Two Mirrors

{There are at least two very different ways of talking about “systemic”}

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Two Mirrors

{There are at least two very different ways of talking about “systemic”}

The first is like a mirror hanging on a wall. It is the conventional systemic mirror of modern psychology. It reflects relationships, family patterns, communication dynamics, alliances, and conflicts. But for it to work, the wall needs to be straight, orthogonal, and very smooth. The frame matters: there is a model, a theoretical framework based on the idea of the modern human psyche.

If the mirror breaks, it can be repaired.

If the image is distorted, the angles can be adjusted.

The system is something that can be observed, analyzed, and reorganized.

This systemic mirror has expanded Western psychology by introducing circularity and context. But it still hangs on a modern wall: anthropocentric, clinical, organized around an implicit model of family and subject. The system is relational, but it remains completely human and framed solely within the human psyche.

The second form is not a hanging object.

It is a lake.

Because the meta-relational systemic mirror is not fixed on a wall, it is embedded in a living ecosystem. The water reflects, and is also crossed by wind, roots, falling leaves, ancient grief, unmetabolized stories, ancestry, collapse, and rebirth.

There is no guaranteed orthogonality.

There is no frame.

There is no external observer.

Those who look are already viscerally involved in the field they are looking at—perspective, posture, and lens.

Here, the human is not the center of the system, but one of its expressions. In this lake, it is not only familiar patterns that are reorganized. Historical fields are metabolized. Living systems are heard. It is recognized that suffering is not only relational dysfunction, but a manifestation of ecological, cultural, and civilizational intertwining.

The first mirror asks: “How can this system be reorganized?”

The second asks: “What field is emerging here? What needs to be metabolized? What historical, ecological, and ancestral field is manifesting itself here? What unmetabolized grief runs through this living system? What civilizational patterns are operating invisibly?”

Both reflect. But they belong to different cosmologies.

How can we name this distinction?

When we speak of “systemic,” we use the same word to designate two radically different worldviews. In one case, it is a psychological systemic: an extension of modern psychology that incorporates circularity, context, and relational patterns, but which remains centered on the human as a unit of reference. The system is primarily familial, communicational, and intersubjective.

Although it recognizes complexity, it remains anchored in a clinical epistemology and an implicit model of the subject and family organization that presents itself as neutral but is historically situated. In the other case, we are dealing with an ontological or ecocentric systemic cosmology. Here, the system is not just a set of human relationships, but a living field in which history, ecology, ancestry, culture, and civilizational metabolism are intertwined.

Humans cease to be the organizing center and become participants in a larger entanglement. It is not just a matter of reorganizing patterns, but of recognizing fields of force that traverse us and demand metabolization.

The difference, therefore, is not methodological—it is cosmological.

One paradigm broadens psychology; the other shifts the axis of the very conception of reality.

Where does friction usually arise?

Friction often arises when the meta-relational approach is interpreted as “just another therapeutic technique” within the same clinical framework. When translated into familiar psychological categories, its ontological dimension is lost and it is reabsorbed by the paradigm that it precisely seeks to question. What was a shift in focus becomes merely a variation in method.

This assimilation can lead to misunderstandings, because the proposal is not to improve the mirror hanging on the wall, but to shift us to another type of reflection.

Another area of tension arises when criticism of anthropocentrism is felt as criticism of clinical practice or the people who practice it. However, the point is not to devalue the contributions of conventional systemic therapy, but to recognize its historical and cosmological limits. Meta-relationality does not position itself as superior or substitutive, but as belonging to another layer of reading reality.

The friction reveals precisely that we are crossing paradigmatic boundaries—and that it is not always comfortable to realize that the shared word does not designate the same world.

The difficulty of displacement

When the mirror is no longer hanging on the wall and reveals itself as a lake, something trembles within modern subjectivity. The first impulse is to feel that one is losing ground: if I am no longer the center, who am I? The impression arises that the self needs to be replaced by the field, as if recognizing the intertwining implies dissolution or erasure.

But the lake does not swallow those who approach it, it only shows that we were never isolated on the wall — we have always been water in relation to water. Life in relation to life.

Then comes the vertigo of complexity. Sensing that the field includes history, ancestry, ecosystems, ancient griefs, and invisible bonds, the mind tries to map everything, understand everything, tidy everything up at once, and it freezes, dissociates, gets angry. “How can I take ALL relationships into account?” it asks, distressed. But the lake does not ask for accounting, lists, or calculations. It does not require us to embrace the whole world with effort. It invites us to feel that we are already being sustained by shores, submerged roots, ancient currents. The field does not ask for control, dominance, or understanding; it offers belonging.

Displacement is not a Herculean task—it is a gentle surrender to the evidence that we have always been held by bonds older than our own name.

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Fundamental Differences

Systemic Therapy - The Mirror Hanging on the Wall

• System = family

• Psychological focus

• Clinical intervention

• Reorganizing patterns

• Human as center

• Functional health

Systemic Mirror Meta-Relational - The Lake of Living Water that Reflects

• System = multispecies living field

• Ontological focus

• Participation in the field

• Metabolizing patterns

• Human as participant

• Metabolic alignment

(*) This article was seeded by my own contextual practice and students’ inquiries. Please note that meta-relationality is an entangled living cosmology from the GTDF and Vanessa Andreotti’s work. Please refer to their work for more in-depth context.