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Ego - Emotions
I’ll go back and forth for the summer. Continuing with the glossary I’m working on and original posts. Thanks for reading.
Ego
Plain and simple, our ego is us. It’s the mashup of our greatest hits. It’s the experiences, the data, the emotions, the wounds, the hurts, the triumphs, and the suffering. Roll that up into one ongoing narrative and there we have it, ego.
How we present that ego to the world is a different matter. Our egos carry the bits and pieces, the highlight reels, and important moments with them, and they can often be quite protective of those moments of us. The main purpose of an ego is to build enough armor to protect us against a sometimes hostile and unpredictable world.
Sometimes that armor gets out-sized. The confidence we want to project comes across as arrogance. The moments of failure create out-sized shame cycles. To protect us, the ego creates an us-against-them vibe. It wants nothing more than to make sure our stories keep going and the writing never stops.
However, that can mean that we’re often fumbling around in armor that doesn’t fit. We get nervous and cede control to our ego. When we allow the ego to take over, problems start. When our ego is in charge of creating the narrative, facts and feelings and experiences become hard to tell apart from fantasy and fiction. The ego will lie so that our story makes sense.
Unchecked ego is an unreliable narrator.
Good therapy tries to right-size the egos that walk into the room. It’s hard to connect when our egos run amuck. It’s hard to find lasting joy and pleasure, to truly flourish when we’re in the habit of protecting ourselves from every shadow we see and every threat we imagine.
The best thing for an out-of-control ego? Data, reflection, and a dose of humility.
See: data, stories, reflection, humility.
Embodiment
I once heard someone use the term meat-mecha to describe our bodies. It was an interesting image. Their point was that we’re little more than a squishy suit of bone and muscle armor our brains use to navigate the world. There’s truth there, but it’s a truth that lacks nuance and complexity.
Everything we’ve ever loved, hated, regretted, prayed, or pretended not to care about shows up somewhere in our bodies: tight jaw, buzzing hands, heavy legs, pits in our stomachs. Our bodies often knows what’s happening before our thoughts can catch up. Sometimes before we’ll even admit there’s anything to catch up to.
Part of why that “meat-mecha” image lands is because we’ve been trained for centuries to live from the neck up. Philosophy, theology, even a lot of psychology privilege cognition: think harder, believe better, get the doctrine or mindset straight and the rest will follow. Meanwhile, our shoulders are welded to our ears, our sleep is trash, and our gut is a living horror movie.
Reality is a lot messier and probably a lot more interesting.
Our bodies aren’t afterthoughts; they’re home to an extensive neural network. There’s a dense cluster of neurons in our guts and webs of interconnected nerves that wind their way around organs, muscles, and tissue. This vast neural network sends and receives data as it interacts with the world, building experiences, providing feelings and emotions, and creating the fodder for interpretation, reflection, and reaction.
So how you relate to your body matters. How you use it, abuse it, ignore it, or care for it has consequences. Bodies age, break down, move differently, hold different abilities and disabilities. None of that says a single thing about anyone’s worth or humanity. Embodiment is about honoring the lived experience of the person in front of you, not measuring them against some imagined ideal.
In therapy, I’ll often ask, “Where do you notice that in your body?”
Very rarely does someone say, “Right here, in my thoughts.”
Grief can sit heavy in the throat or the chest. Anger burns in our hands or with a clenched jaw. Shame curls the shoulders, trying to make our bodies disappear. Even when we feel nothing, numb, our bodies are telling us something.
It’s time to let our bodies back into the story. They’re not something to conquer or optimize, they’re our partners. It’s not about loving every square inch of ourselves, but more about including it in how we understand ourselves.
To be embodied is to experience all of us. That means body, mind, and spirit become body-mind-spirit. They’re not separate entities but intertwined realities. The more we separate them, the harder it becomes to regulate ourselves, the harder it becomes to listen to what our lives are telling us.
See: emotions, emotional regulation, autonomic nervous system, trauma.
Emotions
I’ll be brief: emotions are the bodily reactions to stimuli in our environment. They arise from our history with similar experiences and they’re constantly predicting outcomes and what we might need for protection or courage.
Emotions are always there, often before any thought ever forms. Emotions make things stick in the brain. In and of themselves, emotions are neutral. They mostly direct our attention, which means some data gets privileged and our memory becomes unreliable.
We cannot escape or erase our emotions. Trying to do either usually leads to disaster in the long term. We can be intelligent about them and regulate them, but only if we’re willing to accept the role they play in enriching our lives.
Without emotions there is no love, creativity, passion, or connection, and no hate, anger, derision, or disconnection. A rich emotional life is aware of how these things live within us and seeks to understand where they are life-giving versus life-limiting.
See: embodiment, feelings, emotional regulation, data, curiosity, identity.