As a spiritual director and psychospiritual therapist, I have come to realize that my role is to help my clients clean their internal mirror so they can see and hold themselves and their experience with a gracious, unconditional love. When this mirror is clear and allows people experience grace and unconditional love toward themselves, one could call this internal mirror a God mirror. It permits people to see and experience themselves as God does, with an unconditional love that has no aspect of judgement within it. This God-mirror also allows them to experience the different aspects of God’s spirit in response their different life experiences. Unfortunately, most people’s internal mirrors are very dirty and warped causing them to see all their flaws, shortcomings, and mistakes. Instead of unconditional love, they experience readily self judgement and condemnation. In this blog, I want to explore this internal mirror, how it becomes dirty and warped but more importantly, how this internal mirror can again become a God mirror, allowing people to experience directly the unconditional love and grace of God and all the qualities of God’s spirit. When we are born as babies, we don’t really have any mirror or maybe it is more accurate to say that our mirror is so clean, clear, and thin that we see and experience ourselves with no judgement, no sense of good or bad. In fact, as infants, we have no sense of self reflection for that human quality has not been developed yet. We just experience ourselves as just is, and this isness does not only include us but everything within that experience. There is no sense of us and other, only just the experience of life as one reality. When we unpack what unconditional love actually is, we eventually realized that unconditional divine love allows reality to be as it is. This means that when a parent is expressing unconditional love to their child, they are able to embrace their child’s experience without any judgement. Because of that love, the caregivers can hold all of their child’s experiences without judgement whether the child is happy or sad or scared or anger or even hateful. When a parent is in touch with this Divine love, a parent realizes that there is a reason behind all experiences of their child, and so no experience should be judged as good or bad. If children were raised in this way, they would grow up with internal mirrors that would function more like God mirrors allowing them to experience lots of unconditional love and grace flowing in their lives. But this is not how most, if not all children, experience their parents. Most parents view positive experiences as good and praise their children when they have these positive moments. Similarly, most parents see negative experiences like sadness, fear, anxiety, anger, hatred, etc. as bad or wrong and thus they critique, scold, and even punish their child for having such experiences. So what happens to a child’s internal mirror when they experience their parents in this way? They develop an internal mirror that follows the same rules that they experience through their parents: positive experiences create judgements like “I am a good person” and negative experiences create judgements like “I am a bad person.” Since scoldings are experienced as very painful by children, these negative judgements carry a lot more emotional power compared to the words of affirmation they heard from their parents. By the time, people enter their teenage and young adult years, they have internal mirrors that are very dirty and distorted. Many people struggle with lots of negative self chatter, negative emotions, and negative self images. This distorted internal mirror is the common human condition, a major part of what Christians call the human fallen nature. When people come for spiritual direction or counselling, I know they will be struggling with unhealthy internal mirrors, mirrors that actually keep them from experiencing the unconditional gracious love of God at the base of all reality, and the other many elements of the Spirit. So how can these internal mirrors be cleaned and transformed so that people can regain their God-mirror potential? This is a very good question. To help me answer this question, I have found it helpful to consider insights from Self Psychology. I will be applying these insights through a spiritual direction and psychospiritual therapy lens. Self psychology teaches that every person had three core needs as a child: mirroring needs, idealization needs, and twinning needs. Lets look briefly at what these core needs are. The mirroring need is most obvious and the easiest to understand. A child needs someone to reflect back to them accurately what they are experiencing without judgement. When this mirroring happens well, people felt seen accurately by others, and they begin to view themselves in the same way. They slowly develop an internal mirror that reflects back to themselves their own experience exactly as it is without judgement. Due to healthy mirroring, they experience their own sadness as just sadness, their own anger as just anger, and their own anxiety as just anxiety. When this happens, their internal mirror becomes a God-mirror where people begin to see and experience themselves the way God does, with only unconditional grace and understanding and no judgement. As people learn to trust their God-mirror more and more, they need less accurate reflection from those outside themselves to function well in the world. Every child also has idealization needs. A child needs someone to idealize, that is, someone to look up to and trust to take care of them. Part of this trust involves a child receiving the emotional support they need as they face challenges in life. Part of this trust includes getting wisdom and insight from others that they needed as a child to make sense of their life. Part of this trust encompasses having the idealized person protect them, as best as he/she was able, from the painful elements of life. When people, as children, are fortunate to have persons in their lives who meet their idealization needs, that is, provided well their childhood needs for emotional support, wisdom and insight, and protection, they begin to discover these qualities emerging within themselves. These qualities arise from what I am calling the God-mirror. As people experience getting their idealization needs met by others, they begin to notice internal experiences where they feel compassionate emotional support, divine wisdom and insight, and protective strength/power emerging from inside themselves in response to their life circumstances. As people learn to trust these emerging internal experiences, they begin to trust the many dynamics that can arise from their God-mirror. As with mirroring needs, as people learn to trust their God-mirror to meet their idealization needs, they have less need to look to other people for this support, insight, and protection. When these idealization needs are not met, the opposite happens. Not developing a trusting relationship with their inner divine support and truth, aspects of their God-mirror, people look often outside themselves for others to support and guide them. When this happens, they have little sense of God’s supportive presence and divine revelation within their own experience. Finally, every child has twinning needs. A child has a need to experience from their parents and key loved ones in their lives that their caregivers understand him/her, that they can relate to his/her experiences. When this happens, a child feels their experience is validated and valued. If this twinning need is not met, their internal God mirror becomes distorted. A child will feel that they are different, an outsider, and that no one can truly understand and empathize with him/her, not even God. When people find others that can validate and truly understand their experience, then these validating experiences begin to develop another aspect of the God-mirror within their soul. They begin to notice that not only does their God-mirror reflect back their experience accurately, but they have an internal sense of being totally understood and validated. They notice compassion emerging and often even grace arising from inside their soul in response to their difficult experiences. As people trust these emerging compassionate experiences from their God-mirror, they look less to getting their twinning needs met from the outside world. They sense that God gets them and loves them deeply, and they can now truly embrace the Christian teaching that everyone is a child of God, even those who thought they were too different or too broken to be part of God’s family. When you understand these three primary needs of human beings, as taught by Self Psychology through a spiritual direction lens, it becomes evident how our distorted God-mirrors can be transformed and heal. We need to be in relationship with people who can hold our life experiences well, especially our painful life experiences. At a community level, this is a key purpose of a faith community like a Christian Church. But when our faith community cannot meet these needs of mirroring, idealization, and twinning satisfactory, we need to seek a friend, spiritual director or psychospiritual therapist who can.
As we develop a trusting, caring, therapeutic relationship with our spiritual director/therapist, our God-mirror begins to transform and regain its original reflecting and nurturing qualities. As we experience our director mirroring our experiences well, our God-mirrors begins to reflect these life moments in the same objective nonjudgemental way. As our psychospiritual therapist meets our idealization needs, we begin to notice and trust those moments of inner support, truths and insights, and even inner strength that arise in us in response to our life experiences. As our pastoral counsellor fulfills our twinning needs by validating our many diverse experiences, we come to realize that God also understands our experiences and has much compassion for our pain and shows much grace toward our mistakes. Through continuous experiences like these with our spiritual director/therapist, our once distorted and dirty God-mirror begins to recapture it original state. When this happens, we find ourselves no longer at odds with God but experience many moments of God’s presence in our life experiences. Questions to ponder to help you reflect about your God mirror:
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