Please Don’t Mirror Me Perfectly: Our Obsession With Attunement Is Stifling Friendship

I was in conversation with a dear friend recently about something I was struggling with, and at some point she became worried that she wasn't being helpful.

She was angry about something someone had done to me. I wasn't particularly angry. And she was worried that because she was having an anger response, she wasn't mirroring or validating me accurately enough. Maybe she was putting something onto my experience that wasn't there. Maybe she wasn't validating where I actually was.

And I told her in essence: I don't need you to mirror me perfectly. You get to be angry. I don't need you to have my exact response to what happened to me in order for me to stay in contact with my own experience. I’d rather encounter you than perfect validation.

We have learned a lot about mirroring, validation, attunement. And thank god. Most of us could probably stand to get much better at receiving – our own selves and others — without immediately fixing, interpreting, arguing, dismissing etc.

But I think something can happen when we start trying to do these things just right or feel they are the correct or even evolved way to relate.

I don't need a therapist’s precise attunement from a friend. I don’t need the ideal mirroring of a mother to child from a friend.

I want a reciprocal relationship. One that requires encountering one another, readjusting, and sharing the vulnerable relational thing—which I often think is much harder than sharing the vulnerable event. Telling you that someone broke my heart is disclosure level vulnerable.

Telling you, while I'm sitting with you, that I don't like what you just said, or what I long for in this moment without making it about what you should do, asks something else of me. It requires in the moment, relational, I-thou vulnerability.

She can listen to me and get something i said wrong. She can mirror something back that isn't quite it. She can have a response that doesn't match mine. I can say, "No, that's not quite what I mean." Or, "Interesting, I'm actually not angry at all." Or even hey, I have such a longing right now to vent it all out without interruption!” And see if it’s something they can or want to give me or not. 

That is the relational. That is vulnerability. That is intimacy. And it’s not mirroring perfectly or validating perfectly. 

There is a particular usefulness to the mirroring position. For a moment, one person's experience is the thing we are orienting around. The other person is allowing some space to stay with it, understand it, make room for it. Their own responses are filtered somewhat through what will serve that person's process.

Sometimes I absolutely want that from a friend. Sometimes I'm wrecked and just want to be received. But, I can’t force anyone to do that. I can’t guarantee another can do that. And if I’m so easily destabilized if someone cannot, then friendship will become more about what I can get from someone, than who I am encountering.

If you misunderstand me and I get so knocked off that I can't regain my balance, then of course I'm going to become extremely invested in getting you to understand me correctly. If you're angry about something that happened to me and I'm not, and your anger starts to feel more real than my own response because I can’t hold onto myself around other people’s strong emotions, then of course I'm going to want you to stop being angry. If you disagree with my interpretation and suddenly I can't feel what I think anymore, your validation is going to feel very important.

Then a lack of mirroring or validation can start to feel like a relational threat. And a true intimate encounter—with someone who is separate from us, who will inevitably get us wrong—can itself become threatening to our inner sense of stability.

In order to really encounter one another, we each have enough of a center that another person's response doesn't have to be perfectly calibrated in order for us to remain ourselves.

Because if I can stay in my center even with someone who chronically tries to fix, I have more choice. I can respond from my center rather than from threat. I can share what’s it’s like. I can get annoyed. I can decide I don't want to keep having this conversation with them. And sometimes, if they have the capacity, meeting them from that place may have even more influence than trying to make them relate to me correctly. Not because influence is the goal, but because I'm actually there.

And this doesn't mean I shouldn't be affected. Of course I am going to be affected. I don't think a strong center is one that nobody can knock you out of.

The question is whether I can notice.

Oh. I'm inside her experience now.

She thinks that. I don't.

Her anger is hers. What do I actually feel?

And then I can recalibrate, take the blame away from her, and become interested in strengthening my own center so that another person's experience doesn't so easily become more authoritative than mine.

Not to endure shitty treatment, but to actually become less hooked into it.

Maybe then I can say, "God, I really feel this strong urge to make you understand me better right now!"

Or, "I love that you love me and are going all mama bear, but man I’m finding it challenging right now to stay steady in myself.”

These aren't demands, they aren’t even requests or “needs” (another sneaky management attempt). Rather: I'm letting you see what is happening in me in response to you. And then you get to encounter that, just as I have encountered you.

They are revealing my internal relational experience vs directing the relationship toward an outcome, an action or an object (other person as object).

There is something much more vulnerable about that than simply deciding that the other person is doing it wrong and should do it differently. I am showing you me, and not dictating your showing yourself.

And because you are a separate person, I don't entirely control what happens next.

Maybe you soften. Maybe you tell me why you're having such a strong response. Maybe I discover something in what you say. Maybe you realize that you have been overtaking the conversation. Maybe you double down and get defensive. 

This is real intimacy. Yes, even if someone gets defensive. You are encountering reality. Encounter, real intimacy, doesn't promise a “feel good” outcome. It promises contact with what is actually there.

I bring myself, but I am also affected by finding you there.

You bring yourself in response to me, and then I respond.

And neither of us knows exactly where we're going to end up.

That is the part I think can get hidden when we become overly concerned with mirroring, validating, and attuning correctly.

The relationship is the encountering. The different responses. What happens when those responses meet. The sharing, the vulnerability of sharing our desire in the relational moment, the flexibility to respond to what we find in the other person. The movement from there.

Mirroring and attunement can be incredibly helpful inside of that. Sometimes they are exactly what allows us to receive each other at all.

But if I'm so afraid of getting you wrong that I can't simply be with you, something has been lost.

If you need me to get you right in order to stay connected to yourself, something has been lost.

You affect me. I find myself in response to you. I bring that back to you. You respond. Maybe you move. Maybe I move. Maybe we both do. Maybe neither of us do.

Not because either of us knew beforehand what the right response was supposed to be.

Because we encountered each other.

And funny enough, a few days after she shared her anger about what had happened to me, I found my own anger. Encountering her helped me know her, and it allowed me space to encounter myself.