out of mutual respect."

   These ideas are discussed and integrated at EMETT workshops around the world, attended by thousands of women every week. That, out of the humble beginning when the first EMETT group had ten women, including Adahan herself. The now-famous EMETT book was actually a pamphlet she wrote for her own group. And even now, with a busy publishing and lecture schedule, private therapy sessions and the global job of training more EMETT group leaders, Miriam Adahan is still an average member of her own group.

   "I love to help people when they turn to me, but I don't like it when they think I have all the answers. I don't. I'm very average. I don't want people depending on me for solutions. I want them to turn to their own inner wisdom."