Altering Ego…some of the lies we tell ourselves and others
There’s the: ‘Oh, that’s my depression talking’ as someone tells a staggeringly negative story about themselves, the ‘me and my life are totally shit’ kind of story.
And then there’s: ‘that’ll be my OCD’ as an obsessive-compulsive disorder explanation for the repeated missed calls and blizzards of texts sent to you.
Or: ‘That’s bi-polar-me doing that’ to explain away a mood spike and trough so extreme that it went from giddy euphoria to suicidal despair in a space of minutes leaving the listener reeling.
Beyond the flip humour, what do these three lines have in common?
They are all said as a frontline defence, the outer persona covering up for the inner pain.
But here’s a question: how much does it help when you’re outward persona explains away the agonised behaviour of your inner self? Doesn’t it just create an ugly co-dependency, an internecine internal battle to the death? And sometimes it is actually to the death.
Let me be very clear about this, the distinction between the inner and outer self, the two aspects of ourselves that have the capacity to both exist in harmony, but also in a state of continual mutual destruction.
I am going to use the terms ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ self, just to simplify the terms.
We Two
The outer self is the one we project on the world, the one that says ‘Fine thanks,’ in response to the anodyne question ‘How are you?’ Meanwhile the inner self is screaming ‘I am not fine at all, you have no idea, every part of my life is agony, thank you for asking but you’re not really interested, but just for the record it’s all shit, shit, shit…’
The outer self is a marriage of evolution and ego, and there’s a big fat overlap between those two. We are designed to project ourselves in the world to our best advantage, to cover up the flaws so that we can look bigger, better and brighter. It means that, again from an evolutionary point of view, we have the best chance to get our genes successfully into the next generation.
The outer self spins a good yarn, and it can fool almost all of the people most of the time, to misquote Lincoln, but the one person it never fools is, well of course, the inner self.
The inner self is the perpetual commentator of our lives, second-by-second, choice-by-choice. It is highly critical, and hugely sensitive, by design. Again it’s a product of evolution, married with our conditioning, our lives and experiences to date. It will live beside us for all our life, passing judgement on everything we say or do. When we are disinhibited, as in high on whatever is our drug of choice, it might report back very positively, in the vein of ‘I’m wonderful, that was cool, what a brilliant answer, wow! I’m good’. It might also report back even more negatively than the un-drugged version of ourselves, if we are down, anxious or depressed. With the last boundaries doped and dumbed away, it will tell us how unremittingly crap we are, and how pathetic our life is.
But why—why do we have such a cruelly critical inner reporting system? How can this be evolution serving us in any useful way?
Of course I had to get back to evolution because, before we can get our genes into the next generation, we have to survive, to protect ourselves in order to be able to do the gene passing.
Our mind evolved to scan for threat, all the time. This has been delved into in a previous post, but this is to re-iterate the point that our mind’s nature is to go in search of the negative all the time, in order to assess it for threat, and then to go on looking for further threat. This is its job, its design—useful when avoiding a predator out on the pre-history savannah, not so useful in a state of big city despair, looking out on rain on tarmac, drumming down, drumming down your soul. A negative looking for a negative will always find one, every time, feeding despair with more despair, seeing rain on tarmac as a sign of the pointlessness of life.
Our life’s journey is to know how to challenge the inner voice when it is misreporting, when it is telling us negative stories that are simply neither true nor helpful.
By its nature the inner self is more introverted, the outer more extrovert, hence inner and outer. The inner is the self-examining soft animal of who we are. Its journey is understanding and learning who we are to the extent that we know ourselves so intimately that we find ways to feel tender towards our flaws, our errors and failures. It also has the heavy task of challenging the outer self, checking it when it is getting too bolshie, or indeed too fragile and insecure.
So, instead of the outer self saying, ‘Oh, that’s bi-polar talk’, the inner self learns how to watch the mood spike, and to explain it to the outer self with the commentary: ‘You are too tired, overwrought, or hurt,’ or whatever other reason lies behind the extreme swing.
The outer self will acknowledge this. The inner self can then advise gentle action, or rest and withdrawal to a place that feels emotionally and physically safe.
The outer self will be relieved, the inner self will feel stronger.
And the ego will not have to lie to the world about how you are feeling because you, the two of you, are living in balance rather than at war.