The purpose of the ego is to act as an interface and buffer between the Authentic Self of the child and the material realm. It is who you really are and were always meant to be. Most people spend much of their adult life trying to figure out who they really are, their amorphous personality is capable of so many roles and identities, we are very chameleon like, ever changing our persona to fit the external circumstance. But who are we really? Who you really are is called the Authentic Self and it is within you buried deeply within your personal unconscious, buried beneath layer upon layer of the ego and the false persona it created in infancy. This is a direct result of childhood trauma.
The most damaging aspect of childhood trauma is the repression of the Authentic Self and the development of the false self. This separation from the Authentic self is the source of all suffering. We are disconnected from the life force within us. We have rejected and abandoned our true self in order to develop a false self that is more capable of getting its needs met by our mother. In short we have rejected, abandoned and betrayed ourSelf and suffer as a result.
All infants are hypersensitive emotional beings easily wounded by the slightest perception of rejection or disapproval. Remember the child’s life totally depends on its mother’s attachment to it. If she leaves the child dies. The infant must maintain this bond at all costs, even the cost of its true identity. the infant must maintain the “We”, the experience of Unity or a morbid sense of dread results.
Infants are very needy and demand almost the undivided attention of their mothers unless they are sleeping, thankfully they do sleep a lot. However our materialistic, capitalist society does not provide women nor their families the support they need to raise children successfully. It takes a community to raise a child, not an isolated mother left to cope on her own. The needs of an infant combined with all the other socially induced stressors on the mother can and often do overwhelm her. Her stress can make her emotionally unavailable to the infant, she can become upset and frustrated by the infants constant neediness and detach or worse lash out at the child verbally or perhaps physically and spank the child. The hypersensitive, emotionally attuned infant is very sensitive to its mother’s emotional states and easily wounded by them. If she is upset, angry or depressed the child is immediately aware of her emotional state and senses that their bond is weakening.
The infantile ego of the infant now comes into play. The situation needs fixing, the infant assumes responsibility for the situation and wants to fix it, the infant feels it is at fault and must take corrective action. The ego uses infantile defense mechanisms to maintain the sense of the “We” experience without any capacity to consider the long term consequences of its defensive actions. The well intentioned infantile ego begins to develop a persona or personality that is more capable of maintaining the Unity experience, a personality that is more acceptable to the mother. The defense mechanism of repression is one of the most preferred and simplistic strategies employed by the ego. The ego simply represses any aspect of the true Self it perceives as unacceptable or upsetting to the mother into the unconscious The ego begins to develop adaptive strategies to fit its perception of the external reality. These adaptions produce an ever changing personality designed to win the approval, acceptance, affection, significance and esteem of the mother. If the ego is successful the sense of Unity and belonging is restored and the fear is relieved for the moment.
Now that the ego has been activated in a defensive role life for the child will never be the same, over the years the ego will react with short sighted strategies designed to defend the We feeling, the sense of belonging is paramount in the ego’s world view, even the Authentic Self is sacrificed in the pursuit of the Unity experience. The ego over time creates a persona an actor on the world stage that it feels is more adaptive to the harsh realities of life. We as adults live our lives out of this false self and continue to pursue affection, attention, esteem, significance and security at all costs, without regard to who we really are and meant to be. We often feel lost, because we are lost to our true Self, we feel alone, because we have lost the Unity experience and this produces a sense of impending doom or fear. Cut off from our true Self we search desperately in the material realm to fill the inner void. We may even be somewhat successful, accumulating great fame and fortune, but when alone the inner emptiness returns and more adaption is required as we continually move farther and farther from the truth.
The truth is the Authentic Self is alive and well, passively waiting our return. The Unity experience, the deep sense of belonging is alive and well, although incomplete without us. We will continue to suffer until we turn around and make the internal journey back to our Authentic Self. We suffer as a result of the infantile defensive reactions of our ego, we have become egocentric and thankfully it is only our ego that suffers. The Authentic Self was never at risk in infancy, the ego judged emotional pain as unacceptable, where as the Authentic Self merely absorbed it and used it to develop empathy and compassion. The ego has no capacity for empathy or compassion, they are perceived as incompatible with survival. Only the Authentic Self is capable of empathy and compassion. If you experience either of these qualities then you know your Authentic Self is alive and well.
Next I’ll take a look at the way back.