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“Mirroring” — the People-pleasing Technique That Awakened Me
A viral series forced me to see the relationship between my own debilitating need for control and my fear of abandonment
I still remember the day. It was the first lockdown of 2020. Alone in my apartment, I was rewatching The Office (US) on Netflix for the 3rd or 4th time.
It has always been my go-to series for when I am feeling lost, powerless, or at times even dissociating. The mundaneness and absurdity of the characters has always made whatever is going in my life at the time sort of fade away for the duration each 20.5-minute episode.
I was rewatching season 2 yet again, and the painfully brown-nosing character Andrew Bernard was grinning through the fourth wall at me, gloating about how good he was at “mirroring”. This day, though, it felt as though his sweaty expression was directed right at me.
This has just followed a scene where he, having just relocated to a new branch at this job, was gleaning all the information he could from his colleagues about his new boss. It was literally day one, but his goal was crystal clear:
- say your boss’ names repeatedly when you’re talking to them to make feel connected with you (and like you);
