The Mirror to Your Soul
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
- Carl Jung
It is in relationships with others that we can discover who we truly are. We reveal our hidden beliefs and the hidden parts of ourselves in how we interact with and react to others in all our relationships. Everything we find annoying, we complain about, or just don’t like about others is simply a reflection of who we are. A reflection of our own internal universe, our way of being-in-the-world.
Relationships are a mirror to our souls and our most intimate relationships are the most revealing.
Everything we find annoying or complain about with our partner is simply a reflection of who we are. A reflection of our internal universe, our context.
Ironically, it’s in our strengths, our strongest beliefs, and the things that make us the most successful, where our subjective reality comes into conflict with others. It is these “strong” areas that are the most vulnerable and sensitive and easily irritated.
The bumps on the outside of our armor show us the tightly held beliefs pushing us from the inside.
Want to know about your context? Look at where you get irritated, then look at your relationship to that thing.
Let’s look at a simple example of two peoples’ different relationship to and context around money.
If your relationship to money is “money is a scarce resource” (scarcity mindset), then you would be someone that would be worried a lot about money. For you, money is hard to get and hard to hold onto.
If your partner has an abundance mindset, where money is available for everyone and is more of a conversation than a tangible good, their behavior around money would come into direct conflict with your way of being with money.*
Most people don’t understand they even have a specific relationship to money that is different from others let alone understand what exactly is their relationship to money.
The result is that every interaction you have with your partner about money is going to cause you stress and irritation. You may have no idea about your scarcity relationship with money, but it’s revealed in every interaction with your partner. As long as you blame your partner, you’ll never be able to develop a deeper understanding of your own relationship to money and how that affects you and your relationships
Using this technique where someone else is a mirror for our own context of being in the world, we can start to understand our own relationship to things and how it affects our interaction with the world and with other people. We might even discover where we got this in the first place.
It is important to say that none of this means that you or your partner are “wrong.” The whole point is that you are different and can actually help each other to discover who you both are.
You can do this with everything. Every place you judge, get irritated, or react negatively is a place you can examine to understand your own belief system and where it came from. When you do this everywhere in your life, your self-awareness, integrity, and ability to stay centered (and unmessable with) skyrocket.
In “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey advises us to take a different approach when we encounter someone with a different way of thinking than our own. He wisely notices that if we only spend time with people who already believe the same way we do, we’ll never learn anything new. He approaches it this way:
“…I realize that you see something else. And I value you. I value your perception. I want to understand. So when I become aware of the difference in our perceptions, I say, ‘Good! You see it differently! Help me see what you see.’”
Finally, there is a saying we had as kids. Any time a kid was trying to blame another for something, we’d say, “When you point a finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.”
If you think about this saying, it’s a kind of a re-statement of the quote from Carl Jung at the beginning of this article. And it’s great imagery to use when you detect your judgment directed at someone else.
It’s like saying, “What about me am I really pointing to?”
Now, try this mirror view exercise
Any time you get irritated with someone, try this out. These techniques can get you started in receiving all difficulty in relationships as gifts toward self-awareness:
Notice every time you get annoyed or irritated with someone else.
Own this reaction as yours. Take responsibility for it. Get that it has nothing to do with the other person.
Ask yourself: What is it about me that creates this feeling of irritation?
What is the belief I have about myself or the world that is creating this reaction?
Where did I get that belief from? Who taught me that?
How can you take full responsibility for that being my personal context? This may require an apology if you’ve already said something inappropriate in response to the situation.
“When you point a finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.”
*A detailed discussion of abundance and scarcity mindset around money and other things is saved for later post.
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
