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