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Christmas day and the day after are the two days out of the year that have the most reported heart attacks. Part of the reason for that is the stress of conflicts that seem to erupt at this time of year.I wanted to write this post about something that could help de-stress people by helping them defuse conflicts.
Introduction
A major cause of both low self esteem and conflicts with others is from a lack of mirroring- and the shame that often follows. The missing mirroring can be either from other person or from one's self. So, I thought of writing a piece about mirroring.
I had no idea when I first thought of writing this article, how difficult it would be for me. I wanted to write something filled with memorable, useful content, but in a playful and humorous style. I was thinking of mirroring in the context of my work of coaching unhappy couples and family members get from distressing fights to deep understanding. While many people in pain are urgent about getting to "solutions", it is only from the place of deep understanding that they can create any real and lasting solutions to their issues.
I was in that playful mood while deciding to write about mirroring. I But my chipper mood evaporated as began to reflect upon the enormous significance of the subject to me. I found myself encountering sorrow at the ways I have not mirrored others, and the ways I had been deprived of mirroring myself while growing up.
What is mirroring?
I'd better describe what mirroring is, and is not, before giving personal examples. Mirroring is a process that reflects, or feeds back to the other person what they have said. That process reassures them and yourself that you understand the content of what they have said. A useful analogy might be to think of your self as a flat mirror which reflects an accurate image of their communication - a reflection without the magnifying or minimizing distortions that convex or concave mirrors give.
If you make an interpretation and add what you understood or what you think, rather than what the other person said, you distort what they have said. And if they this are in a highly charged emotional state, your distorting leads to further judgments, conflict and pain for both of you.
Rest assured that mirroring is not giving up your own experience or point of view. And it does not mean that you agree with the other person's way of seeing things. It is recognizing that the other person has had an experience too, and that their experience--though different from yours--is equally as valid. There are very good reasons the other has experienced what they have experienced. Even if you don't realize it yet.
It's just part of our uniqueness that others will not and in fact could not have the same experience as you. Until we learn that others are not us, we cannot relate to others; we can relate only to ourselves.
What happens without adequate mirroring: Pain
I remember how I first experienced mirroring from a former therapist. When she would start a sentence with, "You..." I would cringe, expecting some awful description to follow: "You don't have the brains you were born with." "You don't know what you are talking about." "You have all kinds of pipe dreams." It took months and months to learn that after "You" nothing horrible was going to follow. Though an interim stage was that if she said something merely descriptive, I interpreted it as a criticism. Once she said, "You want him to be engaged in the conversation." Recognizing the truth of her statement, I thought she meant I must want too much, and I'd better stop wanting it.
I think of the pain I see in clients who were abysmally and chronically deprived of mirroring responses as they grew up. A client I'll call "Joanne"* shared with me just this morning one of the consequences of such early deprivation.
Joanne's* Journey
"What's happening?!?" an alarmed Joanne asks herself. She sits at the head of the dinner table with five of her gallery's artists gathered together before the opening of their show. Joanne suddenly feels as if she's at the end of a long tunnel. Everyone else grows bigger and bigger; she gets smaller and smaller. She can't breathe and she knows something ominous is about to occur. She watches herself carry on cordial conversations, fulfilling her role of artist support person. All the while, inside she feels so much pain that she wishes she would die. Her terrifying reaction was due to an experience of being invisible which triggered awakening memories of early childhood experiences.
So what happened? Earlier that day she had been interviewed by a media writer whose publication had awarded the gallery a "Best in LA" award and one of the six "Best in the USA" awards for sales. The writer had made no make eye contact. He answered her questions with a curt "yes" or "no." And afterwards, the writer had called to offer her gallery co-owner a gift of a day spa treatment, but did not offer her one.
As a child, her divorced and depressed mother would sit on the sofa watching TV all day, and did not look at her, or answer her questions. Many years later when Joanne took her mother to Hawaii, in a desperate attempt to give her mother pleasure, when Joanne asked her how she was experiencing the trip, whether she was enjoying herself, her mother responded with a flat tone, a flat face and no eye contact, "Yes, it's fine."
These brief examples are but tiny tastes of ongoing painful relational interactions with what some psychological researchers call "still faces," faces that do not show response to the other person. In experiments with toddlers, when the mothers were instructed to hold their faces expressionless, the toddlers burst into tears.
Joanne's harrowing experience is an extreme example of how most of us react when we feel unseen, invisible, and misunderstood. The opposite is a feeling of acceptance and well being. The difference is in the experience of being mirrored.
The importance of mirroring
I recall several famous relationship experts express the necessity of developing the relational skill of mirroring.
"Developing the ability to experience the world through your partner's eyes, while holding on to your perspective, may be the single most important skill in intimate relationship," write Pat Love and Steven Stosny in their book, How To Improve Your Marriage without Talking About It.
Harville Hendrix, in his Keeping the Love You Find, notes that mirroring is "a crucial relationship skill" and that if you cannot mirror what your partner says, "You cannot relate to another person's internal reality; you only relate to your version of it, which means that you are relating [only] to yourself." And, he continues, "you can count on the distortion and conflict that ensues."
Management expert, Stephen Covey, author of the best-seller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, calls his Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood. "Communication is the most important skill in life," and, "Habit 5 is the first step in the process of win/win." Most people, he notes, listen with the intent to reply, not to understand the other and then we tend to automatically respond in one of four ways: 1) we evaluate 2) we probe 3) we advise 4) we interpret. And none of these help when the other person is in an emotional state.
In the next post I will discuss the how to of mirroring.
*I protect client confidentiality by using different names, sexes and life details.
