Fear and Ego

Ego, being a construct of false beliefs, and a parasite on the psyche, is unable to feel. It has no direct access to our hearts or our energy (our ‘chi’), our natural life with all its subtle, non-verbal awareness, its joys and sorrows.

But ego is nothing if not resourceful – as well as being a master of disguise and pretence – and it feeds on fear. I have made these observations in myself, and through paying attention to what goes on between myself and other people, and among other people around me.

Correctness and mutual consideration lower fear levels, and the feeling of being loved and accepted brings security, at whatever age. If these conditions are missing in childhood, and/or if children’s natural inner No is overridden and disabled, by insensitivity or worse, these early, unbearable experiences of being unheard and unmet are shut away in the child’s mind, in a box labelled ‘Don’t Go There’.

Even the thought of this box arouses dread in a psyche where things have been shut away, and so people can and do end up living in fear of their own fear!

Too Much Choice

However, it’s not only having our feelings disregarded or overridden that generates fear: over-indulged (spoiled) children also become prey to fear, through their parents’ overriding of their proper boundaries, in relation to their children, and through being presented with misguided and anxiety-inducing, unnecessary little choices: “Frosties or Sugar Puffs? Pink gloves or yellow?”

‘Choice’ can itself be a misleading idea. It is falsely held up to us in the West as a triumph of affluence and individual self-realisation. We can easily observe in ourselves how unsettling and draining it can be to be faced with a series of choices, when all we want is a cup of coffee!

Children know very well that they are not in control of what’s going on – they naturally and correctly look to their elders for guidance. They shouldn’t be expected to decide what's what, or be flattered into feeling powerful by such insincere, Starbucks-style tricks.

Over-indulgent parental behaviour often arises out of adults' unacknowledged fears, and so it arouses fear in the child.

Also, offering trivial choices to children caters to the formation in them of the 'little prince' or 'princess' form of ego, which, unless checked, grows up into a tyrant, both over the adult’s own psyche and over those whom the ego-ruled adult can control.

Behind the bullying and invasiveness of the ego-ruled adult lurks the child’s dread of being ‘lost in space’ without a safe place where s/he is held secure, with an embodied, realistic sense of the limits between themselves and others.

Failing to respect correct boundaries between parents and children, whether by over-intrusiveness and authoritarian or manipulative control of the young psyche in its formative years, by overindulgence or neglect, or by confusing inconsistency – all these disturbing conditions arouse fear in a child’s psyche.

Unmastered fear leads to the shutdown of the heart, and the construction of all kinds of makeshift coping (Koping) mechanisms and strategies, to compensate for the inner disability and ‘keep the show on the road’.

People can go through their whole lives with their hearts padlocked.  They may come across as strong, confident and successful, yet deep down they are terrified, and therefore at the mercy of their egos.

Fear, therefore, is ego’s favourite fuel, since it generates lots of employment for it.

Possibly, fear underlies all the other ‘emotions’ that ego uses as fuel, such as envy, meanness, resentment and so on. The fear of not getting your share, of being overlooked or excluded, done down by others or by life, leads to many unpleasant and conflict-perpetuating states of mind.

It seems to me that ego opportunistically ‘tops up’ its fuel tank of fear, any time someone does something that ‘presses our buttons’. If we go into reactive mode, and get vehement or defensive, we are allowing ego, and our stored fears, to rule our responses.

We can reverse this ‘topping up’ process, and undo any damage done, by noticing what’s happening in our minds/bodies (same place), when we feel under pressure to react, and stepping away from the whirlpool of tainted, fear-tinged emotions that ego is busy stirring around in us.

Awareness - Antidote to Ego

The benefits of mindfulness are manifold. Learning to pay attention, and to bring ourselves back to stillness, whenever ego gets going, helps us to see through its strategies, and spot the ways we are being lured or driven towards betraying ourselves.

Those who habitually let ego control their responses to misbehaviour in others (the ego-led) – and those who habitually let ego motivate and initiate their own behaviour (the ego-ruled) – actually keep themselves locked inside their fear of their own fear.

And so, ironically, the fears shut away in a psychological strongbox within the mind actually control the ego-led person, through their unwillingness to ‘go there’ – to feel and accept those old, long-denied feelings of humiliation and helplessness, of frustration and anger.

Many people would do anything, tell themselves anything, rather than risk ever feeling like that again, and so they carry on along their accustomed, ego-approved rat-runs, either ruthlessly, recklessly insensitive to their own and others’ feelings (the ego-ruled), or (the ego-led) taking refuge in self-image-based ‘righteousness’ which may be cliquey and finger-pointing, or embattled and desperate.

The irony is that, by lugging this strong box through life with them, unopened, these people prevent its contents from ever being released into the fresh air, and into the past. So, in a sense, they continue to live inside the frozen feelings and toxic, banished memories they deny.

Fear - Feeling or Fantasy?

As I mentioned above, ego, having no life of its own, cannot feel. But, in a psyche where it is active, it colonises the life of the feelings, by tainting them with fear.

Fear itself clearly belongs to the range of natural human responses.  It has been said that newborn infants are only afraid of loud noises, and of falling.

Yet in the course of human history, in various cultures, the human imagination, and the myths, beliefs, taboos and stories carried by language and inherited attitudes into each child’s mind through their upbringing, have together developed a deep and fertile soil for fears based on nothing more than fantasies.

Fear, in its natural function, acts as a warning – an alarm bell, and adrenaline-fuelled accelerator pedal, to get us out of danger – or to draw our attention to a hidden or potential danger. Usually, if we are aware of our feelings, we don’t require a full blast of the fear horn to wake us up to danger.

Our natural feelings – our inner senses – work continuously, through all our organs, responding to life moment by moment - to our thoughts, our interactions with others, and of course, to our memories. They are neutral, precise, gentle and matter-of-fact direction-givers, guides we can rely on.

Our feelings do not deal in fear, or in heightened, stressful ‘emotion’. When such vehemence is around, we can tell that ego is involved backstage, piling on the Big Deal factor, delivering ultimatums and threats.

Ego's Fear Pipette

The image I have now is of ego at the ready, holding a pipette, or eye-dropper, hooked up to the storage tank of our unacknowledged fears, so it can release a few drops of fear onto any emerging feeling.

Our feelings arise spontaneously, in appropriate response to whatever is happening in our lives. They are not 'emotional' - rather, they are neutral, simple navigational help: yes/no, welcome/better not, careful here.

But if we are in the habit of ignoring our feelings, ego has plenty opportunity to taint them with its pipette of poison.

‘No’ gets ratcheted up to ‘No Way!’, ‘better not’ to ‘what are they up to?’ – inviting us to focus on the dubious area and start speculating, letting ourselves be drawn into its dynamic – and the neutral warning: ‘careful here’ gets intensified into slanderous invective.

Similarly, if we are in the habit of overlooking ego’s interventions in our inner lives, it can carry on ‘tagging’ our feelings for its purposes. We may only notice we feel anything at all, once ego’s amplifier and distortion pedal have turned up the pressure to unbearable levels. By this time, fear will be on the rampage in our bodies and minds (same place).

Our feelings, once tainted with fear, can be worked up into ego emotions, and used to perpetuate conflicts, self-conflict, enmity and mistrust. We become entangled in ego’s inner arguments and accusations, while we flounder in our own fear-drenched, ego-infected feelings.

Distress is grist to ego’s mill. Only self-awareness can help us out of this bind. We must be willing to spot and stop ego’s activities within our own psyches, and willing to listen to whatever still unfelt fears of ours it is using to fuel its parasitic existence.

Ego-Ruled Groups

(rant warning)

It is worth reflecting on what exactly is going on, in the all too common situation where someone who is clearly out of control, and unconscious of the havoc they are wreaking, habitually dominates - and is allowed to dominate - the feelings, thinking and behaviour of a group to which they belong, be it a family group or a work situation.

This doesn't tend to happen so acutely in groups of friends, as there everyone has the option of walking away, withdrawing.  Ego flourishes on the element of coercion, in any situation where 'duty' or fear make it hard for people to remove themselves from abusive/ inappropriate treatment.

Wherever people appease and cater to a demanding or peremptory or manipulative person, there is huge fear – whether felt or unfelt – both in those catering to the ego-ruled person, and in the ‘dominant’ person themselves. This is a form of slavery – of psychological (self)-enslavement - with all the awfulness this word implies.

(Samuel Beckett, in Waiting for Godot, showed an abusive, co-dependent relationship, between Lucky and Pozzo.  Many many people have first-hand experience of  such little Stalins, whether in the family or at work.)

Slavery entails sanctions, threats of punishment and actual punishment unlimited by statute - no recourse, the degradation and humiliation of self-betrayal, the denial of dignity.

Such bullying and/or manipulative control is not always wielded by the older over the younger, by parent over child – it can be the other way round. It is the biggest fear that rules such an ego-ruled group. That fear is of course most hidden from the one most under its spell – the dominant one – who is using their control of the others to avoid feeling any fear themselves.

At critical moments, it is as if one hisses at another, ‘My fear is bigger than yours – don’t mess with it. You have no idea what it can do to you.’ But of course, the fear being held at bay in the psyche of the one doing the bullying is not named, not acknowledged – and it is this denial of what is really going on that makes these situations so confusing and persistent, until we stop listening to arguments and rationales, and start listening to our feelings.

As any maker of horror films, or thrillers, knows, it is the hidden threat that grips the imagination. Likewise, it is ego’s hiddenness that gives it its spurious ‘power’ over us – a power we ourselves grant it, by accepting its lies, and allowing it to operate within our psyches, unexposed.

Often, people who feel trapped in such destructive groupings comfort themselves with a flattering self-image – one of ego’s many tactics for pretending to be ‘good’ and ‘helpful’. We may see ourselves as ‘the mediator’ or ‘the nurturer’, ‘the heroically self-sacrificing one’ – or the ‘righteous rebel’ ‘the truth-teller’. There are a thousand ways ego can spin our failure to withdraw, our continued participation in the game.

The way out of such negative dynamics is through feeling and accepting our own dread of the consequences of walking away – the opprobrium, the misunderstanding, the slanders and whispers, the sky falling in.

The sky doesn’t fall in, in fact the Cosmos rejoices with us and reaches in to help us – good things happen, all unexpectedly, whenever we take a courageous step away from bullying by ego.