“The Therapist as a Mirror”
My wife has always maintained that when I work with a sufferer, I am a mirror: “something that faith fully reflects or gives a true picture of something else.”
In a way that is so, but I try to be more than just a passive pane of coated glass. My work is to reveal to the sufferer who he really is. I, as it were, hold the mirror up to his nature. I hold up the mirror—and adjust it to help him see, at last, his true nature.
A snapshot of a person is only a picture, but a portrait by a master photographer is a true picture, going deep within the subject to reveal his inner self, his true nature.
Initially, the sufferer usually sees his reflection as “bad,” for that is how he views himself. But I try to help him see instead the reflection of the shining glory that is his True Self—the Beauty, the Belovingness, which is Him. For this alone is the True picture.
