6
Creating Change Through Mind Consciousness
Trevor couldn’t understand why his last relationship had gone up in flames—yet again. He was smart, successful, attractive, and fit, all characteristics he thought made him the ultimate catch. Women should be flocking to me! he thought.
Though Trevor had no difficulty attracting dates or engaging in sexual experiences, sustaining a romantic relationship was another thing altogether. It didn’t have anything to do with what he looked like or how much money he made, as he had once thought. What was sabotaging his relationships was his ego story continually running through his mind about who he was and who he had to be to feel worthy of love.
We all have an ego, and every ego has its stories. These narratives are created by our subconscious mind to make sense of the world around us. Our ego may create the story that “we’re not worth their time” if someone we’re interested in doesn’t text us. Or our ego may interpret being passed over for a work project or business opportunity to mean that we’re an unqualified imposter or fraud. Though we can’t ever be sure of all the factors involved in a potential lover’s preferences or a boss’s decision, our mind creates stories and assumptions, assigning meanings to our experiences to try to help us deal with the discomfort of not knowing. The more frequently we assign the same meanings to similar experiences, the more these interpretations form a cohesive narrative or storyline that accompanies us through life. Even though it’s impossible to know all of the objective “facts” surrounding our circumstances, we continue to assume that our interpretations are factual representations of reality.
Most of us have several different ego stories, some that change over time. But our biggest ego story—the one that we’ve been listening to the longest and is most influential to our sense of self—is the story that our subconscious made up during our childhood to help us better manage the stress of having needs neglected by our parent-figures. No matter your personal ego story, it usually boils down to deep-rooted shame about being not lovable enough, good enough, or worthy enough for someone to want to meet your needs.
As children, we lacked the emotional maturity and perspective to know that it wasn’t our fault if our parent-figures weren’t always able to help us feel safe, valued, and loved in the ways we needed. In a childhood state of egocentricism, we couldn’t evaluate situations maturely or from another person’s perspective and, as a result, personalized all interactions and experiences. When our developing brains couldn’t understand the many factors that contributed to a person’s abilities or choices in any given moment, we reasoned that anything we or others did indicated something about us and who we were. Because our wounded inner child believed that we were the problem, we began adapting or modifying ourselves in order to fit into our environment and relationships. We tried to keep ourself safe and connected through the habitual patterns of our trauma bonds, trying to feel “loved” in whatever ways were available.
Today, we probably still subconsciously believe that we’re not worthy, continuing to suppress or hide those parts of ourselves that we believe make us instinctively unworthy. Sometimes we even hide those undesirable parts of ourselves from ourselves, keeping them repressed in our subconscious, unable to admit that they’re even a part of us at all. You may have even heard these repressed parts referred to as “shadow” parts.
You may be asking yourself why, if most ego stories include difficult, uncomfortable, or limiting aspects, do we repeat them over and over again? Because the human mind craves certainty, our ego works tirelessly to confirm, reconfirm, and reinforce the stories we’ve repeated and grown comfortable with since we were young.
Anytime we think thoughts about ourselves—I’m undesirable; I’m too sensitive; I’m not good at anything—that’s our ego at work, helping to create, define, and maintain our identity. Our ego’s primary job is to protect our hurt inner child, and to do so, it spins stories about who we are to help us understand, justify, and compensate for the ways in which we didn’t feel safe or secure in the past.
Examples of common ego stories include:
I’m too much or too sensitive to be loved by others.
I’m needy or helpless.
I’m worthless and deserve to be alone.
I’m cursed, and nothing good ever happens to me.
I’m loved only when I’m doing something for others.
I’m an imposter and worthy of love only when I appear to be perfect.
I’m always going to be left, abandoned, or cheated on.
I’m more important than others, and my needs or opinions are the only ones that matter.
I’m weak, and I’d feel too vulnerable to share how I really feel.
I’m always being violated or taken advantage of.
Most of us are unaware of our ego story. Instead, we think our ego story is our truth because it’s become such a familiar pathway of our subconscious mind. Since we were children, our brain has fired the same ego-driven thoughts and intrepretations again and again, creating and reinforcing the associated neural networks. As these networks grew stronger, our ego began to filter our daily experiences to confirm these forming beliefs. Whenever our subconscious is presented with information that contradicts or conflicts with our ego, it will quickly and adamantly reject it as a threat to our perceived identity. We easily get stuck repeating the thoughts and reactive patterns of our ego, our experiences continuing to confirm the identity-based narratives from our childhood. Over time, we become more and more limited in both our thinking and perception and end up feeling more threatened, reactive, and often out of control as a result.
Thankfully, though, we can choose to develop mind consciousness or to become aware of these powerful subconscious beliefs by learning how to witness our ego story and the ways in which it drives us to think, feel, and react with others that don’t serve our best interests or align with who we want to be. As we gain a greater awareness of our subconscious conditioning, we can begin to challenge our ego’s underlying beliefs of unworthiness and make new choices that aren’t colored by the hurt of our inner child.
TREVOR’S EGO STORY
Before we get into the process of developing mind consciousness, I want to go back to Trevor, since his ego story helps illustrate how our subconscious narratives can impact our relationships. Some of you may identify with Trevor’s story because you’ve experienced something similar or have been in a relationship with someone like him.
Trevor had many ego stories, but the one he’d been listening to the longest was the one that was largely responsible for short-circuiting his romantic relationships. His ego story was: I’m a man, and emotions make me (and all men) weak. Here’s how his hurt inner child came up with that belief.
Trevor had grown up in an upper-middle-class family in a safe, financially privileged neighborhood. His father, once a high-ranking officer in the military, was the CEO of a bank, which gave his mother the financial ability to stay home and raise their son. Trevor attended a good school, was encouraged to be physically active, ate healthy, home-cooked meals most nights of the week, and was allowed to pursue the hobbies that interested him, including costly ones like skiing, horseback riding, and guitar playing.
Though he had very few unmet physical needs, Trevor grew up with near-constant emotional abuse. His father was a physically and verbally domineering man who ruled the family with an iron fist. When Trevor expressed a normal emotion like sadness, loneliness, or fear, his father would respond by telling his son “Stop crying,” “Man up,” “Shape up or ship out,” or “Toughen up, or you’ll never make anything of yourself.” His father, who frequently shifted into Eruptor mode, often exploded in fits of rage, sometimes for no apparent reason. To cope, Trevor began to adopt a cool, distanced facade, often using humor or deflection to deal with uncomfortable emotions, whether his own or those of others. He learned from his father to be consumed with status, wealth, and physical appearance, since that was how Trevor’s dad felt he and other men were valued in the world.
Trevor’s mother didn’t protect her son from the near-constant emotional or verbal abuse in their home, helping him feel emotionally safe or secure. Though she loved Trevor deeply, she was frightened of her husband and fawned around him, enabling his temper and his harsh treatment of their son. This dynamic left Trevor with little to no emotional support since both his primary caregivers were unavailable: his father scared him, and his mother was too sacred to do anything about it. Trevor began to feel immense pressure to step in and mediate tense or volatile situations between his father and mother, using the same tactics he saw his mother use to try to please or calm his father.
Trevor was too scared to express his emotions or needs, so his nervous system remained on high alert, always ready to protect him against future attacks. Like his father, Trevor developed a two-faced exterior, remaining stoic or silently seething most of the time, then in reactive moments exhibiting rageful and abusive behaviors toward those closest to him. Though he mostly hid his dark feelings from the outside world, they created a highly complicated experience later in life for his romantic partners, who felt invalidated and silently enraged by his Jekyll-and-Hyde personality.
Wired for fight, Trevor learned from his father that anger was an effective way to control his environment. As an adult, Trevor used anger to intimidate others so that he felt more powerful, subconsciously compensating for all the times he’d felt helpless in childhood, as well as helpless against the emotions he feared made him weak. His hair-trigger temper was especially evident in his road rage, which frightened any partner who had to sit next to him in the passenger seat, and when he erupted at restaurants, parties, stores, or the office when he felt overlooked or slighted in some way. Trevor’s nervous system was constantly scanning his environment, looking for evidence that he wasn’t valued, which he usually found, even if none existed. Everything looked like a threat because everything in his childhood had been a threat: his authoritarian father, his passive mother, and the impossibility of expressing any emotions that might make him appear weak.
In his romantic relationships, Trevor suppressed all emotions other than anger, caught up in his ego story that real men don’t show their feelings. He was regularly the Life of the Party, always acting as though everything was fine. Because he was unable to authentically express his wants, needs, and desires with others, he couldn’t truly connect with his partners, who often saw him as angry, unfeeling, and harsh—not the nuanced, complex, kind, compassionate, generous, and loving man he was capable of being when able to authentically be himself.
Trevor’s ego story prevented him from attuning to his partners since most emotions, even those expressed by others, scared him. During his childhood, no one had modeled healthy emotional expression for him or helped him learn how to adaptively cope with his or others’ feelings. Growing up in an avoidant and explosive environment, he had never learned how to attune to his own upsetting emotions, which made him uncomfortable whenever others expressed their feelings around him as an adult. He often used logic to shut his partners down, unintentionally explaining away or invalidating their feelings when they shared their concerns with him. If his partner had had a tough day at work, Trevor suggested that her boss was a jerk or that she needed to get a promotion or apply for the job he had recommended months before. Or if she told him that she felt lonely, he questioned the validity of her feelings, reminding her that she had just been out with friends the other night. As a result, his partners never felt safe enough to honestly express themselves around him, and many stopped sharing their emotions altogether, causing them to feel isolated and often frightened within the relationship.
YOUR JOURNEY TO MIND CONSCIOUSNESS
Your ego story is likely different from Trevor’s. Some of us have no problem expressing our emotions within our relationships, but our ego story keeps us trapped in patterns of emotional dumping, abandonment anxiety, or other dysfunctional behaviors that are driven by our inner child wounds. No matter what our individual ego story may be, it’s likely creating cycles of shame-driven reactive behaviors as we continue to hide parts of ourselves and as we desperately strive to feel good enough.
When we develop mind consciousness, though, we can witness our ego story and begin to appreciate ourselves for who we really are, not who we had to be to feel safely connected in childhood. This will give us the opportunity to begin to take away the power of our ego story and its impact on our relationships. And it’s how we start to create new narratives about who we are and want to be. By doing ego work, we can finally begin to believe that we’re worthy enough for just being who we are, without needing another’s actions or validations to make us feel whole and lovable.
Before we explore how to use mind consciousness to witness our ego, I want to emphasize the importance of continuing the foundational body-based practices to help regulate your nervous system before beginning this process. If your nervous system is dysregulated because of consistently unmet physical needs, developing mind consciousness will be very difficult. If you’re undernourished, exhausted from too little sleep, or fatigued from too little or too much movement, your body will continue to feel unsafe and you will likely continue to experience stress or fear-driven reactions, no matter how much ego work you do. If you’ve been taking steps to consistently meet your body’s needs so you can better regulate your nervous system, you’re ready for the next step in your journey back to your authentic Self.
YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS CREATES YOUR REALITY
Most of us spend the majority of our time in our head, obsessing over or analyzing what we think and feel. We believe that the narratives running through our mind are accurate accounts of ourselves and our experiences. Many of us even believe that we can will or think our way into believing or behaving the ways we want to.
None of this is true. Our thoughts and feelings do not make up our identity or who we are. Who we are is guided by our intuition, as we learn to trust the instinctual feelings in our heart, residing more in our body than in our mind. And, until we become aware of our heart’s messages or desires, our daily habits and cycles of reactivity will be driven by our subconscious mind and dysregulated nervous system. When we become conscious of these inner powerful forces by witnessing both the habitual thoughts in our mind and the physical sensations in our body, we give ourselves the opportunity intentionally direct our creation of and reaction to our life.
Though most of us believe that we perceive the world around us accurately, we, in reality, see only what our subconscious wants us to see, based on our past experiences. And, to speed up processing time so we can move toward the safety of predictability, our brain often makes snap judgments, distorting or misrepresenting the available information. When our subconscious does this within our relationships and makes predictions based on our past, it can cause us to do or say unreasonable things or continue to hide the parts of ourselves we’ve come to believe make us unlovable or unworthy. This is especially true in our romantic relationships, where our subconscious habitually relies on our earliest relational experiences to predict our future. Because my mom was unable to consistently be emotionally present and attuned to my needs, my subconscious, desiring the safety of certainty, drives me to filter all of my relationship experiences through the age-old script that neither I nor my needs will be considered.
Using what happened in my past to predict that my partners aren’t willing or interested in supporting my emotional needs limits the possibility of a different future outcome or experience. Because my subconscious has convinced me that I shouldn’t even try to share my feelings with my partner, I end up shutting myself up in my room when I need or want support or making passive-aggressive or snarky comments that indirectly express my need or desire, snapping that “I wish I had someone to help me” instead of directly asking for the type of help or support I need or want. And, when I do decide to share my feelings with my partner, my subconscious often causes me to perceive any slight reaction—the look on their face or the tone of their voice—as an indication that I’m burdening them, just as I predicted and expected.
As I imagine you’re beginning to see, most relationship conflicts aren’t actually about what’s happening between two people in the present but are instead reenactments of what happened between us and others in our past. When our subconscious makes predictions within our relationships, we can easily apply past trauma to our present interactions and make decisions based on old inner child wounds. Here are some examples of what that can look like, based on early childhood trauma.
If you were repeatedly criticized by your parent-figures—told what to think, how to feel, when to act—your subconscious may interpret everything your loved one does or says about you or to you as critical, regardless of whether it is or not, causing you to be continually defensive. Your subconscious filters another’s communications as a threatening indication of how negatively they really think or feel about you.
If your parent-figures frequently yelled, slammed doors, or barged into your bedroom, your subconscious may perceive any loud noise or sudden gesture—a slammed door, a shut cabinet in the kitchen, someone walking behind you without your conscious awareness—as a reason to startle or scare. Your subconscious perceives loud noises or sudden gestures as threats because believing that someone is coming to yell at or scold you.
If you grew up in a home with scarce or unavailable resources—your family lived from paycheck to paycheck and struggled to make ends meet, your parent-figures didn’t have enough time for you because of financial insecurity, or you were shamed for wasting food or other resources—you may have grown up with a constant fear of not having enough or running out of what you need. Your subconscious may perceive what others say or do as indicative that they don’t have enough resources for you, including enough time, support, attention, or love. You may act protectively in your relationships, always making sure you get your half or worrying that there’s not enough even when there’s plenty to go around, sometimes even quickly consuming whatever is available in order to “conserve” for possible future scarcity.
YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS’S FAVORITE STORY
If our physical or emotional needs weren’t consistently met in childhood, our subconscious can end up believing that we’re inherently flawed. This belief creates an implicit threat of abandonment—that others will reject or leave us once they see we’re unworthy or unlovable—causing our nervous system to repetitively activate a stress response. Over time, this nervous system dysregulation causes more reactivity within our relationships, as we feel consistently overwhelmed by the emotional and physical discomfort inside us.
Our subconscious will continue to overlook or filter out any evidence that we’re worthy so that we can keep operating in our familiar neurobiological confines. Believing that unworthiness is part of who we are, intrinsically and undeniably, we interpret anything others say or do as reinforcement of this belief. As you can imagine, this can have detrimental effects on all our relationships.
Jada’s story illustrates how our earliest childhood beliefs of unworthiness can impact our adult relationships. You may also know someone like Jada, who constantly perceives what happens to her and others as an injustice or maltreatment. Jada grew up in an economically underresourced home with three older siblings and one younger brother. Her parents worked long hours in order to feed the family of seven, and although they were “good” and “loving” people, they were physically unavailable most of the time—and too exhausted when they were home to attune to their children. Their physical and emotional absence caused Jada and her siblings to grow up feeling deeply unworthy of having someone meet her needs. Often behind on rent, the family was forced to move frequently, and the children were transferred from school to school. Struggling to fit in, Jada’s siblings coped with their feelings of unworthiness by bullying her both physically and emotionally. Lacking any type of foundational safety, Jada started to feel that the world was filled with unsafe people—after all, not even her own family was kind to her. Her ego story soon became “I’m not worthy of being treated with respect.”
