The Mirror

The Mirror: what combines into this role

A state in which the inner standards that define oneself are thin, a sense that picks up outside expectations too sensitively, and a state of not having practiced keeping one's distance from one's own feelings. This pattern appears when the three overlap within one person. A person with this pattern loses the boundary between themselves and others and takes other people's desires and expectations as their own just as they are, and while they adapt perfectly to the other person, what they themselves want becomes harder and harder to know.

The Mirror: where it shows up

Whether choosing from a menu or deciding on a career, a person with this pattern automatically gives the answer the other person seems to want. The people around them see this person as easygoing, someone who fits in anywhere, but when asked what they really want, this person can only answer that they do not know.

If, every time a relationship ends, they feel an emptiness of not knowing who they were, it may be a sign that within the relationship they lived not as themselves but in a form shaped to fit the other person.

Empathy and assimilation are not the same

Empathy is understanding other people's feelings while keeping one's own standards, while assimilation is taking other people's feelings as one's own just as they are because one has no standards of one's own. Psychology distinguishes the self formed to meet the demands of one's environment from one's true self. On the outside, both the person who empathizes and the person who assimilates are warm, but the person who empathizes gains strength from relationships, while the person who assimilates must find themselves again every time a relationship ends.

The Mirror: same role, different depth

Two people can share a role and still live differently, depending on how strongly it shows up in each of them.

When this pattern is faint, it becomes a social gift for noticing and adapting to the mood, but the stronger it grows, the less they come to know what they want and the more heavily they depend on relationships. You can see right away in your test results how much it applies to you.