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ОглавлениеWhatever you call it, the ego’s mission boils down to one aim: your unhappiness and lack of personal fulfillment. The ego does not want you to find yourself nor feel your unique purpose and power.
Standing in the shadows, running the show but taking no responsibility, is the ego, your inner critic. The ego is the hit man of the psyche, handed by ancient prohibitions against real individuality. In its most pleasant form, the ego brings euphoria and the kind of inflated self-image that guarantees busted ambitions. At its worst, the ego crushes hope and incentive, and will not rest until you agree to give up the dream. The ego, our inner enemy, undermines us in the most insidious and subtle ways. It is like an agent of a dictatorial state, keeping us too frightened—or too grandiose—to live our dreams. No matter which route it takes, fear or grandiosity, the ego has but one goal: to make sure you never fulfill who you were meant to be. It is anti-happiness, and anti-destiny.
My client Carl was in the grip of his ego for years. Carl was an artist by talent and desire. However, growing up in a working class family, Carl had memories of his mother throwing his drawings in the trash and his father telling him art was for faggots. With phenomenal integrity and drive, Carl went ahead, despite his lack of parental support, and pursued a graduate degree in fine arts, intending a career as a professional artist. Then his ego got hold of him. Carl began to become more and more high-minded about the terms he would accept from the art world. He convinced himself that the art galleries were crassly commercialized, and that he would never be allowed to succeed without compromising his artistic ideals. The last straw came when he was not accepted for an advanced arts fellowship he had desperately wanted. Not able to have his dreams on exactly the terms he wanted, Carl stopped trying to make it as an artist and took a supervisory job in the sheet metal factory where his father had worked as a foreman.
By the time I met him, Carl was a resigned person, with many bridges burned between himself and his soul’s passion. However, I got to watch Carl come back to life, as he identified the enemy within and beat it As we worked together, he began to realize how his ego had promoted his parents’ defeatist, critical attitudes, making him believe it was hopeless to ever have a life different from theirs. As Carl continued on his search for his real purpose, he learned to accept himself as he really was, not as his parents or anyone else saw him. He also realized how he had undermined his own happiness by blindly accepting his ego’s criticisms and inflated expectations.
Once he stopped listening to his cynical, high-handed ego, Carl began to make a new life for himself, discovering fresh outlets for his artistic nature and a deeper warmth for other people than he had ever experienced before. As he learned to accept his true self unconditionally, Carl discovered many positive attributes about himself which had never had the chance to be expressed. As Carl said of his regained identity when he finished therapy, “I always was who I am now, I just didn’t know how to he it.”
Meet the Ego
The ego is that part of yourself that is rooted in fear, guilt, and grandiosity, and is directly at odds with your true self (1). The ego believes that your greatest safety lies in becoming whatever others need you to be. It exists to preserve the status quo and to prevent you from leaving the fold.
The idea of this inner, self-destructive force is not a new one. It is as old as the devil himself. The ego has been known by many names: the internal predator, the killing force of the psyche (2), the death instinct (3), the Voice (4), or even Satan (5). But there is nothing supernatural about this idea, for the ego is nothing more than a self-defeating psychological force.
Whatever you call it, the ego’s mission boils down to one aim: your unhappiness and lack of personal fulfillment. The ego does not want you to find yourself nor feel your unique purpose and power. It is crucial for us to realize that there is one part of our personality, a chip on our shoulder, bent on making our lives miserable. Like any dictator, its goal is not the good of the country, but the preservation of its own power. The ego sets itself up on a throne of infallibility, and your pledge of allegiance to it is, “It’s all my fault” The ego knows that guilt-ridden people do not challenge authority.
This inner saboteur pipes up with its destructive opinions every time we get close to finding our true selves and purpose. In ancient myths, this was symbolized by the dragon that guarded the prize or the defeating riddle that stopped all newcomers from moving forward. It is the confounding inner presence that menaces us with the suggestion that maybe we should just go on back home where we belong and not try this grown-up stuff. Believe me, it is a paper tiger. It has exactly as much power as you want to give it.
How the Ego Can Use Success
Interestingly, the ego is not just about making you fail necessarily. It can accomplish self-defeat through your “success” as well. If being a big finanrial success allows you no time to follow your dreams, the ego will gladly encourage that “success” instead of failure.
The ego can also use your otherwise positive dreams against you by inflating them too much. The ego makes you greedy For instance, it might makeup you unwilling to accept that beginner’s salary or hesitant to pay the necessary dues to get started in a new field. In this way, instead of feeling like a frightened failure, you might begin to regard yourself as an entided prodigy.
Either way, the ego guarantees the fulfillment of your inner dreams is not going to get off the back burner. When your ego whispers in your ear to chase empty “success” or overnight fame, your dream’s chances can be ruined just as surely as if you had given up altogether.
The Ego’s Attitude
The ego thinks it knows everything. It deludes us into thinking it is the master of the house, when it is really a freeloading tenant. When we are operating by the ego, we are out of touch with the unique gifts belonging to our true selves. The ego is who we think we are supposed to be in order to be accepted by others, but the self is who we really are.
The ego thinks it can do anything. Nothing looks hard to it, because it knows perfecdy well that it has no intentions of ever really putting itself on the line. The ego is like the worst kind of crazy-making parent to the rest of your personality. On the one hand, it inflates you and tells you that you can do anything. On the other hand, as you begin to work toward your goal, it tells you that life should not be so hard, that this is too much effort. Besides, it might add, you probably don’t have what it takes, which everybody is sure to find out when you are exposed as an impostor. What a treacherous force to harbor in our minds, and the ego is all the stronger for not being unmasked. It misleads you every step of the way.
The ego thinks it knows its way around a competitive world in which everyone is trying to get their desires. It has a defensive attitude and a suspicious way of thinking that can be applied to every situation. However, the ego loves no one, and it has none of the radiance of the real self. Never can the ego supply you with the heart-expanding joy of creating your own wonderful life. The ego cannot create. It can only destroy what your true self has tried to or should create.
The ego is highly reactive emotionally and has an opinion about everything. It tells you your deed should have been done a different way; this person that hurt your feelings wasn’t nice; asks how such a thing could happen; and so on. So much energy is spent by the ego on its reactions to everything, you have very little left over to actually do anything. The ego’s ambition is to create inner turmoil, not accomplishment.
The ego, while it serves some purposes for survival, was never designed to support personal growth. It conveys all the fundamental insecurity of a frightened narcissist. It is self-protectively absorbed only in furthering its own mission of fear and conformity.
Let’s Get This Straight
The ego hates your enthusiasm. It is the bully who cannot resist knocking down what you have begun to build. With all its accumulated negative learning about the world, the ego has only one mission: to keep you from reuniting with your true energies and interests. The ego—let’s get this straight—is not on your side. It is not at all interested in your happiness or fulfillment, even though it insists that is its sole purpose. Throwing you off the track any way it possibly can is what the ego is really about. Its methods instill either hopelessness or unrealistically inflated expectations; although opposites, they are both equally deadly in the end.
The ego will be skeptical and cynical, whatever it takes, to keep you from throwing your whole heart into your mission. It will undermine not only your confidence, but your creativity as well. The ego will make you side against your intuition and your desires, so that you mistrust the things you love the most.
Ego Attack
A client of mine, Kathy, had made enormous progress in her psychotherapy sessions, learning ways to become her own person in spite of intense resistance from her family. She had learned to ask herself first what she wanted and the threat of her domineering mother’s disapproval was beginning to lose its effect. However, after a period of exhilarating growth and increased self-confidence, Kathy slumped into my office one day in a grimly depressed state. She morosely told me, “I feel like all that other stuff I told you before was just a bunch of bull. Look at me, I can’t do anything now.” (This was actually not true, but this is how one talks when the ego is in control.)
Perceiving that Kathy was in danger of breaking out of the family corral for good, her ego had become highly alarmed. It hit her with a blast of demoralization that caused her to doubt all her progress to date. We had to figure out how her ego had been able to stir up this crisis of self-doubt and how to put it in its place.
Kathy had spent the weekend with her family for the baptism of her sister’s baby. Kathy’s temper rose as she watched her mother take over and ruin her sister’s special day by ordering everyone around and pouting childishly when things did not go her way. However, Kathy did not want to make a scene, so she pushed down her feelings of outrage over her mother’s insensitive behavior. The strain of this internal tension exhausted Kathy, and left the door wide open for her ego to do what it does best: stir up self-doubt.
Instead of continuing to be angry with her mother, Kathy turned her anger and frustration inward and began to doubt all her growth and progress thus far. Notice the non sequitur here, so common to the ego’s illogic. Kathy’s distress over her mother’s behavior somehow in Kathy’s mind became transformed into a cause for pessimism about her capabilities and her future. Kathy’s ego had used those wobbly moments of internal conflict to shake her confidence and tarnish her integrity with a nonsensical train of thought. Once we realized what had upset her and how it left her vulnerable to the ego’s illogical tactics, Kathy was able to see the incident clearly and her depression lifted. When she no longer supported the ego in its attack on her, its power fizzled.
Hand-me-downs
The ego has the peculiar characteristic of presenting itself as the most personal and real part of you, and yet it is literally the most unoriginal part of you. The ego is all borrowed. It is not who you really are, who you came into the world as. It is an assortment of survival memories from other people’s pasts. Like hand-me-down clothing, it does not always fit well. Our parents or society may have passed down these antiquated beliefs direcdy into our scared little child egos. So when you are judging yourself harshly or feeling total certainty about your chances for failure, just take a moment and ask yourself if that is really your idea, or if you inherited that attitude from someone else.
It can be very hard to consider rejecting ideas and beliefs that we have held all our lives. It can be the hardest thing in the world to think originally, to look at the evidence and form another conclusion different from what you have been told all your life.
Yet this is what you will do if you are going to become who you were really meant to be. Your true self does not consist of the fears and opinions that have been passed down to you like great grandmother’s quilt To find our true purpose we have to begin seeing the ego part of our personality for what it is and start refusing to let it have the final say over us. The ego’s aim is destruction, despair, and the disconnection of positive ties with other people. As we will see in a later chapter, some positive ties with other people are going to be necessary for your success, because nobody does anything completely on their own. Nevertheless, the ego does not want you to trust other people or move outside your family. It wants you to listen only to it.
The Ego is Not Your Conscience
The ego is not your conscience (6). Your conscience has constructive motives and basically serves your best interests because it helps you operate from wisdom rather than impulse. It is a good thing to think twice before breaking the law or doing something that would hurt someone else. As your guide for ethical living, the prodding of a well-oiled conscience can have long-term benefits. But the ego only desires your unhappiness and must be differentiated from the conscience if we are ever to be free of it. Just think of the ego as your conscience’s evil twin.
Of course, the ego, being the parasitic, alien life form that it is, masquerades as a part of its host. You hear the ego, and you think it is your conscience talking. It feels highly moral and righteous, as if it were infallible. It tells you “how things really are,” things such as: you’re never going to amount to anything, you’re a dreamer, it will never work, and you’re being selfish. But whatever it says, it destroys your motivation.
Conscience instructs, but it does not undermine initiative nor rob you of energy. When your real conscience tells you something, the knowledge imparted adds to your ability to cope. The conscience gives you guidance, advice, prompts redirection, promotes apologies, and steers you in the right direction. The ego, on the other hand, is only interested in taking things away from you and keeping you scared. Conscience adds, ego subtracts.
Many people worry that conscience-less behavior is being promoted when they are encouraged to develop more self-interest. This worry is another example of ego nonsense. Self-development and conscience support each other and balance our psychological growth. We need our consciences. We do not need the ego, that life-sucking leech that masquerades as your conscience and ruins your chances at true happiness.
Pretzel Logic
The ego has its own peculiar logic which can be very persuasive when it is delivered cleverly in little bits and pieces at a time. The ego does not expose its whole agenda at once, because if it did, you would immediately identify the deceiver and know better. It instead just whispers a little doubt in your ear or suggests doing the very thing that will lead you down the road to ultimate discouragement. Taken a piece at a time, the ego’s advice appears to make perfect sense. But only if you are not wise to it If you know what the ego is up to—to keep you from finding lasting happiness—and you know how it operates (negatively and destructively), you are forewarned and forearmed for the false knowledge the ego might try to offer you. Think of the ego as a doubt dealer, and just say no.
Not everybody has an over-developed, destructive ego, but it can be presumed to be present whenever a person feels chronic frustration about his or her life. If your ego is well-developed and likes to work overtime, there will be certain reliable signs of its negative influence, like symptoms of depression, anxiety, and nagging unfulfillment.
The philosophy of life that the ego really supports must be looked at all at once out in the open where we can really see how the components of the ego mind work. Once exposed, you will never again be so naive as to trust its opinions blindly.
THE EGO’S SURVIVAL GUIDE GAME PLAN
1) Chase Your Tail
The ego encourages indecisiveness and pointless tail-chasing. This is especially encouraged at three o’clock in the morning, or any other time when there is nothing you can do about that which is bothering you.
The ego wants you to worry about what you did, what you did not do, and what you are about to do. The chief characteristic of ego worry is that it produces nothing but suffering, and subtracts from your ability to cope with a situation. The result is you worry about everything without resolving anything.
2) Use a Cannon to Kill a Fly
The ego leads you to believe that anything worth doing must be done perfectly. This includes the silliest, most inconsequential tasks. It encourages you to wear yourself out pouring pointless effort into meaningless little things, so you will not be in danger of success in the big things.
3) Put It Off
