Mirroring Love
"We were born with the capacity to feel the whole panoply of human emotions, but that capacity requires activation before we can use it fully. We all have what it takes to feel, but to experience our feelings fully and safely, they have to be “installed,” in a sense, by someone through mirroring. Mirroring involves the unconditional positive regard for our unique needs, values, and wishes shown by someone who mindfully provides the five A’s."
"The opposite of mirroring is shaming. The less mirroring we have received, the more ashamed of ourselves we may be."
An example of mirroring: “I know it’s scary, and it’s OK to have that fear. I’ll come to school with you today and stay with you for a while. When I come home, I’ll be thinking about you. Then I’ll come and pick you up right on time, and we’ll go for ice cream. You can be afraid, but don’t let it stop you from having the fun you will have at school and after school!”
An example of shaming: “Stop being a crybaby. You’re going to school whether you like it or not! None of the other kids are afraid. What’s wrong with you?”
"Shaming is a kind of abandonment, and holding on to our own shame is self- abandonment. Now we begin to see why we fear abandonment so much. It is the absence of mirroring, and we need mirroring to survive emotionally. We also see why we fear the loss of our partner. To grieve is to feel keenly isolated and bereft of mirroring. To grieve with supportive others, however, is mutual mirroring. This is why funerals are public events: Our fellow mourners mirror grief to us and we to them. Grief is healed by letting go and by contact."
"Some parents fear their children’s feelings. When a son says to his father, “You don’t understand!” he may mean, “I can’t show you my feelings because you can’t handle them.” He is protecting his father from ever having to face those frightening feelings. We may stay in this role all our lives, implicitly believing that men or women are too fragile to receive our feelings. When we despair of mirroring and of the possibility of trusting in others, we despair of the very things that make intimacy possible. Intimacy is mutual mirroring."
“My parents did the best they could” is what our denial of deprivation may sound like. But our bodies cannot be fooled. We know viscerally and instinctively that what we needed was not there or was being withheld. In an adult relationship, we may go on denying how deprived we feel and never address, process, or resolve the deprivation. It wouldn’t be surprising, considering just how difficult such tasks are. I may have decided in the midst of the unalterable deprivation in my past: I just won’t need what isn’t there."
"Beneath denied deprivation, though, is a silent scream, a stifled cry. Our body is the only part of us that cannot lie or be lied to. Such phrases as “They meant well” or “It wasn’t intentional” mean nothing to the body. It only understands words like “This hurts” or “I am so scared”—or angry or sad or powerless."
What Hurts Us Comforts Us
"When our primal needs were left unmet, we might tolerate abuse in adult relationships. We keep going back for more where there is only less. (“You keep hurting me, and I can’t leave you.”)
"As mirroring (acceptance of us by another) gives us power, so abuse takes away access to our power. In an abusive relationship we may believe we cannot let go because things might get better. Our power is thereby deflated in two ways: by the belief that we can’t extricate ourselves from abuse and by clinging to an unfounded hope that the abuser will change. These are the lies we learned when we became accustomed to unhappiness and hurt."
The Southern Custom—of the Bird—
That ere the Frosts are due—
Accepts a better Latitude—
We—are the Birds—that stay.
Emily Dickinson
"Mindfully loving partners never consciously engage in hurtful behaviors toward one another. They police themselves and place under arrest all the pilferers from the ever so pregnable hope chest of intimacy: vendetta, violence, ridicule, sarcasm, teasing, insult, lying, competition, punishment, and shaming."
How Good for Me Was My Family?
"I look in the mirror and see my father’s eyes; I scream at my wife and hear my mother’s words; I caress my child and feel Grandma’s arms; I scold, manipulate, control, or make demands on my children, and I remember how I was treated as a child; I deal with a disturbing neighbor and lo, I find that familiar upstart ego that characterizes so many males in my family. My name is my family name; my grave already waits beside my family’s graves. I came here with ancestral traits, and I will leave those same traits behind. My life is a chapter not a book."
"However, there are differences between my parents and me: I apologize when I hurt others; I have more resources for I dealing with interpersonal problems; I have become more conscious and softer thanks to all the self-help books I have read and all the healers I have met. My immigrant ancestors never had the chance to do those things."
"No family is perfect. The best we can hope for is a family that is functional most of the time, makes allowances for some dysfunction, and when things break down, finds a way to mend them. In my view, the functional family is one that grants the five A’s most of the time and does not abuse any family member."
Light on the Hurt
"Since the five A’s are the components of emotional support, when we don’t receive them, we feel physically, emotionally, and spiritually disconnected and isolated. The lack of any of the five A’s feels like a gap in our psyches, a hole, a deficiency. Yet each unfulfilled A is more than a hole. If we stay with the pain of the emptiness, it opens a spacious chamber in our psyche. To be human, after all, is to be deficient, to have some holes, and yet deficiency can have a positive side."
"We find our depth when we go directly into the hole, as Alice did. Wonderland is really the depths of the human soul, with its defiance of logic and all its radiant possibilities."
"The work of healing the past is not to recall past hurt and fix it but to stay with it, in it, until it starts to shift and open on its own. To stay is to find the inner Beloved, our deepest personal reality. To stay in a painful situation and be abused is to accept our victimization; to stay with our pained self is a spiritual victory. The hurt becomes a doorway into our vulnerability, and in that raw place we find our most tender self."
"Our ego searches for love, but we are meant to find love within ourselves first. Once we have done that, we can reach out to others as rich people looking to share the wealth, not as paupers seeking to commandeer it."
"We should never accept being victimized by violent abuse. But falling victim to depression when others betray us is appropriate. Occasional lapses into powerlessness help us let go of ego and control, and every real hero welcomes them. It is even true that losses, hardships, disappointments, hurts, and betrayals
seem necessary to encourage our growth from childhood to—and throughout—adulthood. The mother who always gives us our way will not help us build character."
"Without betrayal we would have no stimulation, no incentive to leave home, to strike out on our own, and consequently, to find self-reliance. Without it, Joseph would not have sold himself into slavery and thereby walked the path to his special destiny beside Pharaoh. We stumble onto such paradoxes at every turn of the human story: Dante had to be exiled from Florence, the city he loved, before he could write The Divine Comedy. Homer and Milton went blind before they wrote their thrilling epics. Beethoven went deaf before he composed the great quartets. In each instance, the artist produced the great work he was destined for after pain and loss. We are artists, too, and our fate—and challenge—is much the same. We cannot unlive our painful history, but we do not have to relive it. We cannot let go of it, but we do not have to hold on to it."
A Heroic Journey
The archetypal heroic journey is not a move from point A to point B as in football, where the purpose is to go from the line of scrimmage to the goal. It is a movement from point A to point A to the thousandth power, as in baseball, where the purpose is to go from home to home with a point made—that is, something to show for the journey.
The phases of the heroic journey exactly match those of intimate relationships. The hero leaves familiar surroundings; passes through a series of trials; and returns home with a spouse, treasure, amulet, or healing power. Relationships likewise begin by leaving the family, the familiar; passing through a series of conflicts in unknown territory; and returning to one’s full self, but this time within a committed partnership.
Practices:
CHECKING FOR SAFETY- Can I chance being myself and let love happen with you? Can this relationship provide a zone of security where the submerged parts of me can surface? Will I still be held and cherished even if I show you all my worst traits and most unappealing feelings?
MIRRORING- "In every phase of life we see the influence of our earliest longings. Our work is not to renounce our childhood needs but to take them into account, work on them, and enlist our partner to help us do this, if she is willing. Our goal is not just to cut our parental ties but to unite with a partner who can join us in our work. As Shakespeare says in King Lear, “Who alone suffers, suffers most.”
ADULT SEEKING • Mature adults bring a modest expectation of need fulfillment to a partner. They seek only about 25 percent (the adult dose) of their need fulfillment from someone else (100 percent is the child’s dose), with the other 75 percent coming from self, family, friends, career, hobbies, spirituality/religion, and even pets (dogs are expert at giving the five A’s!).
“I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.”
Henry David Thoreau
REFUSING ABUSE- We can commit ourselves to suffer no more than thirty days of unhappiness and emotional pain with a partner before telling her about it directly or bringing it to therapy. Am I on the thirty- day plan or the fifteen-year plan?
REVERSING MESSAGES- "Recall the parental message you heard most often in childhood. When does it come up now? For instance, perhaps the message was “If something good comes your way, you will lose it.” Now when you are promised a job, you worry: “They will change their minds and not offer it to me after all. You feel that this kind of happening is an old pattern in your life, but the record does not confirm your feelings. You are simply operating out of a fear/belief that was installed in you early on."
"The fear you feel now can be reconfigured as a call for your attention from that child. Welcome him and hold him, reassuring him that he is not powerless anymore; you will handle his losses and rejoice in his gains."
"Most of us have internalized many messages by which we judge and insult ourselves. But when we notice a censorious self-debasing voice within, we do not have to submit to it. We can focus on it as an assault by an inner enemy who is caught in a habit of self-defeat. We can patiently redirect the judgmental voice, converting it to a new avuncular voice—one with feisty compassion for our frightened inner child; one that speaks kindly to us; one that responds to us with attention, acceptance, appreciation, and affection and allows for error. This is how we self-soothe and keep from giving up on ourselves."
FINDING THE HOLES- • It is painful for us to find ourselves fully. We avoid the holes that were left in us by the disappointments of early life and adult relationships. But we launch ourselves into them and through them. Here is an empowering practice to be done in a quiet, meditative way:
1. Find the holes in yourself, the places where the five A’s have been unfulfilled.
2. Think of all the times you have tried to fill these holes with someone or something else.
3. Make a commitment to climb into these scary craters and sit in them on your own, with no attempt to fill them. The only tools you bring in with you are the five A’s. Simply stay in each of your deficiencies
attentively, acceptingly, appreciatively, and affectionately, fully allowing it to be there without protest, shame, or blame. The five A’s are the only true fulfillment of the needs. By giving them to yourself, you are healing wounds you received because you didn’t get them from others in your past.
Alice, by herself, followed the White Rabbit into a hole that led to the parts of herself that were confusing and scary. Ask yourself if your various partners were meant to be just such rabbits that kindly tried to show you the way into your deepest self. Now you are finally willing to enter. (A soul mate, by the way, is a partner who is willing to take this journey with you carrying the same tools.)
If you are interested in this book, you can email me (kh.nebulishvili@gmail.com) and I'll send the PDF version of this book :)
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