Father, forgive them.

There is a certain inherent humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, confirming, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness. That’s the trouble with doppelgangers: anything you might do to dispel the confusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people’s minds. 

In this way, confrontations with our doppelgangers inevitably raise existentially destabilizing questions. Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be?

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (p. 27). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Getting confused with someone else is similar to being falsely accused of thinking things, feeling things, doing things which one has not thought, felt, or done.

People often blame other people and attribute motives to them that are not accurate. This false attribution can arise from many things, but perhaps the most common is that a person, wanting to be a victim, looks for a perpetrator to blame their unhappiness on. 

“My happiness is all your fault because of something you did or didn’t do.”

These false accusations can make a thoughtful person doubt their own sense of identity. Am I the person who did these things which the person is accusing me of? We may look to others for corroboration, asking bystanders and onlookers whether the accusations could possibly be true. The person experiences a split between the person that they think themselves to be and the person the other person sees them as.

Other people are our mirrors, our looking glass, because their feedback and perception of us help us form our own self understandings and identity. Is the feedback we get from others validating of our sense of self or mystifying?

When a person experiences themselves as other than what other people perceive them as being it often creates distress and anxiety. When false perceptions and accusations occur how can the person targeted best manage them?

Klein writes that to engage with the false perceiver to clarify often makes the false perception more real because the false perceiver now has to justify, protect, and explain their false perception and judgment making it even more manifest. The situation can quickly become polarized and adversarial. Perhaps it is better to leave things alone and rise above it. In A Course In Miracles, this rising above it, and not responding is called “forgiveness.” Forgiveness is giving up making other people and circumstances responsible for your unhappiness. Jesus says as he is being crucified, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

What have you done when you have been falsely accused and what thoughts were behind the path you chose?