Through the Looking Glass.

'"The conscious person uses the world as a mirror to better understand and to master themself.

The unconscious person attacks the mirror because they do not realize it's a mirror."

One of the hallmarks of personal growth is the development of self-awareness and greater understanding of ourselves. When we develop this we begin to see that very little of what we perceive is happening between ourselves and others could be what is actually taking place in the way that we're interpreting it. We're afforded a very different viewpoint of a situation or of a relationship we have with someone. This can help us to reach understanding, forgiveness and peace. It also helps us to understand ourselves to the core of our personality so that we can see where we are transferring our own thoughts and feelings onto someone else and misinterpreting their intentions and behaviour towards us.

In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the looking glass is a metaphor that describes a distorted view of the world where Alice encounters a series of fantastical situations whilst meeting a variety of implausible characters. Nothing is as it should be or as it seems to be. I think the same thing can occur in the relationships we have with other people; they become a looking glass for us that can show us a reflection of ourselves - an interpretation of ourselves - that we formed through our experiences as a child. When the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland asks her who she is and she replies that she barely knows, she's speaking from a child's perspective - one that hasn't yet grown to an age where she can understand herself in relation to the world and whose identity isn't fixed. She explores this world with naivity and tries to use her own logic to overcome tests and challenges until eventually she sees how illogical and unrealistic this world and the characters in it are and therefore not really a threat to her at all, wereupon she wakes us from the dream that opened the door to this unusual world in the first place. The same way that we can wake up if we see that sometimes the interactions we have with others can show us a distorted view of ourselves and our relationships with them.

Our inner-child remains within us no matter how many years we live through and depending upon our childhood experiences it can either be a core of ourselves that responds open-heartedly to life (if we were cherished and nurtured) or a part of us that didn't develop trust if we weren't made to feel safe, not just in others, but safe in who we are and confident that we were enough, in and of ourselves, and didn't need to be something more or somebody else and therefore a disappointment if we couldn't live up to other's expectations. The way we're treated as children can have a huge impact on how we believe other people see us and how we can expect to be treated by them. If our experiences were negative they can produce an adult who feels constantly victimized and bullied, or someone who strives to be a perfectionist or over-achiever because we assume that everyone around us is either out to get us or judging us. If we see ourselves this way - then we assume that everyone else does too. We believe that sooner or later someone will discover that we're a disappointment, a bad person, a stupid person, or someone who is lesser in some way; who isn't loveable and who may be taken advantage of.

Everyone that we meet offers us the opportunity to see ourselves from a different angle. It might be fair sometimes to label someone as bad and there genuinely are people who are dangerous to be around and we don't have to consider their behaviour to be a reflection of our self-worth, we just need to keep away from them if that's possible, but for most of us these reflections that we see of ourselves in other people come from the those we have the most interaction with on a daily basis; whether they're our partners, our parents, our friends, the community we live in, our teachers or our work colleagues and customers.

Part of my job involves listening to people talk about the relationships that they have and being able to encourage them to take a wider view of any experience they feel they may be having. My own growth relies upon me being able to apply this to myself too. What I've noticed is that when we talk about our experiences with others, sometimes we don't factor ourselves into the story. It's like writing a book and missing out an essential chapter that helps us to understand the plot. If everything is happening externally, where are we when this is taking place? We're not just observers, we're active participants. This isn't an attempt to encourage anyone to consider how their own behaviour may be triggering someone else even though I know this can and does happen - it's more of an attempt to encourage you to look at how you're interpreting your experience because in situations where misunderstandings occur and we start to feel wounded, that inner-child part of us that holds all the core beliefs is more active. What we need to do is figure out is if someone really is victimising us, judging us, hating on us or rejecting us or are we assuming that this is what's happening because we've felt like this before and we're making assumptions? A lot of misunderstandings occur this way. A lot of friendships are damaged this way.

Recently I had a client who was speaking about a work colleague who they felt had positioned themselves to take advantage of the fact that they were more 'in' with the company than my client was and had therefore started to try to annexe some of my client's customers. My client by this stage was feeling hurt and angry because the situation was so unfair but also they felt totally overlooked by everyone involved in the situation, as though they weren't valuable enough to be regarded and their feelings weren't important. They felt as though there was no support there for them in the workplace which should have been abiding by a more reasonable set of rules. I'm not going to say they were wrong in feeling this way; it sounded very unfair that my client wasn't getting the support they needed but short of going into the company myself and having a big shout on their behalf, the only other way of helping was by understanding what they were saying to me when they said, 'this always happens to me'. Because that said everything.

When I asked my client why they'd said that a whole set of experiences came tumbling out that had begun in childhood, lasted through education, and now we're showing up in their working life. Not only that but these experiences had coloured their friendships and sabotaged some of their relationships. This was a really intelligent person who'd worked incredibly hard to position themselves professionally and now felt as though all the work they'd put into this was wasted because they were being overlooked, taken advantage of and ignored.

Now we had to look at the 'mirror' who, it turned out, had their own problems. The other person in this example who, through their own experiences I could summise, probably felt that if they took from my client (who they may have felt threatened by which could be triggering their own insecurities) would feel a sense of popularity as well as more powerful if they felt capable of influencing management to consider them as more important. This person was trying to ease their jealousy and feel more in control. In this case both of these people clashed and were reflecting back at each other their own insecurities as well as the beliefs they'd formed about themselves from the way they'd been treated during childhood.

If we can understand our own feelings; where they've come from and what triggers them, we can apply that understanding to others. We can't always know, or assume that we know, what someone else is thinking or how they're feeling so we have to be cautious about how we're interpreting their behaviour towards us. We spend our life trapped in a box of our own personal experiences and we can't penetrate other people's thoughts and feelings that are based upon what they've been through themselves because we haven't lived their life - but we can hazard a guess. That can make things feel less personal. It can help us to detach.

Though this experience was very uncomfortable for my client it also offered them the gift of being able to reach a deeper understanding of their own view of themself and how this was being reflected back at them by someone else. It also helped them to see how the other person was doing the same thing to them. The point is, the experience that my client felt they were having wasn't really happening at all. There was misinterpretation and misunderstanding on every side and once my client saw things differently they approached management for a better conversation where other myths they'd created about how they were being perceived were also dispelled. Whilst there may never be a friendship established between my client and their colleague, who's probably still lost in the mists of their own personal Wonderland, they can at least view this person now with greater understanding which gives them the patience to diffuse any situation that has the potential to escalate and which allows for better boundaries.

If you're experiencing difficulties with relationships of any description then the first person to look at in order to find a way of changing outcomes is yourself, otherwise we start casting aspersions on others and riding into battle which isn't always necessary. First we have to make sure we're not making assumptions about why we feel we're being treated in a certain way and see what evidence exists to prove that these assumptions are genuine. If we're noticing a repeated experience that's happened in other relationships or with other people before and we feel that this says something about how people perceive us, where has this belief come from and how long has it been established? Does it go back to childhood? Has how we were treated in childhood created this core belief because if all we were ever given was a hammer, then everything we see becomes a nail.

It isn't always possible to avoid disputes regardless of whether the mirrored image we see is a reflection of us or whether what we're experiencing with someone else is happening for a different purpose which I'll blog about in another relationship post. What I have found though both with myself and with my own clients is that self-awareness has to be found through calmness and practising peace. Learning to detach and let go, especially of distorted self-beliefs. Otherwise the years of hurt that we feel can be endless and some of the relationships and friendships that might have the best potential can be sabotaged.

I don't think my client should have 'let go' of their job as a solution to this situation which was something they had considered but they managed to find an alternative solution through changing their perspective. In finding peace with themselves and feeling love and understanding for themselves they managed to let go of some of the difficult experiences they'd had in the past and that helped them to find solutions to deal with the situation they were in.

Calmness and peacefulness aren't the actions of a passive person. They hold the space for self-awareness to flourish and they provide an access point to the deepest well of strength that we can source. They fuel us with power and can help us to set better boundaries. Take a look at the beliefs that you formed about yourself as a child and let go of any of the negative ones that were foisted upon you. If you were made to feel unloved and insecure this was the fault of someone else - probably damaged themselves in some way - who had no right to make you feel like that. It was a lie, not the truth. Don't strive so hard to make yourself feel worthy and don't diminish yourself to fit in with others. Have the courage to show yourself in your uniqueness and authenticity because that person will see their genuine reflection shining back at them in every encounter they experience and that person is the one that's needed.

Georgina