Episode #253 - Mirrors

When you look in the mirror what do you see?  If you do not see what the Lord sees then you are projecting a false image of yourself, a masked image and masking has consequences.

Transcript

Welcome to Episode #253 – Mirrors.  If I asked you what you saw when you look in the mirror, what would you tell me?  Actually the question isn’t easy to answer, as much as it might seem to be.  The things we most often see in the physical mirror are our flaws and weaknesses.  We see a hair out of place, a stain on our clothing, birthmarks and everything in detail.  We also see our spiritual weaknesses. Not only do we see the detail but we feel it.  We know where we are frail, and we deeply feel those weaknesses.  We feel them so deep and so poignantly that for us they are as obvious as the zit on the end of our nose.  We see our weaknesses as glaring and obvious but the truth is that most weaknesses are not obvious to anyone but yourself.  Yes the world will find something by which to torment us but our true weaknesses are often hid so deeply that no one would even guess that we had such a problem in our lives.  This is often the case with our illness.  We hid and mask the symptoms so skillfully that no one would guess we had such terrible emotional turmoil.  We look calm and cool on the outside but on the inside it is as if we have entered a torture chamber with no exit.

However, what we don’t see or recognize on a real level is that our emotions can only be seen through our physical mannerisms.  And for the most part, because we all mask our emotions to some extent, we really do not know what people are thinking or feeling.  Masking is the ability to conceal ones true feelings and intentions by showing false mannerisms and facial expressions that more closely match someone who is at peace.  Although we do attempt to guess another’s emotions and intent regularly.  Our emotions are such a part of who we are that our mind and body believe that everyone can easily see our struggles.  However, the statement is untrue for at least three reasons.  One a person judging your intent and emotional state really cannot do anything but guess.  Related to the guessing, we tend to be wrong most of the time.  Two, most people are concerned with their own weaknesses and glaring emotional problems that they don’t focus on our problems.  We all tend to be egocentric.  Meaning the world revolves around us.  That makes sense because in some ways we create the reality we live in, so in a way the world does revolve around our creation of reality. Three, we can only feel what we have experienced.  Someone who has never experienced depression can only understand it in the sense of perhaps the death of a close friend or loved one.  But even then that isn’t true depression where the troubling feelings come without rhyme or reason.  The reality is that no one can see your emotions or your weaknesses because they have weaknesses of their own they are trying to hide.  

However, something important to think about.  Because we have experienced something, our mind tends to believe that everyone has.  Again this is to do with our egocentric mind.  For some reason our mind has trouble comprehending that another person may not understand what we feel at all.  Our mind even struggles at times to comprehend that someone we know and love doesn’t fully comprehend our mental and emotional difficulties.  Our mind would like to think that everyone experiences life as we do and in some ways it projects our reality in that sense onto others.  Because we don’t know how everyone is feeling and because we can’t really know, our mind fills in the informational gap and assumes that they do understand.

This creates a serious issue when we are struggling to find our footing.  If the mind believes that everyone understands our trials and struggles emotionally, then it will be looking for other comments and comfort in regard to our illness.  We tend to look for validation of our ideas from other people.  Validation is simply the another person recognizing our current state of emotions and difficulties.  It is them recognizing our identity and who we really are.  We are always looking for validation from this world.  That is a part of who we are as human beings.  We need feedback from the masses to know if we are falling into the culture and social norms of the day.  We also need feedback to understand what another person is feeling and thinking.  We desperately need feedback spiritually from our Father in heaven.  The reality is that the only feedback that provides any real significant value is that of the Savior and the Father.  Most of the feedback we receive from the world will be communicated poorly, exaggerated immensely, focused on the wrong areas of our lives, shallow in detail and depth and completely useless, although we still tend to use the feedback we get, even when we know that it isn’t correct.  If I wear the most awful conflicting, contrasting shirt to church, I am going to get some feedback.  Most of that feedback will be attempting to keep me in line with the culture of white shirts.  Nothing wrong with that culture, it is actually quite valuable to have such things as standards of dress.  But the sentiment is the same no matter what I do.  Most feedback is not constructive and is meant simply to keep me in line with the culture.

However, the feedback that the Savior provides is always uplifting and beneficial to the soul.  Even when the Lord is direct and honest with me about my actions, I don’t feel condemned rather I feel emboldened to take on the challenge.  The Savior’s feedback provides a stable foundation upon which one can build that will not drift away with the next storm like the shifting sands.  Most often the world is focused on our exterior physical attributes, temporary attributes that change with time.  The Savior most often focuses on intent, core spiritual emotions and correcting the problem at the source rather than just attempting to correct a behavior.

When we hear the world speak and they are loud, we are very likely to take the actions and intents of another and twist them to our own reality and then interpret them incorrectly.  We as humans are terrible at filling in informational blanks because we can only fill it in with our own experience.  We are limited by what we personally know and that is very limited even if you were the most intelligent person on the planet.

Let’s talk about an example.  Let’s say I m struggling one day at church with my anxiety/depression problems.  For me, as for most people, depression makes me noncommunicative.  And the anxiety causes issues with approaching individuals.  So because of my emotions I can look sullen, intimidating and unfriendly rather than welcoming.  I can look unapproachable and as though I am not interested in conversation or you as an individual.  While that might be true given the depression, individuals are not seeing depression when they see my face.  They see an older man with a no-smile face and his head down.  Not really approachable.  What they might see is someone who is cranky, or elitist, unfriendly, uncaring and yet the reality is none of those things.  He is suffering the effects of depression.  No one would guess that unless they had experienced depression and then they might still get it wrong.  So often when we suffer those around us make poor assumptions about our mental and emotional status.

Let’s take another example.  I beautiful young woman, educated, and spiritual has trouble building and keeping relationships.  She desperately wants to get married but her anxiety just causes issues with communication and relationships.  With her friends she doesn’t have any issues but with someone who might be a possible date she fumbles and struggles to even get a few sentences.  And then after she analyses those statements over and over again knowing that she has just destroyed any chance she ever had.  When the young man doesn’t speak to her for whatever reason, she will use that moment to confirm the feeling.  Why didn’t the young man, possible suitor, speak to her?  Could have been for a number of reasons.  However, when we are anxious we have strong tendencies to demonstrate a reserved shyness and that causes us to appear uninterested.  We are trying so hard to conceal our anxiety and fears that we simply some across as uninterested or even worse elitist.  

What we see so glaringly in each example is a significant difference between perceptions.  While the young woman is trying desperately to hide her anxiety, it is not perceived this way.  The perception is quite different for the one attempting to understand facial expressions and visual cues.  We can and often do “read” people incorrectly and we judge them through what little experience we have in this life.  And often, almost every time, those judgments we make about someone are wrong or false.   But we make them because our brain needs them.  Without understanding anything about the other person, the brain must concoct a story to make sense of what it is seeing.  This person takes my expressions and matches them up to someone from their past.  They then assign the characteristics of the person they knew in the past and project them upon me.  These people were rude and “standoffish” to me on a regular basis.  I don’t like elitists. Why doesn’t he smile?  What is his issue?  

You see we walk into a situation already having formed opinions based on what we have previously experienced.  It gives us a base to work from to establish the real story but often we don’t search for the real story.  We too often use the concocted story as what is true.  The same is true for the person who suffers from mental and emotional health conditions.  They are creating a similar story in a similar way.  Taking limited information about you and creating answers as to why you are behaving the way you do.

Goodness that person is strange, why do they stare like that.  What is their issue?  Do I look strange?  Is something wrong with my clothing?  I think that we can each regularly admit to our brain filling in large gaps of information without knowing whether that information is true.  Science calls this a bias because we always fill in the blanks from our own experiences.  And thus we taint the information with our own personalized color.  It is like taking a coloring picture and matching the colors of the person next to you without even looking at what colors they are using.  We might know basic colors but we will never be able to fully match the other coloring page.  

Why go through that discussion?  Because it directly impacts our mental health.  When we fill in the blanks during an episode of depression, anxiety or bipolar in our minds, we are tainting that information with a significant bias or depressing emotion.  We can’t see good in ourselves and so we struggle to see good in others actions and intentions.  We can’t feel happiness so we assume it in others.  We can’t feel the spirit in our lives regularly and so we transfer all of this to others to a limited extent.  

Something our minds do that is strange when it creates biased information.  It only creates a certain level of detail.  We tend to whitewash the other person and the scene, ignoring the large looming fact that we live in the same world and are subject to the same problems, difficulties and sins.  So not only do we fill in the blank character traits of another person almost immediately upon meeting them.  We do so without detail and without the struggle that allowed them to rise and obtain those characteristics.  It is like calling for Batman without knowing anything about his back story.  The name is strange unless you understand his history.  Without that history a guy running around in a bat suit with strange toys is going to seem very weird.  Unless you know his story you wouldn’t even be able to understand why he acts the way he does.  So you whitewash his story leaving out the struggle and only showing the result.

Finally, tend to cast our image upon the other person and then use the expression they give as clues to intent and emotional concerns.  We see other people through a comparison to ourselves.  We really can’t help it.  That is encoded deeply in our systems.  So when we see another person and that person looks stern for a moment without even knowing they are casting such an expression, we will evaluate them based on how we feel when we look like that.  So that stern moment which might have been a simple struggle of prayer has now been fully calculated before any real information is obtained.  We do this all the time.  And every human being does it.  

However, knowing the way others go about making decisions and judgements can help you tremendously.  If you see an older man with a scowl on his face, he may not be that intimidating, just struggling emotionally.  When you see that young man or woman hesitant to engage, they may not be truly shy but rather have serious anxieties that could be allied if someone with a comfortable voice and a friendly manner includes them.

Now you ask.  Bro. Socha have you even tried this?  Does it work?  Can you really avoid your personal bias?  No, not entirely.  Your mind is always going to fill in the blanks and assign information to another person.  It can’t work any differently.  It only has one good processor and it needs shortcuts to make our life livable.  But we can in almost every instance, avoid quickly assigning character traits and information bias to someone and simply ask a few questions about them.  No this may not be possible when you have little desire to communicate.  

Now a word of caution about the masking that we do as human beings.  Every person in this world begins to mask their true emotions early in their life.  We call it controlling our emotions.  We should be thinking about ways to properly express emotions but we teach our children to repress them.  That is a story for another day.  Masking is the way most all individuals control their emotions.  We live with the emotion inside of us but we mask it into what is needed for our social setting.

Those who suffer from mental and emotional illness, also mask but they become far more expert at it.  This is simply because they get far more practice.  Masking is certainly an important part of blending into societies circles without causing issues.  However, it comes with a couple of downsides and costs.  The first of these you might not recognize.  When you mask it takes a great deal of emotional energy to maintain the mask.  You will find yourselves exhausted without reason and all the time.  The more time you spend in the masked state, the worse it will get.  The second issue with masking is that it does not bring any form of joy.  It cannot bring joy because it is a lie from the very foundation.  You can’t lie yourself into joy.  Joy comes from the most pure form of action, when we are obedient to the commands of god.

I have seen many, many people attempt to mask their way to happiness.  Blending in, taking on them entirely unique and falsified personalities in public.  These people are some of the most miserable people I know.  They desire happiness but cannot have it because they are looking in all the wrong places.  You can’t fake true happiness by altering your facial expressions.  Yet so many try.   When masking doesn’t work individuals often go on a life journey to discover themselves.  What they are doing most often is truing their inner life with their outer life.  They are living more honestly with themselves and with God.  Masking takes a terrible toll.  However, you can’t wear your emotions on your sleeve all the time.  Neither method is very helpful to building genuine relationships.  So we must create a balance.  A balance in which the scale is weighted heavily to ones true personality and spiritual nature and we limit our masking. As you leave masking behind and limit its scale in your life, you will find much greater happiness specifically and generally.  However, it is not easy.  To leave masking behind we are showing our true selves and that frightens most of us to death.  Because if someone doesn’t like our true selves we cannot change it very easily.  If someone doesn’t like the way we mask, that is easy to change.

However, masking will almost always end up in spiritual death.  We must confront who we are with the Lord.  The Lord looks right through our mask and sees us as we truly are.  He wants to change us not just the mask but that requires us been honest with ourselves and others as we seek that change of heart.  When we look in any mirror, there is no value looking by yourself.  You should always be there with the Savior.  And how do you know the Savior’s voice because it is as it stated in D&C 121: 41.  His voice will always be persuasive, long suffering, gentle, meek, loving, kind, merciful, and most of all enlarging to the soul.  If the voice comes in any other way, then it is not him.  

My personal hope is that you will find greater peace in working with the Savior on what you see in the mirror rather than the world.  If you are feeling condemned, guilty, unpardoned, burdensome emotions, then it is not of the Lord.  He is there to lift not to cut you down.  When we look in the mirror we should always see ourselves as the Lord does, not as we do, or the world does.  When we do this regularly we will find a much greater happiness in our lives and a much firmer foundation.  Until next time do your part so that the Lord can do his.