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.”
The older Jada got, the more her ego story caused her to see the possibility of injustice in most daily circumstances. Feeling deeply outraged and, at the same time, powerless and alone, she was constantly on guard for possible threats, often adopting a combative attitude in an attempt to keep herself safe, especially from those who held positions of power. That misguided and hypervigilant self-protection often activated a disproportionate reaction whenever she thought someone slighted her, becoming indignant or even rageful if she was passed over for a project at work, she scrolled by a social media post that offended her, or someone mistakenly cut in front of her in line at the coffee shop. Her subconscious perceived moments of possible conflict everywhere and hastily relied on polarized (“us” or “with me” versus “them” or “against me”) thinking to automatically group others into categories based on perceived power dynamics. Usually, she’d take the side of the underdog, even if they were harming others.
In both her romantic and professional relationships, Jada’s ego story attracted her to partners whom she believed she could easily defend or who needed her protection. That was her trauma bond pattern, her childhood wounds causing her to play the role of the Rescuer/Protector with others. Her subconscious was always on the alert for signs that those she cared about were being taken advantage of, and when her mind inevitably found evidence of that, she would become reactive and defensive, yelling at whoever was causing the perceived injustice. She continued to project her internal experience of powerlessness onto others, seeing people as vulnerable and in need of rescuing. In her ego’s reality, she was just trying to stand up for others the way she wished her parents had stood up for her. Though in her interactions with others she wasn’t able to hold space for any differences in perspectives and often came across as self-righteous and often abrasive even though she meant well.
Meet Your Ego Exercise
You can witness your own ego by beginning to pay attention to the thoughts or stories you frequently tell yourself about yourself, others, and the world in general. During the next couple of days or weeks, nonjudgmentally take note of these types of thoughts as they occur throughout your day, writing them down on the lines below or in a separate journal or notebook if helpful. By recognizing these stories for what they are—tales made up by your subconscious mind—you can stop reacting to them as your truth and start responding to them in new ways. Continue to extend yourself compassion during this exercise, acknowledging that these narratives once helped protect you and your inner child from your deepest pain.
Examples:
“I’m not good enough.”
“Others aren’t trustworthy.”
“The world is unsafe.”
“I am _______ .”
“Others are _______ .”
“The world is _______ .”
MEET YOUR EGO-GUIDED MEDITATION
Meditation practices can help you enhance your ability to witness and more objectively explore the thoughts you have as just thoughts, with no judgment, meaning, or value. Removing the strength and meaning from your thoughts can, over time, help you begin to see that your ego story doesn’t define you and will give you the opportunity to create new beliefs that better align with your intrinsic worthiness.
If you’re new to meditation, you may be wondering where to start. Though the idea can be intimidating, there is no right or wrong way to meditate. Remember, your goal is simply to be present in your body in the moment, observing the thoughts you’re having without judgment, as though you are watching clouds drift across the sky.
Though meditating with your eyes closed in a quiet space can limit distractions from your external world, helping you better see your internal one, you can also learn to be consciously present while around others. As you grow your meditation practice, it’s helpful to begin to notice your ego-based thoughts in real time. Learning how to shift into this state of witnessing in the moments when you’re in a reactive ego state can help create the space needed for you to pause, rethink, and make more authentic, heart-based choices.
EGO CONSCIOUSNESS AND YOUR CONDITIONED SELVES
If our ego story feels so much like our identity and truth, how can we convince it otherwise? The answer is that we can’t. Though you may have heard otherwise, our goal is not to “kill” or overpower our ego. Our ego is actually a critical part of our experience as a human, one that has kept us safe in overwhelming environments or situations since we were children. Now that we’re adults, our ego’s presence lets us know when something from our emotional past may be coloring our current experience. Over time, we can use our ego’s presence to cue our conscious mind to bring ourselves back to safety and the present moment.
Though our ego is an important and protective part of each of us, it’s not all of us. When we let our ego story color how we think about ourselves and interact with others, we operate in a space that I call ego consciousness: we automatically assign meanings and value to who we are, who others are, and what they think of us based on our unmet emotional needs. We can’t help but hide parts of ourselves as our ego story tricks us into believing that those parts aren’t worthy.
When I’m in a state of ego consciousness, I believe that my Overachiever self is what makes me me. I’m compelled to act as though my self-worth is dependent on whether I’m succeeding in my relationships by impressing others, appearing without imperfection or vulnerability, or fulfilling what I assume are their expectations of me. My subconscious is always analyzing what others say and do for evidence that they like or value me. Because at my core I don’t believe I’m worthy, I look to others for validation to help make me feel better about myself. The irony, of course, is that no amount of praise ever takes away my deep-rooted feelings of of unworthiness: that belief comes from me, not from others.
