Mirrors: Windows to see ourselves
Exactly who are you? You are indeed unique,
and no one else is quite the same. So, what makes you you? Part of the answer
is your appearance. Other people spot you in a crowd and recognize your
likeness. They know it’s you. The way you look identifies you to others, and
your appearance is part of your self-identity as well.
How do you know what you look like, though?
As part of the human condition, your eyes can only look outwards, and you can’t
turn them inwards to look at yourself. If you want to see who you are, you look
in a mirror.
Mirrors are magical windows to see ourselves.
Each mirror is slightly flawed, yielding a different picture. If you take
a cheap door mirror, for example, and mount it on the wall with a slight bump
in the center behind it, you have a fat mirror. If you put the bumps on each
end, it will be a thin mirror. A cloudy old mirror will make you look dark and
gloomy, and a thick, new mirror will have a clear reflection.
Interpersonal mirrors
The people you interact with are mirrors for
you as well, reflecting back how they see you. As Rabbi Avraham Baharan stated,
“I am not who I think I am. I am not what you think I am. I am
that which I think that you think that I am.”
In conversations, good listeners are not
passive observers. They communicate in many ways: facial expressions; smiling
or frowning; body language; leaning in to express interest; veering away to
escape; hand gestures; eye contact; nonverbal cues; etc.
Just like various mirrors will produce
differing images (fat, skinny, dark), each person will also reflect back a
different picture of who you are. Take the example of bullying. When bullies
pick on someone, they mirror back to their victim a negative picture of
himself. The bullied party sees in this mirror that he is weak, defective,
worthless, or some other negative image. Over time, he will internalize and believe
that these reflections accurately portray who he is.
On the flip side, positive mirrors will yield
favorable reflections. Take, for example, the principal who couldn’t figure out
how the new teacher made his class of special needs students so successful. The
teacher explained that he mistakenly thought the class was comprised of
geniuses, based on the list of their locker numbers he was provided. The
teacher had thought these numbers were their IQ scores, and then proceeded to
treat them as if they were very smart. The students in turn responded to this
positive mirroring.
Therapeutic mirroring
Clients tell their stories and relate their
problems in therapy. Like any good listener, therapists are also not a passive
audiences. Indeed, therapists are trained to be expert and active listeners.
But, how is talking to a therapist different than talking to another caring
support? Yes, the therapist does offer tools and techniques that an amateur
might not have access to. If this were the only difference, though, then
clients would just research and gather tools on their own. What, then, is the
mechanism that creates the magic of therapy?
Therapists are trained to use “the self”
therapeutically. They mirror back to their clients only in ways that will
be healing and helpful. Every facial expression, every nuance of body language,
and every response and utterance, is carefully monitored to prevent harm, and
to instead benefit the client. Rather than mirroring back in an instinctive and
automatic fashion, a good therapist strives to always be a healing and
therapeutic mirror.
To demonstrate: Untrained peers might
naturally respond to reports of bizarre psychotic delusions with discomfort,
dismay, judgment, and possibly laughter. They could similarly react to confessions
of abuse history with expressions of stigma, rejection, disgust, and in other
unhelpful ways. The therapist, on the other hand, skillfully defers his
automatic reactions and keeps them in check, until he clarifies the best way to
mirror back that will be therapeutic and healing. Each client, each situation,
and even each moment, requires unique and tailor-made mirroring. Often, empathy
and acceptance are called for. At other times, the therapist needs to cultivate
feelings of disturbance, in order to motivate change, break through denial, or
facilitate grieving.
Lack of mirrors
Clients often have limited supports, and they
lack social connections. Even if they have “acquaintances” with whom they
interact, they don’t share what’s really going on inside them. This is indeed
part and parcel of many mental health issues: One of the symptoms of depression
is withdrawal and isolation. Addicts lead secret double lives, and they hide
from everyone behind a mask. Victims of abuse, hurt, and betrayal no longer
trust enough to share authentically. Clients who carry significant shame
can’t even look themselves in the mirror, and they certainly can’t interact
openly and honestly with others. Low self-esteem, anxiety, social phobia,
paranoia, and personality disorders are all obstacles.
After years of detaching and disengaging,
choosing to talk openly with a therapist is new and unfamiliar territory. It’s
not uncommon for a client to report feeling better after even the first
meeting, because they were able to finally unload and feel understood. As
therapy continues, clients are no longer alone with their thoughts and
feelings.
Mirrors to receive and to reflect reality
Isolating and keeping our feelings to
ourselves results in allowing them to fester. Repressed feelings become swollen
and infected, bigger than they need to be. The word emotion comes from the
Latin root emovere, which means to "move out, remove, or
agitate." Healthy management of emotions requires expressing them and
bringing them out from our emotional space and into the world, which requires
someone to receive them on the other end. Clients are often not able to express
their emotions to others, because they fear they will be judged, shamed, or
that the receiver won’t understand or be able to handle the intense feelings. A
good therapist is trained to listen with a welcoming and understanding ear, to
even intense and disturbing emotions, while mirroring back in only helpful,
healing ways.
In isolation and without feedback, the
thoughts of our internal world diverge more and more from what’s real. An
employee might believe that his boss hates him, because he did not return his
morning greeting. In reality, though, the boss may have been simply
preoccupied or did not hear him. Possibly the boss was upset, but about
something else. There are so many possibilities. It’s necessary to share our
thoughts and beliefs with others to get reality testing, to check out how
realistic the thoughts are. A good therapist knows how and when to mirror back
what the client said, but with just the right twist, so it will now reflect
reality.