Ego in Relationships: Remove the Ego to Transform Great Personal Relationships
from Orkun Azap on Unsplash
Today I came across a quote from the publication Psychology Today. It reads, “Great relationships require hard work.” And we all know that nothing we desire happens without hard work. Right?
Well, I think there’s a better way to look at this idea of a great relationship, and it has to do with understanding the distinction between content and context.
One way to look at this distinction is that content is what happens, and context is the meaning we give to what happens.
Understanding the Difference Between Content and Context in Relationships
from Christian Erfurt on Unsplash
As a relevant example, suppose I have an expectation that people are generally unreliable. That expectation is the context in which I view another’s cancellation, say, of a lunch date. The cancellation serves to reinforce my expectation, and that particular relationship will likely suffer as a result.
If, on the other hand, my expectation is that people have busy lives and we will get together when the timing is right, the lunch cancellation will likely not adversely affect the relationship because I will simply ask to reschedule. What happens is just what happens, but my experience of what happens is determined by the context I’ve created for that particular incident.
Let’s generalize this principle: it is the context we create for our lives, and not the content of our lives, that determines the quality of our life experience.
What is the general, over-arching context we create for our lives? See if this rings true for you:
We are separate beings, blessed with the capacity for rational thought, trusting the evidence provided by our senses, on our own in life but able to work together for the general welfare. Oh, and we each have an ego, and sometimes it gets in the way of authentic, loving communication.
What I’ve just proposed is how most people live their lives, and it doesn’t serve us. It implies a measure of control over the content of our lives that we simply don’t have. It leaves us ineffective at solving our problems and unsatisfied with the quality of our lives and our relationships. Why is that, and what other context would serve us better?
Understanding the Ego in Relationships
Let’s return to the subject of great personal relationships… and, to the Ego.
If we are aware of the role of ego in our lives, and most of us are not, let’s not take our egos so personally. We usually think of “my ego,” or “your ego.” In that personal context, the ego is usually thought of as a character defect, which we sometimes feel we have to make up for with apologies and/or our resolution to put it aside and thus be more present, truthful, or authentic. Instead, let’s try thinking of it as something we’re all submerged in.
The ocean of Ego we all swim in
Suppose we say that every human relationship takes place in the context, or ocean, of Ego. It’s useful to consider that ocean to be a global phenomenon, the water we all swim in, that colors or distorts everything we look at. From that perspective, we wouldn’t feel the need to apologize or make up for our habit of following the ego’s dictates, because we’re all in it together.
Again, relationships live as content inside the context we’ve created for relationship. We human beings live inside an unrecognized, unidentified, and widely misunderstood container called Ego. That container determines how we see everything we look at while we’re inside it. And it’s a mess.
Why is the Ego, the ocean of understanding we live in, a mess? And further, when we recognize it to be a mess, why don’t we just clean it up?
Good questions.
Here are my answers. The Ego is a mess because it’s based on some very fundamental misunderstandings… about who we are and why we’re here. And we don’t clean it up because we don’t recognize it for what it is, a shared thought-environment that’s not concerned with our best interests. It’s only concerned with its own interest, and that is to remain the context for our lives. In other words, the Ego’s aim, what it’s up to, is its own survival.
The Ego in relationships tells us that we’re fortunate if they’re good ones and those good ones are hard to find. And because we’re looking through the ocean in which we’re embedded, that’s the way we see our relationships.
In a transformed relationship, however, things are reversed. In that case, the Ego lives inside the context of the relationship instead of the other way around. It is then seen to be a Thing, an ocean of shared viewpoint, transmitted from generation to generation as parents teach their children language. It doesn’t ever disappear or even become negligible. But it can be recognized and processed in the context of a mutually honest and trusting conversation about any and all disagreements that may arise.
When two people agree to hold themselves and each other as creative beings dealing with a global set of inaccurate assumptions and mistaken ideas I call the Ego in Relationships, they can work together to reveal those misunderstandings and progressively clear up the mess for themselves. In that process, the Ego is gradually revealed to be what it really is: a story whose apparent power is a superstition. And that “recontextualization” changes everything. The relationship itself becomes more truthful and authentic… and so do we.
For more, I invite you to check out my book, Hoodwinked: Uncovering our Fundamental Superstitions. It will show you how to recontextualize your entire life!
