I do not know what you think of yourself. No one will ever know. Even if you tell me, you will be lying. What we really think of ourselves and how we describe ourselves are inherently different. The reason has something to do with the formation of our very consciousness, the emergence of what we call personality. What Freud called Ego. In fact if you have never looked into Freud’s theories on Id, Ego and Superego – you should. Fascinating. To narrow it down to my point, the ego is the balance between the subconscious, spiritual, inherited part of yourself and the outside reality. Your form ego through a variety of experiences and you end up deriving this part of yourself through struggle, defensive mechanisms and grappling with your reality. However, we all have a super-ego and these two concepts are not the same. Here is where you keep yourself in check with social norms, right and wrong, morality, acts of conscience – to use my theme from yesterday – your sense of what perfect is.
So I will never know what your ego says you are. In fact we use the terms wrong. We should not say – oh, that person has such a huge ego. It is more about the super-ego. The super-ego is what you probably consider your conscious. It is the thing that gets involved when you are compensating for something. When you child is obviously lying, they are trying to establish balance between these two parts of themselves. And so that leads me to the point of this blog. You build you.
You can proactively, and consciously influence and work on your super-ego. You can decide who you want to become, what is the best. Your ego will continue to battle that. It will strive to regulate, temper, balance, avoid, defend, run away and try to interpret the super-ego desires with the reality it is dealing with. Yes, I want to be the an awesome ultra marathon runner and win some really tough race but my ego is saying, whoa dude – you are not young anymore, you have a family at home, you have a job that is demanding. You do not have time for that lifestyle, better just be happy with running to improve your health. The super-ego makes me feel guilty for not being the perfect ideal, the ego tries to hold that in check and make sure that I am acting appropriately. In Freudian terms, you also have the Id. I call it the primal. That part of you that just suddenly wants to eat a bunch of chocolate chip cookies when you are on your new Paleo diet. Your ego has to deal with that too!
Getting back to the point. You can influence that super ego. It is not like the Id. The Id has impulses coming from sources that you really have no control over it. Hunger, thirst, reproductive impulse, fear, that feeling you got the day the bully in school told you that you were ugly, all of these things are coming from a source you cannot control. You can control what we focus on, who we want to be, what we want to be. We can influence our super-ego and we can work with our ego to cope with our new requirements. You see we quite literally are three people. Yup. We all have some split personality disorder. I think it is critical to recognize it, and know the source. Just because you think about eating the cookies, does not mean that you have to eat them. Just because you believe that only people that drive exotic cars are cool, does not mean that you have to go into debt to buy one to avoid the guilt. Just because someone was harsh with you, does not mean that you are a failure and that you should run away. You see each of these areas of our mind can get carried away if we are not careful. That is why it is important to understand the source, and to work on improving how you react.
You can help your ego out tremendously by coping properly. When you were younger you hopefully had parents that taught you coping skills. When your little sister or brother would take something away from you, you would over react. You ego would start freaking out. Overtime, your parents guided you through the process of understanding that your impulse to lash out and kill your family member was coming from the ID, and that should be ignored – not appropriate. Your parents taught you that it was not socially acceptable in the family to start crying at the top of your lungs because someone took a toy from you, they helped you to correct the super-ego’s consideration of what was right and wrong. There is no difference today, and just because you are older now, does not mean that you can just pretend that this battle in your mind is not going on all the time.
If you think that that impulses that you get are you and that you are obligated to act on them, then you are going to get in to trouble. You are not going to be a healthy person and you will most likely end up in prison or in a grave. Allowing the ID to influence the ego, unchecked, is a bad idea. Also, having an unhealthy expectation for yourself, via your super-ego, is equally a bad idea. Your will be living in a black cloud all day long. Yes, you can build you. However, you start by understanding who you really is. That starts with understanding that there are primal forces at work, a belief system of who you want to become or who you think society wants you to become and then the way you deal with it all.
What is fun is to start recognizing when people are around you and even yourself are clearly not coping well with one area of these Freudian components of the psyche. I am not sure Freud was exactly right, but he is the founder of modern psychology for a reason. It was these concepts that opened us up to an understanding of the human mind that we now take for granted. I am trying to apply these principles in a very pragmatic way. Using this to recognize and identify when I am being influenced by something from my subconscious or primal instinct (ID), understanding where my feelings of guilt, depression, elation, and fulfillment are coming from what I expect of myself (super-ego) and the way I go about dealing with reality and handling my day (ego).
You may wonder, why the heck is he talking about this anyway? Well, it is fundamental. I struggle everyday with doing the right things, doing things that I know will help me. Abstaining from things I know that will hurt me. I think it is helpful to proactively spend time considering how this works on a fundamental level and determine strategy to overcome. I think you will all agree, in the conquest of building a better you, the mind is your greatest enemy, and your greatest ally.
Guy Reams
365 Member
44 Days Left to 1st Marathon
