‘Mirroring’ and its New Age Offshoots.
Every single bad experience or person that you encounter, is not a ‘mirror’ of you, or, some aspect of you, that needs healing. (The New Age concept of “mirroring” is derived from the psychological one which is synonymous with: reflection, match, reproduction, imitation, copy, simulation, mimicry. Some will profess that ‘mirroring’ is the opposite, or the inversion of something but that is not the meaning of it in this context.) Even when there are lessons to learn, you did not cause, nor are you responsible for, another person’s behavior. There are two interrelated reasons as to why you cannot be held accountable for someone else’s actions: firstly, each person can choose, at any given moment, how s/he will act independently of what you say and do; secondly, these choices are motivated by that person’s traits, past experiences and conditioning – you are not responsible for any of these factors.
The Law of Attraction: Like Attracts Like.
Like energy would always have to attract like energy in order for it to be a ‘spiritual law’. If this were true, then good people would only ever come across other good people etc., without even trying. If you are one of these good people, I am assuming that you already know via experience, that striving to do the right thing, does not always bring you the same in life. If a psychopath (or any of his/her evil cousins: narcissist, rapist, embezzler, plagiarist etc.) shows up at your doorstep, this does not mean that you ‘attracted’ that creature into your life. The psychopath’s true parasitic nature kicked in, so that s/he had to find a person brimming with life to attach to in order to survive – a parasite cannot exist for long without a live host. If psychopaths only ever associated with their psychopathic counterparts, they would die off because parasites cannot live off of other parasites.
Dislike or Hatred is ‘Mirroring’ and ‘Projection’.
This is the belief that whenever you dislike/hate something or someone, it is an automatic reflection of you as a person, or something in you, that you don’t like. Then, you disown this by ‘projecting’ it onto the hated thing or person. If you believe this, then it follows that if you happen to hate pedophiles, or murderers, you must be one of them (or similar to them, in some way).
This kind of rhetoric is cunningly used to shift the blame for the actions of evil people onto their victims – it’s also known as “victim blaming” or “victim shaming”. It’s what I refer to as “evil justifying its own existence”. Think deeply about this when you hear someone peddling these beliefs. Perhaps you have already bought what they were selling, and as a result, blamed yourself for actions that are not your responsibility, or seen yourself as possessing traits that you do not possess. How many times have you done this to yourself? After reading this article, are you going to keep doing it?
Helen
