The Power of Pretending

Before I learned about emuna, I would sometimes ask my clients to recall happy times from their pasts so they could benefit from those feelings again in the present. Unfortunately there were plenty of times when clients would strain to recover one positive memory and couldn’t come up with anything at all.  They tried and tried and the more they tried to dig up a good memory the worse they felt about not being able to remember one.  It wasn’t a pleasant experience for me either. What could I say to people who never had a good day, ever?

I haven’t had this problem since I started using emuna in my work. I no longer have to frustrate my clients who don’t have any positive memories or who lack a positive image of hope for their future. Now I know that it’s perfectly okay if people can’t remember anything positive about their lives. They don’t even need to have ever had a positive experience in their lives to be able to start feeling happy right now – that is if they are ready and willing to learn about the power of emuna.

With emuna people can pretend anything and master it.  The first step is learning to drop into an emuna-state-of-mind – the most resourceful and powerful change-state there is. The second step is to simply pretend to already possess whatever quality, behavior, attribute, success that you are aiming for.

A person can pretend his way into being happy or productive or outgoing or studious, or organized or anything else that is important to him. People that I know are pretending to be relaxed people and generous people even though they have never been relaxed and never acted generously in their lives! I have people who have never asserted themselves, who are pretending that they already know how to be assertive. I’ve seen bashful people pretending to be confident and arrogant people with no clue of what it means to be humble pretending to be the opposite of what they are.

How does pretending work and how is pretending related to emuna? When a person pretends that he can control his temper after years of exploding at people, he’s demonstrating his faith that with G-d’s help he is not just a prisoner of his past. G-d gives extra help to those people who “pretend” that G-d can make them into the people they want to be even though they have already made numerous unsuccessful attempts to change.

When a person pretends to have mastered a problem situation or passed a test in life that they have not actually passed yet, they aren’t simply playing a trick on themselves. They are not fooling themselves by thinking that they are already the person that they wish to be. G-d sees a person who acts and pretends to be a better person as someone who really wants to be a better person. Pretending is an expression of that person’s  will to improve, and when G-d recognizes a person’s will to change for the better He turns that person’s pretending into that person’s new reality.