When we are growing up, we learn what we are through the mirror of the world around us. We see our reflection externally in people’s faces when they look at us, in the words they use about us and to us and in the actions we evoke in them. This is both positive and negative. If your mother looks at you lovingly and tells you that you are beautiful, you learn that you are beautiful. If you get angry and your father acknowledges your anger and helps you to regulate that emotion, you learn you can trust your own emotions and that they are valid and that you are bigger than your emotions. Conversely, if he shames you for them and says you should not feel that way, you learn that you cannot trust the way you feel, something is wrong with you because you are feeling something you should not be feeling and your emotions are bigger than you are. If you grow up in a society that does not accept you, you see yourself as a person who is bad and wrong. If your teacher writes an A+ on your math test, you learn that you are good at math. If your family does not interact with you even when you try to interact with them, you learn that you are invisible. Some parents see their children as extensions of themselves and they will not recognize any desire, trait, emotion or quality in their child that is not one that they themselves have. When this is the case, the child gives up on having an identity at all. They become what the people around them want and it goes on and on like this. We come to see ourselves and form our identity out of the reflection we get in the outside world.
As you can see, our knowing of ourselves is dependent on the world we grew up in. We remain unaware of any aspect of us that the external world does not reflect about us. It remains a part that is hidden in our internal world. In this day and age, most parents, caregivers and people in general do not understand the importance of mirroring. They do not understand how critical it is to mirror the formation of a person’s self-concept and level of awareness. They either only mirror a small fraction of who a child is or they do not mirror at all and as a result, the world is suffering from a syndrome I call “The Missing Mirror”. We do not have any clue who we really are, how we really feel, what we really think, what we really want and do not want, what we really like and do not like. Many of us are beautiful, but walk the earth thinking we are detestable. Because of the lack of mirroring we receive in childhood, our level of self-awareness is poor at best.
For this reason, as you are journeying through a person’s internal walls and landscapes, one of the most healing things in the world is to reflect them. To reflect, all you need to do is to allow yourself to hold a bodily posture that is congruent with whatever landscape you are experiencing and/or verbally narrate the experience you are having, what you are encountering and the intuitive information you are receiving as you journey through someone’s walls and landscapes. For example, if you are going through a cave system inside their internal landscape that felt lonely and cold, you could tell them this is what you are seeing. You could also let your body language slump to imply that you feel that loneliness and coldness or you could let your body reflect unconditional warmth and love for that coldness. This choice depends on which reflection you intuitively feel they need the most. Keep in mind that any language or body language that implies a rejection of or aversion to any aspect of their internal world is a negative message that you are giving them about themselves. It is a negative reflection in the mirror. Mirroring helps a person not only to be seen, felt, heard and understood, it also helps them to see, feel, hear and understand themselves. It is a way to bring the missing mirror back to life. It is a grand opportunity for self-awareness.