Ego Strength
Ego Strength
Written by Levi Miller, LCSW
What is Ego Strength?
Ego strength isn’t a skill that you either have or don’t have, it’s an adaptable skill set that can be molded and shaped using insight, resilience, and emotional awareness. It’s your capacity to hold your emotions, impulses, fears, needs, and your reality all at the same time without falling apart, shutting down, or collapsing. Ego strength is an active process where you choose to absorb your emotional experience, read its messages, and choose a valued response. And in that response lies your personal growth and freedom.
Ego strength is believing that you can tolerate the emotion or stressor that you are experiencing and using the self-soothing or problem solving skills that can help you. One example of this is choosing to be self-compassionate when your inner critic wants to shame you. Ego strength helps you to be able to look at disliked parts of yourself without collapsing, without it dominating you, and saying “I choose not to shame myself right now, let me learn from this and move forward”. In doing this, you are integrating those disavowed parts into yourself without letting them control you anymore.
What is an Ego?
Ego psychology was born from Sigmund Freud's work on the Id, Ego, and Superego. The id contains all our drives, desires, and impulses, while the superego contains all of societal norms and expectations. The ego’s job is to navigate achieving the Id’s needs in context of the superego’s restrictions. Someone with an inflated or insecure ego will often turn to psychological defenses (denial, avoidance, projection) to cope with reality while someone with healthy ego strength is capable of navigating reality without ego collapse into insecurity or grandiosity. Our ego develops through years of conditioning that reinforce particular defensive patterns that were beneficial in protecting you in some way during hardships in your life.
When someone practices ego strength, they are choosing the balanced middle path. It’s saying to yourself, all my programming wants me to defend against this problem in an unhelpful way, but I choose to take the path that will reflect my authentic character and values. For example: you might notice yourself projecting in an interpersonal situation because you simply don't like what the other person is saying, catch your ego defenses in the act, and choose to be accountable to their perspective.
Qualities of Ego Strength
People with ego strength demonstrate admirable qualities in the way they navigate their relationships and life stressors. The first that comes to mind is patience, as they can understand that their initial responses to events are often conditioned by past life experiences and are not always adaptive to the current problem. So they are able to practice the pause, collect themselves, and make a choice as to their best course of action. They also exhibit distress tolerance, as many times the best course of action is the difficult choice to make. Overriding our conditioning can be a painful process that involves losing the perceived comfort of our old defenses. For example, when you're apologizing, you choose to tolerate the feelings of guilt and responsibility when you take accountability and express remorse. These actions can be liberating and empowering as well, as it takes significant personal agency to choose new paths for yourself that align more with who you are, rather than who you needed to be in the past.
Ego strength involves knowing that you are not your emotions, other people’s emotions, or even old patterns, and therefore being able to differentiate between the self and your parts. This can allow for yourself to have boundaries (for example “I won’t allow my inner critic to speak to me this way”) and provide self-compassion for your parts instead (for example: giving love to the inner child that was hurt instead of criticizing yourself). This allows for the process of integration to begin where all your different parts have a seat at your table with your self-leadership.
Tips for Developing Ego Strength
Skill 1: Practice the pause:
Wait a bit before sending that mean text response. Sit with a fearful situation instead of running from it. Resist the urge to fill awkward silences in a social setting.
Whenever experiencing tension, notice your defensive reaction to it, and what it is urging you to do. If you notice anger, tune in to the primary emotion underneath (i.e.: hurt, disrespected). This will allow you to set a more assertive and non-aggressive boundary with the offender. If you notice avoidance, tune in and sit with the fear underneath it, without needing to change or fix it.
