The Ego Paradox

I was talking to a colleague today about how some people (yeah, some other people) can be so defended that they can’t hear feedback or own the less lovely parts of themselves. When we see someone unable to look at his or her “stuff”, someone who can’t take feedback, we know that we are seeing an ego in defense. 

And I do know that from my own experience—that my ego will try to protect the fragile, wounded, less-than-pretty part of me and it will go for every defense mechanism to keep me from seeing and owning what’s painful or icky.

But then I realized that –quite paradoxically—that it takes a lot of ego strength to be able to look at your own inner life, your motivations, your wounded parts and be able to own them and accept them. It takes having an ego to be able to say—even if cringing—“yeah, that is me”, “I guess I do that”, “there’s that old part of me again”, “yeah, I’m doing it again and I want to stop that.” That kind of looking and owning takes tremendous ego strength.

Vulnerability and humility and self-awareness require having some ego. So is it a balancing act? Maybe like Goldilocks—we need not too much and not too little but the “just right” amount of ego to see and heal and change.

Vengefulness

I liked this so much I copied it into my daily notebook:

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men and women dependent on those who have hurt them. You chain yourself to the person who harmed you and you are trapped.”

-----Laura Hillenbrand, “Unbroken”

The Paradox of Time or One Day at a Time Maybe

In San Antonio I saw 50,000 AA members play out one of our major paradoxes. As AA members counted down their years of sobriety we cheered like mad for the man with one day and the woman with three weeks. Then when the old timers stood up we screamed again.

We do this in our home groups too. We are thrilled for the person with 24 hours, five days or one month. We say, “All that any of us has is today”, and “The person who got up earliest today has the most sobriety.” Then we brag that our sponsor has 28 years or that our sponsor’s sponsor has 35.

A contradiction? A paradox? I think the reason we are in awe of old timers is that we know that if they have been sober that long then it has to be true that they have been through it all: love, loss, illness, death, success, failure, more success, more failure, new love and more heartbreak—and they stayed sober through those things that we desire and fear.

And that is what we want for ourselves—one day at a time.