Technique «Mirror»: how to change the look at the situation

How to use

• Sit in a chair in a quiet place where no one will disturb you.
• Designate a «scene» in front of you. It can be a small space on the floor or on a table with delineated boundaries. The easiest option is to put a sheet of A4 paper or a string indicating a circle.
• Mentally play the disturbing situation in front of you on stage. You are now an outside observer and look at the action in miniature. It can be an unpleasant meeting, a conversation with someone, and so on.
• Write down your thoughts, feelings, sensations that appear when observing.
• Now put the chair away from the «stage». Play the situation over again in your mind.
• Answer the following questions in writing:

  What’s new in this situation?

  What happened to my stress?

  How do I feel about what happened now?

  What can I do to minimize encounters with a similar unpleasant situation in the future?

If the answers to questions come easily, then it is enough to change the point of view once or twice.

If it is difficult to answer (for example, there is confusion in thoughts, anxiety), change the place of the viewer four or five times (taking a position at different points in the room) in order to literally assess what happened from different angles.

Result

You better understand how you feel, why you react the way you do. Your feelings become more conscious, tension decreases or disappears.

You may have noticed that although the technique is called «Mirror», it is about the stage. The point here is this. This technique returns us to that stage of child development, which the creator of the psychodrama method Jacob Moreno called “the stage of knowing “You”, that is, another person.

At this time, for the first time in our lives, we begin to realize our difference from others, we notice our “I”. This is the very period when the child sees his reflection in the mirror and begins to guess that it is himself, and not some other boy or girl.

So in the proposed technique, we look at ourselves as in a mirror — from the outside. And we can see ourselves not from the inside, as happens when we are included in the situation, but from the outside, through the eyes of an unbiased viewer.

Thanks to this, we can better understand both our own feelings and the experiences of other participants in the scene. Often this is enough to change our feelings, and sometimes to understand what we would like to do differently next time.

The proposed technique can be used not only to work with what has already happened, but also to play out upcoming events if they cause anxiety. For example, talking to your boss about a pay rise or taking an exam. Such a rehearsal will help reduce anxiety and see the possibilities for a favorable outcome.