How to Reflect on Your Observations

One remarkable feature of making contact with others, as well as the emotions that one is most ashamed of, is reflecting on what you are observing.

Taking the time to sift through observations of one’s self, exploring the dimensions of the person you’re with, and considering how what you observe may be a reflection of your biases and history—all this adds a great deal to understanding the depth of your emotions and the integrity of people around you.

Often there’s a tendency to assume you know something about yourself because it’s what you heard your parents, siblings, and partners say about you: But what they say may not be who you are, but how they want you to be or how you present yourself to them. Reflecting on who you really are is a task of psychotherapy, and independently of clinical settings, it’s what makes art possible.

Once you know yourself better, having reflected on your observations of yourself, you will be better able to observe others. Who you are attracted to, who sets you off, who you think is dangerous, and who is a threat--all that can change with reflection. When you consider what you are observing, and how it’s based on blinders, once having taken the blinders off, you are in a position to affiliate more honestly and clearly with yourself and others.

Rather than denying how you feel, pushing it away, pretending you don’t feel what you feel, and avoiding pain, reflecting is the lynchpin needed for changes. Denial and avoidance are part of what makes us human and are needed for us to get through trauma and loss, but reflection is the first step toward affiliation. Affiliation not only with others in your family and community but also with yourself. In order to move past trauma, you have to acknowledge that it took place.

C.S. Lewis writes about the heartfelt power of observation in his in, “A Grief Observed,” which is about the death of his wife. It's not something to get over: it's a tragedy to reflect on and determine perhaps how it changed him, and will continue to do so in ways unanticipated. The psychologist Hayao Kawai, writing in, “Buddhism and the art of psychotherapy,” frames reflection as a component of observation through a way of life.

To really make use of reflection, the process must ultimately be a way of life.