Mirror Mirror on the Wall
They say that relationships mirror the qualities within us. For a long time, I didn’t fully buy into that idea. Of course I thought, “I am nothing like the people who trigger me. Nothing like that co-worker who judges everyone, or the family member who’s bossy, or the partner who can be selfish.” Right?
But healing work has a way of humbling us.
Recently, I had a moment of truth, a very unexpected one. It arrived in the middle of a Walmart parking lot, where I sat sobbing for nearly 45 minutes. The mirror I had been avoiding was right there in front of me, and there was no bypassing it. I actually told me friend that I’d “feel and process” it later. But I could no longer deny the processing it, it had its own timing.
The deeper I go on this path, the more I see those qualities that I resist so strongly in others often live somewhere in me. I don’t always want to admit it, but the truth is I can be bossy, judgmental, selfish, bypassing, fawning, overbearing… all of it. We all carry shadow qualities alongside our soul gifts.
And when we place someone on a pedestal, we set them up for a crash they never asked for. The fall hurts them, and it hurts us, because it was never real. It was a fantasy of perfection and bubble bound to burst.
This doesn’t mean we are destined to become the worst versions of the people around us. Instead, it means that life continually offers us mirrors (as uncomfortable as they may be) so we can see what is unhealed within us and choose to work with it.
For me, the hardest mirrors have been the ones I have desperately worked to rail against my whole life (I will NEVER be like so and so). To even consider that I might hold those qualities somewhere in me is deeply uncomfortable. But healing isn’t about bypassing. It is about asking: How can I meet this part of myself with compassion? How can I transmute it, and move more fully into my heart, one step, one moment, one feeling at a time?
And here’s the other truth I know: if I don’t do this work, it doesn’t end with me. It passes forward, carried into the lives of my children and future generations. The science of epigenetics tells us this clearly. If that isn’t incentive to face the mirror, I don’t know what is.