Discovering The "Quiet Ego" Revolution Transformed My Healing Journey
A tower of self-help books never brought me this kind of peace
Everything I tried felt temporary.
I’d wake up in the morning and do all my self-care, including sitting outside and meditating, positive affirmations, slow and deliberate breathing and even listening to my app that played brain wave simulations like Alpha, Delta and Gamma waves in my ears. I also did my daily practice of trying to let go of the things that were bothering my monkey mind in an effort to decrease the anxiety that held me hostage.
I thought I felt better doing all these things or hoped I would in the future. My peace was always so precarious, flowing through me with love when things were going decently but then vanishing at the first signs of trouble. Even after more than a year committed to a daily journey of healing for complex PTSD, I was still having anxiety, panic attacks and tons of self-doubt nearly every day.
Admittedly, my grace periods had gotten longer in between the bad episodes, but I still wished I could feel peaceful all or most of the time. There were a million things I had learned about healing and self-love through reading, listening to podcasts, journaling and any other way I could get the information, but it seemed there was always an incredible amount still left to learn. In fact, there was more out there than one person could learn in a lifetime, and I worried I couldn’t take it all in fast enough for it to work on me before mine was over.
In many ways, I’m incredibly fortunate. I have a family that loves me, a house to live in and food to eat every day. Only the torture and memories of trauma that live in my mind keep me from achieving bliss. Something will hit one of my triggers like a particular sad song, an unkind sentence or somebody merely looking at me sideways, and before I know it I’m a shaking, crying, raging mess. Even after I get control of myself, I can’t stop feeling like a failure. Was I ever going to truly get all this healing stuff?
I learned about the “quiet ego” theory kind of, well, quietly. It didn’t hit me like a two-by-four but was an idea I read about that stuck in my brain. There was a great article in The Atlantic about it just this morning and, once I finished it, I finally realized that I had been doing the whole self-help, healing journey totally wrong even though my intentions were good. I always believed I needed guides and exercises and even props to make myself well when, in reality, all I had to do was turn down my ego to a functional level.
It was simple, yet it was freeing.
According to an article in Forbes magazine, the “quiet ego” theory was introduced by Dr. Heidi Wayment and Dr. Jack Bauer, who describe it as a compassionate self-identity that counters a “noisy ego,” referring to a more self-centered and possibly disruptive aspect of the self that is driven by the need for validation, dominance and constant attention. In other words, having a quiet ego is having an identity that incorporates others without losing the self.
The article also lists the four defining values of a quiet ego:
Detached awareness. This is quite similar to the practice of mindfulness. It involves observing oneself, others and the environment without judgment or defensiveness. Compassionate and non-reactive observation of experiences allows individuals to relinquish control of the outcome of a situation and cultivate a deeper understanding of their emotions, thoughts and behaviors without being overwhelmed or controlled by them.
Inclusive identification. This refers to the extent to which an individual aligns themselves with others, perceiving similarities in personal qualities. A quieter ego displays cooperative tendencies and diminishes defensiveness when interacting with others, even those that one does not share similarities with.
Perspective-taking. This is the ability to empathize with others’ experiences and comprehend differing viewpoints without losing one's own identity. The quiet ego is flexible, open to new ideas and willing to revise one's beliefs or opinions when presented with compelling evidence or differing viewpoints.
Growth-mindedness. Growth-mindedness includes a transformative shift from focusing on the need for personal gain and immediate gratification towards a broader perspective of long-term personal development and more intrinsically rewarding experiences. This includes acts of care and concern for the generations to come.
Cognitive scientist, Scott Barry Kaufman, reminds us that the self can be our greatest resource, but it can also be our darkest enemy. As he tells it, “A noisy ego spends so much time defending the self as if it were a real thing, and then doing whatever it takes to assert itself, that it often inhibits the very goals it is most striving for.”
That was me in a nutshell. I spent so much time worrying about my “self” and whether it was okay and protecting it from anything going wrong that any progress I would make only worked for a little while until the next bad thing happened that I had to protect it from. I took on other people’s expectations about whether I was “doing well” instead of honestly talking to them about my ideas and feelings when I wasn’t. I constantly felt like I had to prove I was okay, especially to myself.
Dr. Kristin Neff has a website where you can take the self-compassion test online. It ranges from 1-5 with 1 being the least self-compassion and 5 being the highest. My score was 2.78 and looked like this:
As you can see, my scores for self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness were somewhere in the middle, but my self-judgement and over-identification were surprisingly high. It revealed to me that, while the work I had done so far had been beneficial, I was still much too hard on myself and spent way too much time lost in my own mind and wondering who I “really was.” Honestly, these were things I thought I’d already worked through and had come out healthy on the other side, but the scores told otherwise and ended up being right.
Even after all the work I’d been doing, I clearly didn’t believe that the foundation I was building would hold. I realized that the compliments I heard about how “well” I was doing may have been true, but that it was all relative, and I probably should stop believing my own hype. A real healthy human being is humble and knows they don’t have all the answers.
A month or so ago, I was feeling so peaceful that I convinced myself I’d gotten to the finish line of healing and didn’t have to use any more tools to help myself. Of course, life intervened the way it usually does, and I crumbled like always. Now I know that if I turn my ego down and listen more than ruminate, it’s much easier to let go of the things that kept me tied in a knot. It’s important not to “squash down” the ego to the point where it’s non-existent and I’ve lost my identity. Instead, I can fine tune it to where it isn’t too much or too little.
If our egos are properly nurtured and not allowed to run the show, it amplifies our sense of compassion for oneself and others and gets rid of a lot of the “noise” that goes on inside our heads. We embrace the quiet ego as a journey of self-reflection, a commitment to personal growth, openness and empathy as well as a pathway to a kinder world.
I know I could stand to navigate my life with a little more grace, and maybe others feel the same way. There are times where something that seems simple breaks through like a bolt of lightening, though, and suddenly we’re drawn to pay attention. That’s what the quiet-ego theory has already done for me.