Many people today talk about killing the ego and going through an ego death. But the truth is you can’t kill the ego without killing yourself. You can’t rid yourself of ego. Your ego is a part of you. It serves a function just like your lungs or fingers do. What you can do is build a healthier relationship with your ego, build understanding with yourself to recognize your triggers, and respond to those triggers in a healthier manner. This week in Deeper Thoughts we’re going to discuss what the ego’s role is, ways it can cause you to be reactionary, and what it can look like when you use your ego in a healthy way.
The ego’s job is to protect you. We’ve spoken before on how it can cause you to push away things for fear of them going too well, all due to deep rooted fears of rejection. For more on that you can check out my article, “Pushing Away What Feels Good.” But let’s look at another way the ego can be unhealthy.
An unhealthy ego is a reactionary ego. It can give you a false sense of power. You might think you can control and influence things, but when things don’t go your way that ego takes control. A healthy ego can give you great confidence based on past experiences. But an unhealthy ego will cause you to have unearned confidence and when shit hits the fan that fragile confidence gets shattered.
Someone could be challenging your authority (either your expertise or even your leadership), be it directly or indirectly. Your reactionary ego may have you looking through a lens of no one would ever challenge you because they either fear you, or because it’s so obvious that you’re an expert. Having this occur might cause you to lash out in anger, either verbally or physically. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to try and maintain and keep your position.
If something goes awry or you’re challenged, a reactionary ego can cause you to freeze up with analysis paralysis, causing you to over analyze the next step. This can often happen when you’ve never experienced a situation like this before. Your ego is freezing you up because you don’t want to make any mistakes, but trying to make that perfect solution will cause opportunities to pass you by.
It can cause you to point to others and blame them for issues or failure. This is actually an example most of us see, and are all at some point or another guilty of. Many times it’s to keep us out of trouble, but just as often we truly believe that it's someone else’s fault because we handle the reality of being wrong, making a mistake, or being the “bad guy.” So we do this because the reactionary ego thinks it’s easier (and sometimes “safer”) to be the victim in the situation.
The reactionary ego can have you going to coping mechanisms to run away from the issues at hand. When we’re not able to handle stress properly many of us go to escapism. We tend to lean in heavily to drugs and alcohol, porn, excessive video games, meaningless sex, etc, instead of facing the issues we’re dealing with and finding healthier ways to to handle it.
On the flipside, our reactionary ego can cause us to practice endurism in highly stressful situations. Many of us have been conditioned to feel that we have to put up with certain things because “that’s what a good person would do.” These situations can include, but by no means are limited to, staying in an abusive relationship, always loaning money to or helping out family members even though they never return the favor or are toxic, or staying in a toxic work environment. For more on endurism you can check out my article “Endurism, Why Are You Holding On To The Pain.”
An over inflated and reactionary ego can cause you to fail when things get intense, but on the other side of the coin, a healthy ego based on experience can help you navigate any storm that comes your way.
Someone who has a healthier ego uses it as a tool to build themselves up. They’ve studied themselves when their reactionary ego flares up due to triggers, understands what about the situation triggered them, why it did, and takes time to find ways to respond to those triggers instead of reacting. And over time, this plus experience builds up confidence.
This person knows that things aren’t going the way they want, but they take ownership of what they’ve done to contribute to the situation. They become solution oriented and assess the best options quickly and confidently execute that plan.
Their ego doesn’t cause them to lash out because they use it to confidently and swiftly plan the next step and move forward. They aren’t afraid of being challenged. Even if they get angry, they don’t let that anger take control, because they know if they did they’re easier to manipulate.
They have an ego that came up with contingency plans to protect them.
Their ego pushes them forward confidently because instead of pointing fingers and blaming others for their mistakes they learn to take lessons from failure so as to not repeat them, making them more sure-footed as they move forward in life.
One person is controlled by the reactionary ego while the other controls it. The resulting karma when the storm is over speaks for itself. Hopefully this article shows some insight on how the ego can cause you to be reactionary and help you become more aware of your own reactions to situations. With this knowledge you can start responding to situations more appropriately and come out on top.
Thank you as always for reading, and I hope you have an enlightening day.
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