Summary
At the core of our being, we long to be truly seen; not just for the parts we have been told are acceptable, but to be seen deeply, and to experience unconditional acceptance.
It is not surprising that parents want to bring out the best in their children, and children want to please their parents. What becomes complicated is that too often parents “selectively mirror” those traits in their children that they most want to develop, and children, in turn, begin to live more into those traits that are reinforced. The late psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described this as the beginning of the formation of a “false self,” or at least a limited self. As a result, traits that are not validated, or not even seen, go underground.
This, of course, gets replicated in marriage. Influenced by our childhood experiences, we try to be the person we believe that our partner wants us to be, thereby shutting down other parts of ourselves. Ironically, this often destroys intimacy, because much of who we are remains hidden.
It is easy to think of examples:
- The child who was told how sensitive they are learns to close off emotion;
- The child who overfunctioned in their family is reinforced and praised for that role, leaving other parts of the self underdeveloped, as described by Alice Miller in The Drama of the gifted child;
- In highly religious families, only what is considered “spiritual behavior” is reinforced;
- The child gifted in both math and art is reinforced only for math, with the belief that it will lead to a better job;
- The athletic child is reinforced only when they perform well, and criticized when they don’t.
There are many other examples. The point is clear: too often we grow up with only parts of us seen and validated, resulting in loneliness, and at times confusion as to who we really are.
At the core of our being, we long to be truly seen; not just for the parts we have been told are acceptable, but to be seen deeply, and to experience unconditional acceptance.
In Allen Levi’s novel, Theo of Golden, Theo is an elderly man with an uncanny ability to see people deeply and to tell them what he sees. The result is often transformational. He practices what the late psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called accurate mirroring. He reflects back to the people he encounters a deep sense of who they really are and what they long for.
In a letter, Theo describes a friend who is an eye doctor and writes: “The most important thing a parent can do for a baby is to gaze into her face, to hold him and engage the eyes. Can anything be simpler? Is anything more profound? Does anything more deeply change parent and child?” He then he adds these words: “I wonder if, like newborn children, we go through our entire lives looking for a face, longing for a particular gaze that calms and fills us, that recognizes and runs to greet us.”
Those words perhaps contain the best summary of what most of us long for: to be truly seen, to feel understood, and to experience unconditional love and acceptance.
While we cannot always heal the wounds of childhood, perhaps we can, like Theo, work on providing the gift of truly seeing those we love. We can help them experience the joy of being known; through careful listening, deep curiosity, empathy that seeks to imagine what the other is feeling, a willingness to not assume we understand, and an openness to surprise.
In reality, these experiences are rare, which is why we are drawn to people like Theo.
