Mirror Mirror on the Wall
by Jenny Parker.
This portable, simple to use technique is the most empowering tool you could ever wish to master. It is something you can incorporate into your daily life with some practise and the help of a life coach. Get it up and running and you’ll be miles ahead in liberating the joy machine within. Quickly getting right to the heart of any problems you have with others, where long standing issues that seemed insurmountable can be cleared.
‘Perception is projection’ means that whatever you perceive to be outside ourself is also a part of you on some level. Jung summarised this when he said that “you marry your unconscious mind and then spend the rest of your life projecting out onto it”. In other words whatever you don’t like about your partner is a mirror for you, reflecting some unresolved issue inside of you that you are not aware of yet. The more you try to hide something about yourself the more you project it unconsciously on those around you and then think it is their issue. What we resist persists, and we judge most harshly in others what we most deny in ourselves. Perhaps our creators made us like this because we can find it very difficult to see ourselves as we really are - it’s far easier to see faults in someone else. Change things within and our outside world can miraculously transform. This can be seen in our daily lives. You have most likely noticed how differently the world and people appear when you are having a bad hair day, how gloomy and grey life can be if you are depressed and doesn’t the whole world sparkle when you fall in love?
You may or may not have already realised that you can’t change anyone else, no matter how hard you try. We CAN change ourselves however. By bringing our unconscious behaviours that we project onto others back to ourselves and dealing with the issues that present when we do this, we can change our reality. It is very easy to measure our change because the person that has been pressing our buttons (triggering us) will suddenly appear to be acting differently and our buttons won’t get pressed in that circumstance any more. If you haven’t changed inside, and, for instance, trade-in your partner because it was ‘all their stuff’, you will know because your new partner will have the same behaviours camouflaged behind a different body. The old will be dressed up as the new. It’s just self, meeting self, time and time again until we get the message. You can choose the ‘devil you know’ and change within or get a new one and repeat the same behaviours all over again. It’s just a longer/suffering or a shorter/joyful path.
What happens to some people as they begin to realise that they have been blaming others for their own issues is that they start to judge themselves unmercifully. They may even take a big stick to themselves (or beat harder). So the best action to take here is to let go of the old pattern of self-flagellation. Put the big stick away because all judgment effectively does, is extinguish our self-esteem. Instead we need to work on integrating worthiness and once again this is something that life coaching can help you with. You may need to remind yourself that planet earth is the school of learning. Everyone lands on Earth with their own unique combination of subjects to graduate from. There is no good and bad in this game, just behaviours you choose to keep so that you can grow and evolve, and behaviours that are sabotaging your growth, that you feel you want to let go of. As Shakespeare wrote “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. We see the world not as it is but as we are.”
It’s a good thing to always remember that challenging people (that includes our children and the idiots in our life) and situations are our master teachers, helping us to grow, if you have a charge on someone you are a victim to that person. You’re giving them rent free space in your head. Own your projection and it will disarm and take away the intensity of the charge and you can then use the reflection as leverage for growth. We either get results or we have reasons why not. If we want results it means taking full responsibility for our actions and not blaming others. There is a very simple equation that states, that cause is greater than effect (C>E). We need to ask ourselves if we are on the cause side of the equation or the effect side.
We’ve all tried the game of denial and avoidance and we know that it doesn’t resolve anything. Slipping stuff under the carpet in the hope that it might disappear never clears anything and it will just rear its ugly head one fine day when you least expect it. If we are on the effect side of the equation we are in victim mode. We will have a vast repertoire of reasons/excuses as to why we don’t get the results we want in our life. On the cause side of the equation we are taking full responsibility for our life, we will be empowered to get the results we want, the choice is entirely ours - we have the power!
Please note: that we can only use this process to change the way we feel about others or situations and circumstances, and never to change the way anyone else feels or as a way of controlling our environment so we can feel better about ourselves. We work to change ourselves and accept others for what they are. It’s not our business to try and change others. We can’t. We can only change ourselves. Trying to change others is like looking in a mirror with a dirty face and trying to clean our face by scrubbing at our reflection. It is only when we clean our face that the reflection in the mirror changes.
