Death of the ego: YAY! I’m average!

David Burns talks about the Buddhist idea of “death of the ego” and how this relates to our day-to-day feelings. He does a wonderful job, in my opinion, of translating this concept into something an everyday person like me can absorb. I am going to talk about each of the 4 deaths, one in each post so let’s dive into the first death of the ego.

First, what do we mean when we say the “ego”? The way I define it is that the ego is our scared self. It is the part of the brain that is always on alert for threats and danger. That might make you think “Awesome, I LOVE my ego – I want my brain to watch out for me and look for danger!”. Yes! You’re right!! Me too! EXCEPT, our brains are overly sensitive to spotting danger so the ego wakes up and starts mucking about in our lives with survival responses like fight, flight, and freeze, when there ISN’T danger. It’s very annoying.

Unfortunately, when the brain starts mucking about, it gives us lots of icky feelings like resentment, greed, anxiety, shame, and so on. In order to get the brain to more accurately read situations and NOT go into survival overdrive, we need to help get it out of this fear state. We do this by forcefully challenging the brain’s belief system so it has to admit it is wrong and will then give us some peace. Unfortunately, when we kill each part of the ego, it tends to come back to life again and again, so you have to keep killing it. This makes sense because our belief systems are neural tracks in our brains and they’ve had a lot of use up to now. That makes them strong. But you can give your brain a new track to work on and then train it so it goes there more and more.

So let’s talk about the first death of the ego. This is a belief that many people’s brains get hung up on and the belief is: “I have to be special.” This is the first belief that we need to challenge, so get ready, you’re brain is going to fight you when it hears what we want to replace it with! To kill this part of the ego, we want to put in a new belief that says:

“I’m not special, in fact no one is special, and being average is WONDERFUL and JUST WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED!”

Do you feel your brain fighting you? Do you feel it saying “NO WAY! I AM special and actually EVERYONE is special and saying that they aren’t is just CRUEL, Karin! It’s MEAN and a PUT-DOWN”. Hang in there with me while your brain tries to push you around on this. Think about why your brain cares about this; why should it matter to your brain whether you are special? Why is it fighting this? Why is being average scary?

If you start to write down all the specifics about why your brain cares about “specialness”, you will get a list that contains things like: “If I’m not special, then there’s no point in my being here; I’m just like everyone else”; or “If I’m not special, then I’ll probably end up alone. There would be no reason for anyone to want to be with me.”

These thoughts and others like them are flawed; they have Thinking Traps in them. I could tease these out but in order to keep this post to a reasonable length, I won’t do it here. Just know that you would address these painful thoughts the same way you address any other. My first few posts walk through that process. I’ll just say here that I TRULY believe in my averageness . I LOVE not being special - I really do! I often say to myself “Karin, my dear, you’re just an ant on an anthill, hanging out with all the other ants”. This makes me smile. Just like an ant, I don’t fear that this means my life has no meaning or no one would want to be with me. I have responses to these fearful thoughts and I believe my responses 100%.

David Burns says that he has found that the need to feel special or worthwhile (which is the same idea using a different word) underlies all depressive thoughts. When you experience the death of this part of the ego, you release the shame about not being special and immediately are reborn into the joy of self-acceptance. Depressive feelings disappear.

This first death of the ego requires you to go through the pain of giving up on the idea that you need to be special to be okay. This is hard but the truth is that when you give up the idea that you have to be special, then life becomes special. Dare to be average and come on my team, Team Average! It is a warm and fun place to hang out and it is PACKED FULL of wonderful people.