Escaping Twin Flames: The Mirror Exercise
Tool for integration and healing or perpetration of abuse?
This morning I wake up early. As I lay there, I begin processing, and something begins to grip me that I want to explore here: the Mirror Exercise. The Mirror Exercise is an exercise with which I’m intimately familiar. If you’re not familiar with it yourself, it’s deceptively simple (that’s the issue), and I’ll explain it in a moment.
Last week, feeling ill, I watched a couple of shows. One of them was the recently featured Netflix series, Escaping Twin Flames, a docuseries following an organization that eventually devolves into a kind of **weak and lame** cult.
From the outside, it’s easy to laugh at these types of organization and wonder who in the world would fall for this crap?? But the truth is that we all experience periods in our lives where we feel lost or fed up and set out in search of new answers. This state can leave us vulnerable to the influence of others who may or may not hold good intentions—whether that’s an organization or an individual. Even previously strong, healthy people in crisis can fall prey to manipulative influences that may further break down their sense of an integral self and cause disintegrative states in which they may be more or less easily manipulated, controlled and duped.
I’m no expert, but this appears to me to be Cult Psychology 101.
Page 1: Lure in people in a weakened state and purport to offer them—for a price—the “answers” they’re looking for.
Using half-truths, threats and manipulative techniques that further break down the target’s sense of their own competence and intuitive self-trust, these people/organizations then take people’s money (and in some cases lead them down a path of self-ruin) while the leaders increasingly gain perceived control and power by fashioning themselves into “gods” appearing to dole out “truths” in the form of costly classes, courses, coaching etc.*
This is exactly the boring but shockingly effective old playbook that the Twin Flames group featured in this show followed.
But here’s the aspect of that playbook I want to focus on: The Mirror Exercise
One of the core exercises (maybe the ONLY one?) this group—Twin Flames Universe—uses (yep it’s currently happening folks! Join now!) as a basis for their whack-a-doodle “philosophy” is called “the Mirror Exercise”.
Most people who’ve engaged in any kind of organized (led by someone else) inner spiritual/psychological work will be familiar with this type of exercise in which you examine judgements and emotions and turn them around to then examine yourself and your own motives. It’s the basis for Byron Katie’s legit The Work and many (also legitimate) others, and when used correctly, is a powerful tool for self-discovery and freedom.
To be honest, it changed my own life and I use it to this day.
The Mirror Exercise comes in several versions, but the basic idea is to identify a feeling or a judgement causing you distress, such as “I am mad at Ralph because he is controlling me” invert it—“I am mad at myself because I am controlling me”, and then examine where in your life you are exerting unwanted control over yourself.
The exercise works on a phenomenon that plagues us all—the fact that:
We tend to replay parental voices long into adulthood, internalizing them as egoic structures which we unconsciously assume keep us “safe”, but that may, as adults, actually be unnecessary, restrictive and punitive, stunting our growth, development, and life experience.
Used correctly, the Mirror Exercise is a solid technique that can be used to reveal important truths about ourselves and route out these no-longer-needed egoic structures, as we tend to be blind to our own ego-mechanisms and project or extrovert our own issues onto other people.
So, for instance, in the above example regarding Ralph, I might discover that I negatively control myself by often a) shaming myself when I get too far out of my comfort zone, thus preventing myself from growing, exploring or experiencing life in ways I’d truly like to, b) ignoring my own intuition and needs in favor of others’ desires, and relatedly, c) allowing my fear of rejection or disapproval to guide my choices.
I may discover that I am actually subconsciously recruiting Ralph to do my dirty work for me by keeping me in a zone that feels “safe” (no matter how unhealthy or inaccurate that assessment may actually be). The truth may be that I’m unwilling to experience my own discomfort that speaking up for myself, exerting boundaries, making unpopular choices etc. may engender. All very useful information if my ultimate goal is to free myself of these self-deceptive practices used by the ego to keep me “safe”, but which actually imprison me in a cage of my own creation.
The Mirror Exercise is a useful and critical aspect of this kind of self-reflection—the stage where we stop blaming the “outside world” and begin to examine the ways in which we are unconscious accomplices to our own pain; it’s an important step towards freedom, and I’m concerned that, baby and bathwater-style, the technique may be vilified because of this show. It’s a great technique. However, without some understanding about how to use this tool, the Mirror Exercise can also be employed maliciously to perpetrate, hide or excuse abuse. Used improperly, incompletely or with malicious intent, it can be particularly dangerous and damaging to those of us who tend already to internalize and blame ourselves for anything and everything.
When we question our own agendas (very important to do) but fail to integrate this information and recognize that we may also need to take action in addition to that questioning, it can get dicey pretty quickly.
To illustrate, let’s use an extreme version of the Ralph example above. Say Ralph is my boyfriend and he’s punching me when I do something he doesn’t like. Yes, eventually it would absolutely behoove me to look at my internal motivations for engaging in this relationship in the first place, and while those motivations I discover will be valuable, very real to me and worth exploring, the point is that if I do the Mirror Exercise and discover that indeed I’m allowing this bad behavior and in essence, being controlling and abusive to myself by doing so but neglect to realize that I also need to remove myself from this situation because I am with someone who is actually abusing me, I’ve failed to integrate the realizations I’m having about myself and am instead merely using them to further abuse myself (e.g., self-blame, staying in the situation) rather than getting help and getting the hell out of there.
To be effective, the mirror exercise requires a step 2 and potentially also 3:
Self-reflection
Realization, healing and subsequent internal correction (integration)
Action to change the situation that is externally mirroring my internal state
If we stop at step one, we just create victim shaming and continuation of abusive situations. In fact, we multiply the abuse by blaming ourselves for it. The Mirror Exercise is not about blame. It’s about recognition of internal blind spots and healing and integration, which, done correctly, ultimately results in a healthier external manifestation of circumstances.
Whether they do it intentionally or not, those who use the vulnerability of others who look up to them to create dependence using half-truths and implied threats are dangerous. Instead of supporting and celebrating others, they maim and destroy the victim’s sense of wholeness, competence and self-trust with the aim of creating dependence upon the abuser, so that the abuser can profit, appearing to themselves to patch the holes in their own damaged small self.
This is also the story of the ego, which is why the mirror exercise works in the first place.
While children and animals may be the saddest victims of abuse, because they truly have no power or agency of their own, adults fall victim to it all the time, outsourcing their own intuition, common sense and agency.
At the end of the day, the Mirror Exercise is merely a tool, and its safety and efficacy is determined by whoever wields it and how it is used. It can either be a used as a powerful tool for true healing and freedom from abuse, whether that abuse is perpetrated by self or other, or it merely can be a cheap trick—just another bludgeon in the slick abuser’s hand (self or other) to continue, hide and deepen mistreatment.
*Obviously, there’s the positive (real) form of this where leaders, courses, coaching, classes etc. actually do genuinely lead people to their own answers and to self-empowerment and freedom. The negative form of this, such as this whole Twin Flames Universe mess we’re discussing here, know this, and merely masquerade as the real thing.