This
article is incredibly relevant to narcissism, and anyone who has been caught in
the throes of narcissistic abuse.
This article
was inspired by a book I read over my break called ‘A Return to Love’ by
Marianne Williamson and it is about one of my favourite topics…. the ego.
It truly
is mind-blowing how at certain points of our journey we feel called to
read a certain book – and it relates to exactly where we are at with our
own development.
I have
written a few articles regarding ‘ego’ previously, and in the past I struggled
to believe that anyone could have mastered the understanding of the ego more
than Ekhart Tolle, but now after reading Marianne’s book I feel there is a
serious contender.
As a
result of reading this book there is no way I could have kept it to myself. If
you are interested in the ego this book is a must read!
In this
article I share my thoughts on the ego and explain why the egoic part of us
will do anything it can to separate us from real love.
Every Relationship is About Love or Fear
I have
believed for a long time that our most profound teachers in life are the people
that we are involved in relationships with.
As Neale
Donald Walsch states ‘There is only one person in the room’, which means that
every significant relationship we attract and create in our life is a
reflection of our own deep inner self.
Our
important relationships reflect back to us the parts of ourselves which are
whole, and the parts of ourselves which are wounded that require healing.
The
wounded parts of ourselves that are not as yet ‘healthy self-love and
self-acceptance’ appear to us via other people who trigger us significantly.
These
unconscious parts become conscious as a result of relationship experiences.
I truly
believe relationships are priceless and completely necessary in
regard to our evolution. Especially our most difficult relationship
experiences.
Of course
as children we were incredibly powerless, we didn’t have the ability to
understand complexities and we did not have the sophistication to reason or
process information, nor did we have the healthy modelling to heal these
wounded parts.
Rather
than be able to transform these inner parts we created defences, adaptations
and ‘strategies’ to try to get our needs met and minimalize more emotional
damage.
We went
into survival mode, and for the best part this worked. It kept us alive and
functioning and saved us from emotional annihilation.
What we
did not realise is, as Marianne states from A Course In Miracles, ‘what
we protect ourselves from is what we continue to create’.
What we
discover as adults is that the identical patterns of not being seen and met,
not being valued and not being loved unconditionally continue throughout our
life despite our survival strategies.
Upon
further investigation we also understand how we have failed to love, accept and
value ourselves in our self-talk, our self-perception, and our ability to ‘be’
with ourselves and how we have trained other people to treat us identically to
how we really do feel about and treat ourselves.
This is
why as adults it is our responsibility to work out how to heal these wounded
parts that we have tried to cover over and merely survive with.
The truth
is no-one else can do it for us, and we can’t turn the clock back to the
formative years and have our role models do it any differently.
Our role
models were simply acting from their unhealed wounds as a result of their unconscious
teachers.
The
damage was done, and now we have to un-do it. Not just for ourselves, but to be
responsible and healthy models to create future generations where the madness
of fear and pain can finally end.
To be
able to transcend our fear into love we need to understand some fundamental
energetic / spiritual truths, and these involve a deeper understanding of Who
We Really Are, and how our ego, as the ‘agent of fear’ is the ultimate saboteur
of love.
The Ego’s Purpose
There are
only two energies – truly.
Love and
Fear.
Some
synonyms for love are: connection, relatedness, compassion, forgiveness,
understanding, trust, authenticity, transparency, honesty, vulnerability.
Some
synonyms for fear are: separation, competition, invalidation, condemnation,
judgment, distrust, pretending, non-disclosure, dishonesty, defences.
It is so
vital to understand that the ego’s purpose is to keep you from experiencing
love.
When you
are being the experience of love there is no pain – only a sense of Oneness and
coming ‘home’ to Who You Really Are.
When we
come ‘home’ we experience being ‘heaven on earth’. We experience our authentic
nature. We become and know our True Self.
As our
essential nature we can understand that outer events don’t produce this
‘beingness’. It is achieved by cultivating an inner state – one which is
not precariously reliant on outside events.
The ego
conversely is an inner entity which requires pain to survive, and is intensely
attached to the control, judgement and eventual sabotage of outer events.
The cycle
of ego’s self-fulfilling illusion is this:
I am
dependent on you (this thing or person) from delivering me from my emptiness
and pain
I will
create an obsessive relationship based on fear, need, unrealistic expectations
and clinging
You will
disappoint me, don’t fulfil me or leave me, or I will deliver the pre-emptive
first strike and leave – and then I need ‘more’ again.
When we
are being ‘light’ (love) – truly ‘darkness’ (pain) can’t exist.
This is
why the ego creates every illusion possible to keep thrusting you into the
darkness.
The ego
through unhealed inner parts that get painfully triggered, ‘stories’ in your
mind and the results of defensive maladaptive ways of ‘showing up’ –
presents all the evidence to keep you trying to source your life through
engaging tactics of separation, competition, invalidation, condemnation,
judgment, distrust, pretending, non-disclosure, dishonesty and defences.
If your
ego is running your life, there is no possibility of you being love or
experiencing love, and every attempt will be thwarted.
This is
emotionally devastating, because every human entity without exception seeks
love, and ever human entity is in pain when love isn’t generated.
The ego
is pervasive it damages many people in its path.
The Ego and Narcissism
Narcissism
is the epitome of egoic living.
The very
definition of a narcissist is a person who has submerged (killed off) their
True Self – deeming it unacceptable and unworthy – and created the
‘buffer’ of a False Self (a fictitious character) to replace it.
This
False Self is pure ego.
As
Marianne states there is a distinct difference between ‘grandeur’ and
‘grandiosity’.
Grandeur
is the beingness of magnificence (love). Grandiosity is the malfunction of
trying to compensate for feeling anything but magnificent (fear).
Grandeur
manifests love and attraction, whereas grandiosity creates toxicity and
ultimately repulsion.
Narcissism
is extreme grandiosity and attempting to source love and approval from an
unhealed wounded inner centre that has been dismissed, ignored and unattended
to, and which is surrounded by impenetrable egoic defences.
I’d like
to use this metaphor to really grant you the understanding.
Imagine
an ‘opulent’ castle with a malformed, distorted child imprisoned in a cell
underneath the castle.
Imagine
this child as completely abandoned, totally shunned, and as a result he has
become a demented, twisted and irrational abomination.
Now
imagine the master of this ‘opulent’ castle is terrified that someone will find
this child and despise him for housing such a pitiful, worthless and disgusting
creature.
The
master adopts the persona of being affable and charming in order to create a
smokescreen for what really lurks beneath the castle floor.
Additionally
the castle’s master has employed henchmen to ferociously guard the underground
cell.
Anyone
who gets too close to discovering the passageway to the cell is attacked and
thrown out of the castle, and if necessary that person’s reputation and
credibility is systematically destroyed so that they can’t credibly relay their
suspicions to others.
The
master of the castle would rather risk losing anything and everyone, and is
willing to destroy everything and anyone rather than allow the sordid truth to
be discovered.
The
master of the castle cannot expose himself and love others due to the risk of
the shameful child being discovered.
As a
result the master is forever isolated and condemned to never experience real
connection and love.
The end…
Now you
can understand that the castle and the charm are the pretences and ‘cover-up’
of the ego. The henchmen are the defences of the ego viciously guarding the
truth, and the child in the cell is the narcissist’s severely damaged and
disowned Inner Child.
The only
way the master of the castle could stop this horrible existence and be himself
and live an authentically loving life with other people would be to bring
the child up and out of the dark underground cell and love and accept him back
to health, and believe he was acceptable to others.
The
master would never believe the child could be accepted by others unless he had
decided to accept the child himself.
Because
the master refuses to accept the disowned child – he has no option other than
to live an illusion, that is always at risk of falling apart, and attack anyone
mercilessly to try to uphold it.
Especially
the people that threaten to get too close and discover the truth.
There in
a nutshell is the egoic reality of narcissism and HOW it MUST destroy love.
The ego
will NOT allow love to occur.
It NEVER
can…
How can
the ego allow connection with anyone when it is hellbent on destroying anyone
that gets too close to the real ‘unacceptable’ person trapped inside?
The truth
is: the ego masks itself as ‘perfection’ and ‘love’ yet condemns, punishes and
demonises every perceived imperfection that it cannot accept within itself.
The ego
MUST sabotage and reject love in order to survive, because authenticity, trust,
connection and real love annihilates self-loathing, separation, projection and
judgment.
The Fault Finding Capacity of Ego
Because
of the ego’s repulsion with the imperfection of the Inner Child, and how
‘imperfect’ it is to be repulsed with self – that self-repulsion MUST be
disowned and projected outwards.
The truth
is this: The most conditionally loving people and judgmental people are
suffering from an intense lack of unconditional self-love and
self-acceptance. Their ‘unacceptable’ Inner Child has not been rescued and
loved back to health.
This is
where we all need to take radical responsibility, and have compassion not
just for ourselves but also for others – so that we can transcend the intense
pain of egoic judgment.
I would
like you to try this on for size…
Say the
following statement
“I hate
you and your evil ways for what you did to me..”
Feel in
your body how this feels…
Now say
“I
understand and accept how damaged you Inner Child is, how you can’t go inwards
to love and accept yourself, and how tormented your behavior is as a result.”
Feel in
your body how this feels…
You
should feel a distinct difference.
I would
like to remind you again of Neal Donald Walshe’s quote “There is only one
person in the room’.
In
reading Marianne’s book you will be granted an even deeper understanding of the
self-healing power of compassion and acceptance. She states “It is as though we
are holding a sword above their head. The sword, however, doesn’t fall on them
but on us. Since all thought is thought about ourselves, then to condemn
another is to condemn ourselves”.
Marianne’s
teachings are about – only love is real and any other behavior is an
illusion. The narcissist behaves like a narcissist because his / her life
conditions and choices (usually adopted unconsciously at a very young age) have
caused the narcissist to forget Who He / She Really Is, and to source a life
distortedly through fear instead of love.
Within
this understanding we can start to break free and be unshackled from our ego
which painfully holds on to blame, pain, shame and judgment which ONLY
keeps us in fear, egoic defences and separated from loving and accepting
ourselves and creating true healthy connections in our life.
Then
because of the trapped inner pain that our egos are generating we show up in
life trying to fearfully avoid sustaining more pain, yet unconsciously we
continue to attract and create more of what we are judging and trying to
protect ourselves from.
We keep
the painful trapped emotions of victimisation alive and prospering in our
bodies – and this is exactly what keeps our ego energized, alive and running
our life and sabotaging love.
Our Real Job
We can’t
heal darkness by throwing more darkness at it (another Marianne quote) –
period.
Throwing
more darkness is fear and adopting the strategies of: separation,
competition, invalidation, condemnation, judgment, distrust, pretending,
non-disclosure, dishonesty and defences.
Now this
is where we need to take full responsibility in order to get well.
We need
to look for our own damaged Inner Child underneath our floor. It doesn’t
matter whether we are living in a castle pretending “I’m fabulous and
everything is wonderful”, or a battered caravan whining “My life is falling apart
and I will never be the same”.
We need
to go toward our Inner Child instead of away from him or her. We
need to pick the child up and grant him or her all the love and acceptance we
can no matter how damaged and deranged this child is.
We then
need to accept and love this child so much that we allow this child to
be seen by others. But we need to ‘meet’ and ‘see’ this child ourselves first.
We don’t
allow ‘our pearls to be smashed by swines’ by exposing our Inner Child to
people who are sick and dysfunctional (such as narcissists), but we can open
up and connect to non-narcissistic people with authenticity, with truth, and
with the real deal about how we feel and who we are now – warts and all.
We can
also look after ourselves if we need to by speaking our truth, knowing we are
no longer crippled with the fears of being criticised, rejected or abandoned
for being our real self – which is love and loveable as a force within itself,
and which naturally ‘as ourself’ (God / Source did not get it wrong)
attracts more unlimited love from healthy sources.
By
adopting the principles of – connection, relatedness, compassion, forgiveness,
understanding, trust, authenticity, transparency, honesty and vulnerability –
we allow and co-create with people the opportunity to love us authentically for
who we are, and not who we think they want us to be.
…Which
really always was ‘who I thought I had to be’.
The Happy Ending
By loving
and accepting yourself, unlike the master of the castle, you will let people in
– you will let them be with the real you, and then by being ‘seen’ you
can be ‘met’.
Realness
even with ‘imperfections’ (goodness we all have them) is magnetic, it is
powerful and it is insanely attractive!
The
reason it is insanely attractive is because it grants other people FULL
permission to also be themselves! People feel incredibly comfortable when
they are with someone who emanates REALNESS.
But first
you need to ‘see’ and ‘meet’ yourself – truthfully – without defences.
You need to deploy the henchmen who have been guarding the child.
Total
self-devotion states this: “I love and fully accept you into my heart. I will
never abandon you again, and no matter how damaged you are I adore you enough
to do everything I can to stand in and for you, and I will do everything in my
power to help you heal. I am NEVER ignoring you or leaving your side again”.
By doing
so you have just thwarted your ego. You have slayed the inner demonic dragon,
because your ego requires self-avoidance and self-loathing to exist, and can
ONLY creep back in if you fall back into those traps.
You have
become a force in the world that spreads light and does its part to put an end
to egoic madness, because no longer will you be an enabler or recipient of
narcissistic relationship violence.
By
meeting yourself with love and acceptance, then no matter what your life has
been you are on a direct trajectory to claiming your True Self, dispelling
the darkness, becoming love and co-creating real, authentic love.
I hope
you enjoyed this article – if you have any comments or questions please post
them in the section below, I respond to each comment personally.
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