Brave New Kitty

We all have moments when we say or do things in anger that we end up regretting. When this happens, if we’re decent human beings we tend to make pledges to “work on our anger” and resolve to be kinder and more patient. But it’s not our anger that’s the problem; it’s our self-control. This is good news, because self-control is something we can actually improve, while emotions are pretty much unchangeable; you can’t really “work on” your anger just as you can’t “work on” your joy. But with good self-control, we can freely experience our full range of emotions without worrying about how doing so will affect other people. Self-control is the key to a healthy emotional life and healthy relationships.

Self-control is a lifelong process of continuous improvement, and your ultimate goal is probably along the lines of total freedom from anger at other people’s shortcomings. Since most of us aren’t there yet, we can learn techniques along the way to keep our strong feelings under control and keep ourselves out of trouble when somebody does something that drives us to the point of eruption.

You can diffuse your anger in three easy steps:

1. Know that your anger is your problem, regardless of what the person said or did;
2. Hold your tongue when you feel the anger rising inside of you;
3. Send the person kind, compassionate thoughts until the anger, or at least the urge to lose your temper, has passed.

1. Know That Your Anger is Your Problem
This is more of a mindset than a step, but we’ve got to start somewhere. You must come to believe that, no matter what a person said or did, he did not “make” you mad. He did something, and you got mad. Anger was your response, and it is your issue to deal with. This is good news; it means you can do something about it on your own, completely independently from what the other person does. In other words, the other person doesn’t have to change for you to deal with your anger, and whether he changes or not has nothing to do with how you decide to deal with your anger. This is a universally applicable principle.

It’s important to understand this, because if we don’t take ownership for our feelings, we’ll have a hard time with the next two steps of the process.

2. Hold Your Tongue
If you know you’re angry, and you know that whatever you say is going to be angry, and you know that being angry won’t help the situation, then hold your tongue. Don’t say anything. If you must reply to a person, then quietly say, “I’m not able to talk about this right now” or “I need a few minutes to think about a response” or even, “I’m feeling really angry right now, and I don’t want to take that out on you, so I need some time before I can continue this conversation.” Say whatever you need to say to buy some quiet time, then immediately turn your attention to step three.

3. Send the Person Kind, Compassionate Thoughts Until Your Anger has Passed
Instead of focusing on what you’re angry about, focus instead on your love for this person, on his goodness, his sweetness, all the kind and wonderful and helpful things he’s done for you. Think also about how you can be of service to him. What does he need? What can you do for him right now? What can you say that would be loving and pleasing to him? Not in a flattering or artificial way, but from your heart. Finally, send good will and good wishes to this person and hope, with all of your heart, that he gets all the good things he wants in life. Continue this until your anger has abated. You’ll be surprised at how quickly it works.

The Buddhists call this “Metta,” which means unconditional love and kindness. They have a Metta Sutra that they chant to cultivate unconditional love and kindness in their hearts. It shifts the mind’s focus from negative to positive. Negative emotions simply evaporate into the bottomless well of Love, and you’re left with a full heart not only for the one you’re angry at, but for all of humankind. It’s also a wonderful practice for those of us who want to take self-control a step beyond mere discipline, which is necessary, but may not be sufficient to reach our ultimate goals.

That’s it! That’s all there is to it. If you’re angry at someone and don’t want to be, think loving, positive thoughts about them until the anger passes. It really works.

There’s a great movie called “Roger Dodger” in which the main character, played by the wonderfully offbeat Campbell Scott, spends most of his screen time spouting cynical, somewhat misogynistic beliefs about women and relationships. One of his lines, speaking to a pretty young girl about her boyfriend problems, is “It’s the emotional distance that counts, right?” As dark as that sounds, it contains a powerful truth. It’s a succinct summary of the “nice guys finish last,” “women want men who treat them badly,” “why can’t I find someone who loves me for me,” “why am I attracted to jerks” sort of complaints in the relationship world.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that emotional distance is the norm, but Roger was on to an important idea, certainly one worth considering if you have any of these chronically misery-causing issues recurring chronically in your life. There are some specific things to look at, and they are not the sociological reasons that there are no good men—or women—anymore. The reasons are inside you, and if you want to remedy this situation, that’s where you must look to find out what the payoff of emotionally distant relationships really is.

First of all, what is an emotionally distant relationship? It can take myriad forms, but it is basically a relationship that should be intimate but isn’t. For whatever reason, you don’t feel completely comfortable with your partner, you don’t feel completely safe, there are impenetrable barriers between you, and you’re not getting what you want. You’re not happy. Or at least, you’re not happy most of the time. Occasionally, you feel alive when you have a moment of connection or you’ve evoked some strong reaction, and these moments can keep you hanging around for a long, long time: sure, neither of you are happy, but you don’t know how to do it any differently, so you stay in this pattern ad infinitum. If you do break out of the relationship, but don’t address the reasons for the pattern, you are destined to repeat it. It’s like your subconscious does the interviewing, and will only allow the space to be filled by somebody with the same emotionally distant characteristics.

Why? Why do we pick people who don’t make us happy, who we don’t feel close to, who we don’t feel safe with? Then do it again, and yet again? While everybody has different patterns and specifics, I think the underlying reasons break down into some combination of the following categories:

• It’s safe
• It satisfies different wants than intimacy
• It’s easier, and thus more common
• It re-creates an unresolved childhood issue.

Let’s discuss each of these.

It’s Safe
Even if you don’t feel “safe” with a person in the sense of being yourself and not being judged, there is a different kind of safety involved here, and that is the safety of not having to risk too much of yourself. If you’re with someone who doesn’t demand a high level of emotional involvement, then you’re never at risk of being vulnerable. It’s like an emotional airbag, constantly employed, cushioning you from the harsh reality of emotional injury. Often you hear about people who have a bad breakup and then get married to the next person they hook up with, maybe just a few months later. This is often about this kind of safe. Having been badly hurt, they decide that they never want to feel that kind of pain again, so they pick someone who will never be able to stir strong feelings. These relationships aren’t the worst kind of emotional distance, as there’s usually no nastiness or abuse, just two shut down people who’ve settled for each other in implicit agreement to never demand too much. It’s bland, but it’s workable.

It Satisfies Different Wants than Intimacy
While “safe” also fits here, this category covers a lot more ground than that. People can pick their partners for many different reasons than love. Sometimes, they don’t want to be alone. Other times, they need to have a partner for career advancement (married men are promoted faster than single men, and ambitious people know this). Or wealth is important, so they marry somebody rich. Or they can’t see past a big fancy wedding. Or they think their family will approve, or it’s just time they got married, or they want to have babies, or they think they’ll never find anyone better. Relationships based on any of these reasons usually aren’t terrible either: If your reasons for getting into a relationship are only tangentially about your emotions, then a strong emotional attachment just isn’t a priority. Again, bland but wholly workable, in an empty sort of way. However, if you start looking for passion on the side, you’ve proven to yourself that your initial reasons for getting into a relationship weren’t very good ones.

It’s Easier, Thus More Common
This means simply that there are a lot more people in the world who haven’t reached a high level of emotional maturity than who have, just as there are fewer college graduates, fewer people in really good physical condition, fewer people who reach self-actualization, etc. In any endeavor, average is more common than exceptional (that’s why it’s called average), and emotional development is no exception. Therefore, there are all kinds of emotionally immature people getting into relationships with other emotionally immature people. Emotional immaturity is a virtual guarantee of emotional distance by default: intimacy is not for the timid, the faint of heart, or the naive. If you’re still figuring out who you are and what you want, you won’t have a lot left over for somebody else. And that’s just fine, and as it should be. It’s when you try to do a relationship anyway that you get in trouble (and who among us hasn’t had this experience once or twice?)

When two emotionally immature people get together, sparks can fly. The emotional distance can take all sorts of awful forms: loud fights, name calling, attacking each other’s vulnerable areas, unfaithfulness, as well as the blander varieties of disconnectedness listed above.

If neither person wants a deeper connection, then things might work out. Remember the scene in “Annie Hall” when Alvy is wondering what makes a relationship successful, and asks a couple on the street? The man looks into the camera and says, “I’m completely shallow, and have no opinions on anything.” Then the woman smiles and says, “And I’m exactly the same way!” Dark, perhaps, but it speaks accurately to the emotional maturity issue.

It Re-creates an Unresolved Childhood Issue
Now it gets interesting. Much has been written about people marrying their mother or their father, and I think much of it is true. Deeply rooted impulses in our subconscious make this almost an inevitability. Many of our ideas about relationships—as well as most other personality traits—are shaped by the time we’re six years old. The best we can do is to be aware of them.

It’s not always a bad thing. If we had kind, loving parents who we felt close to and safe with, then we are likely to seek out kind, loving partners. However, if we had emotionally distant parents, particularly our opposite sex parent, then we grew up with a gaping hole where love and intimacy should have been. Since a child does not have the intellectual or emotional maturity to deal with the overwhelming feelings caused by such a lack, she tends to repress them. She quickly learns to grab any morsel of kindness, love, or support thrown her way and rationalize away the rest. It’s actually a healthy way for a child to deal with scary emotions, because she literally has no other way; emotionally distant parents is a problem she cannot solve. But she learns two powerful lessons that fuel her subconscious relationship impulses and control her behavior for the rest of her life, or until she decides to face the painful—and painful it is—truth. One, she learns that lying to herself is an effective way to deal with emotional distance. Two, she learns that love is connected to performance, and that if she can get the performance right, she can earn someone’s love.

Both of these are, of course, tragically false. Lying to yourself about how someone is treating you creates all sorts of awful situations. Physical abuse. Emotional abuse. Addiction. Prostitution. Sexual compulsion. You hang on, convincing yourself that it’s “good enough” or that “he’s hurting and I can fix him” or that “I don’t deserve anything better,” or that “it’s better than being alone.” The truth is that no one deserves to be treated badly, there is no reason or excuse that could ever make it okay, and that someone who says he loves you yet treats you badly is a cruel, emotionally immature, person. There is no hope of ever being happy with someone like this, period. He may change, but it won’t be because of you or for you. The sooner you accept that fundamental truth about human nature, the better off you will be.

When love is connected to performance, you have a sense of wanting to “fix” someone. You tend to pick “fixer uppers,” people who aren’t quite what you want, but could be if you can find the right combination of behaviors to make them how you want them (that is, to give you the love you want). Generally these partners are emotionally distant in ways similar (if not identical) to your opposite sex parent, and the “fixer upper” is really you; if you can perform just right, then you will earn the person’s love. There are so many glaring omissions of logic about this idea, I’m not sure they need to be pointed out. And yet, so many of us engage in this behavior. That’s how needy our emotionally distant parents left us—we know on some level that what we’re doing is an ineffective way to feel loved, but our deeply-rooted impulses push us down that path anyway, and we follow willingly.

Love tied to performance is not love. If you have to be a certain way to get your loved one’s approval, then you are in an emotionally distant relationship. This dynamic usually results in a dance of power and control, where one partner seeks approval and the other gives it when it’s beneficial for him to do so. Like the emotionally distant parent, he controls his partner’s behavior by giving or withholding his affection/approval/support.

People can stay in unsatisfying and even abusive relationships, and relationship patterns, for a long time, never really dealing with their unmet needs for closeness and connection. Why? The reason is amazingly simple: it’s too painful to deal with having been unloved as a child. Most people would rather believe that their parents loved them, that they got what they needed from them, and that they’re getting what they need from their partners (or, that they have bad relationships because there are no good prospective partners) than face the ugly truth. However, the divorce rate, the infidelity rate, and the addiction rate in our society all say differently.

A Distance of Our Own
There is the final piece to all of this and it’s the most hopeful, but also the most difficult to look at: our own need for emotional distance. Thus far, I’ve been talking only about emotionally distant partners, but if we get into emotionally distant relationships, then we, too, are emotional distancers. We pick jerks, abusers, alcoholics, and all other types of emotionally distant people because we know subconsciously that we’ll never have to get too close. The emotional distance itself is the payoff for us. So powerful is this drive, we are willing to put up with all manner of poor treatment to avoid intimacy. It’s the skewed way we protect ourselves when we learn very young that being vulnerable is painful and dangerous.

The problem is not with our partner. It’s with us. Exclusively. Completely. Irrevocably. And without exception.

This is terrific news! It means we can do something about it. We can’t make other people change, and we can’t change our childhoods, but we can change ourselves and we can start this very moment if we want to. The big feelings we’ve been avoiding for a lifetime can make it seem more complicated than that, but it’s really not. It’s also all we really have, but it is enough.

Summary
I have come to these conclusions through personal experiences, which, although anecdotal, I believe express a common struggle. I worked hard for many years to come to terms with my emotional issues. After years of therapy, self-help books, bodywork, support groups galore, antidepressants, and gallons of healing tears, I reached a simple, rather elegant awareness: that when all is said and done, all my self-destructive, addictive, shame-based, dishonest, unproductive, and emotionally distant behavior was about dealing with (or rather, avoiding) my grief. Those of us who grew up with parents who weren’t very good at loving us have a deep, heavy grief underlying everything we do until we come to terms with it. It’s not a grief that ever goes away; it will be with me for my lifetime, but accepting this sort of took away its power. It can no longer hurt me or control me. This big, scary, powerful lion that I spent the first third of my life avoiding, with irrational urgency and terror, turned out to be a lamb, a bleating baby that, in reality, had no power at all. It just needed love like everything else. Less than two years after I accepted my grief and all the residue that came with it, I got into the first loving, mutually supportive relationship I’d ever had. This was no coincidence.

Emotional distance is a deceptive weapon. While it may protect us from emotional pain, it also prevents emotional fulfillment. In the end, you can only be honest with yourself about which is more important to you, and make your choices accordingly.

I was writing in a coffee shop yesterday when a young couple came in and sat at the table next to me. They were both in their mid-twenties, the young man in a poorly tailored suit, the young woman in jeans. This incongruency aroused my natural curiosity: what could these two have in common? By paying only the slightest attention, it soon became apparent that they had just met, that the young man was a financial planner, and that the woman had finances she wanted a plan for.

The young man was palpably insincere and obvious, employing the kind of sales technique that preys on needy and lonely people: not handsome but boyishly charming, he gave plain girls subtle hope that it might turn into something more than a business relationship. I couldn’t see the girl’s face, but she had the body language of someone who did not believe she was pretty, her arms and legs awkwardly dangling from her torso as if they were newly acquired and she didn’t know what to do with them yet. He tried to establish a painfully superficial connection by pretending to know some of her friends (which, not surprisingly, it turned out he did not), cracking humorless jokes, and telling her that he likes all of his clients “because I can’t work with someone I don’t like on a personal level.” Excuse me for a moment while I stick my finger down my throat to express my disgust.

The girl was lapping it up, stuck in that not-yet-sure-of-herself place, so common among young women, of being concerned, above all else, with approval. Nervous, polite laughter at his humorless jokes, hesitancy to correct him when he got the names of her “friends” wrong, and a rise in her voice at the end of every statement that said, “you’re completely in charge, and I’m just along for the ride…do you like me? Oh I hope you do…” I heard her say something about information technology, so she was smart, and she had a good job (which was why he was interested in her in the first place), but she lacked the confidence to realize that she had, if only she’d grab the reins, complete control of the situation. After all, it’s her money, and he can only get his hands on it with her voluntary cooperation.

The whole thing irked me. I was thinking how much I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, hon, but you don’t need this guy’s services. You’re a smart girl; you can figure this all out yourself by spending an hour or so online.” I kept hoping he’d go to the bathroom so I could tell her; she had a lost soul energy and neediness about her, and I wanted to help her out. “Max out your 401k. Save ten percent of every paycheck if you can. And don’t piss money away on frivolities. At your age and income level, that’s about all there is to it. Oh, and get some therapy so guys like this can’t take advantage of you anymore.” I even considered doing it while he was there, turned over in my mind how that might go, what the look on his face might be, whether it would break his composure, if he would shift change back into his true demon form; if nothing else, I’d give them both a story to tell. But of course, I didn’t, and when I left, he was still charming her, still sucking valuable personal information out of her, and she was still giggling too loudly and touching her hair nervously. I could see triumph in his whole demeanor, his eyes shining with satisfaction, his investment in insincerity and empty flattery paying off. Chalk up one more victory for the dark side.

Let me say, I don’t have a problem with salespeople in principle. I see them as providing a service which, if I’m in the market for something, I will gladly seek out. I appreciate a good salesperson, someone who knows a product, listens to my needs, then goes about trying to meet them as best he can. These people earn their commission and I am happy to pay them. Sales are part of the lifeblood of a free economy, and I can even see a certain nobility in it. If you’ve ever worked with a good salesperson, one who truly helped you make a sound decision, you know what I mean. They are as different from these financial planner types as a mammal from a reptile.

Anyway, I remember these smarmy guys calling me when I was that girl’s age. I had the same insecurity about my prettiness as this girl, but I was intuitively disgusted by insincerity and flattery, so their methods didn’t work on me. My disgust saved me a bunch of times. From used car salesmen, clothing saleswomen (who will say anything looks good on you if they’re working on commission), miscellaneous door-to-door people, and telemarketers, including these financial planners. The financial planners called on me more than all others put together. For a while, I was getting calls from these guys at least once a week. And they were always, without exception, young men who sounded just like the guy in the coffee shop. Ewww. The oozing smarminess made my skin crawl.

Their confidence and persistence was staggering (particularly in light of the fact that their services were so unnecessary). I was always clear that I was not the least bit interested, but they were unfazed. They just kept calling. Every time, they used the exact same tactics to try to sway me. There was no sophistication or consideration of me, either as a potential client or a human being, in their approach. They had to know that they’d called on me in the recent past, but had apparently taken no notes on me or made any effort to adjust their spiel to counter my objections. All of this was evidence validating my original attitude and then some. They were not just insincere, they were intellectually lazy. And if they were unable to think critically about cold calling, the very source of their income, how could I possibly trust them with my money? The answer, of course, is that I could not.

After awhile I just started saying “Please take me off your list” and hanging up on them. Politeness didn’t work, firmness didn’t work. They deserved nothing better than a dial tone in their ear, and I wasn’t going to allow them to waste any more of my time. Eventually, the calls stopped, and I hadn’t given this topic another thought until I saw the interaction in the coffee shop yesterday.

The hindsight of time and wisdom has proven that my beliefs were completely correct about these guys. And yet, this sense of validation—always satisfying, no matter what the situation—is not the point to think about. The important point is, don’t be that girl in the coffee shop. Don’t be a mark.

The only reason smarmy techniques exist is because they work. As long as there are people who fall prey to them, these techniques will be around. It’s true that a fool and his money are soon parted, and these are the people performing the cashectomies. But as distasteful as that young man was, as were all the others who came before him, it would be unfair to hold him accountable for the young girl willing to give him her money. Like the drug traffickers who get blamed for people who enjoy getting high, he is not the one who needs to change. Because if she changes, he doesn’t need to. He just fades away into the fog, forced by the cold reality of the market to find another way to make a living.

Don’t be a mark. Educate yourself. Acknowledge your weaknesses and insecurities, and find a healthy way to deal with them. Above all, don’t give your money away without serious contemplation about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Especially to people like these financial planner guys, and there are so many of them around. If you must seek financial guidance, go to your bank or a reputable online site such as Vanguard.com. And pay attention to your gut instinct about people, because it’s usually right. If you’re looking for a new friend, you can’t do much better than getting to know your inner voice.

The mark of mature thinking is the capacity to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously and make sense of them all. This idea has its roots in the postmodern movement, which states (essentially) that all attempts to describe reality are models, not reality itself, and therefore, the more models you can consider, the more accurate your description of reality will be. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

This is a useful way to think about personal development. How well are you able to consider all sides of an issue, and also acknowledge that there are sides you can’t possibly see, particularly in your emotional life? I’m thinking specifically of abuse and other emotionally charged issues. In my own life, I was verbally, emotionally, and physically abused by an alcoholic father who seemed to delight in making his wife and children suffer. It was a massive paradigm shift for me when, after several years of work on it, I was able to move from “He’s a horrible bastard” to “He’s a broken, miserable person, and he’s accountable for how he treated his family.”

Both are true. My father was a cruel tyrant, but he was also a victim of abuse. He was a self-pitying, victim-mentality loner, frustrated in all aspects of his life, and he took it out on his family. He is both a tragic figure and a cruel tyrant. He suffered, but that is not an excuse to treat his family (or anyone else) as he did. I can forgive him (I have forgiven him), but I also hold him accountable, which means that, unless he acknowledges his accountability, there is very little basis for a relationship with him.

This “conflicting” view of my father was both enlightening and liberating for me. It was an enlightening view of human nature, in all its complex glory, and has permanently altered the way I view all behavior, including my own: the black and white is easy, it’s the shades of gray where the challenge and adventure lie. And it was liberating because I was freed of the burden of judgment. It was no longer about deep hurts and resentments; it was about objective facts.

Mature thinking does not mean we ignore our emotions, and I am not saying I ceased to have feelings about my abuse. I am only saying that the emotions were only one piece of the picture. Granted, a very important piece. But in order to resolve my knotted up emotions, I had to reach a more mature level of thinking. I had to move beyond my big emotions and see the issue in a larger context. Doing so produced some conflicting ideas, but seeing all those ideas as possible was the key to resolution.

Being able to see contradictory ideas as simultaneously true applies to everything, of course, including science, philosophy, and human nature. Reality is complicated. The more facets of any issue we’re able to see, the closer our model will be to reality. It is so very important to be open-minded, especially about emotionally charged issues. We do not have to give every idea equal weight, but we ought to give each one serious consideration.

It’s hard to hold contradictory ideas as simultaneously true because doing so requires a fairly habitual effort at critical, analytical thought, something that’s become unpopular in our culture of instant gratification and mind-numbing media. A constant temptation exists to reduce, categorize, and dismiss things that don’t make sense or don’t mesh with our point of view. If we don’t like someone, for example, it can be easy to believe only negative things about him and disbelieve the positive. Politics is a terrific example of people taking one-sided stands and refusing to consider the merits of the other side. (It’s also one of the silliest, because partisan politics have very, very little to do with the significant events taking place in the world.) The point is, mature thinking demands that we resist the temptation to reduce ideas to fit our beliefs and instead, continually grow our beliefs to take in bigger ideas; these bigger ideas can be contradictory, and yet, the ability to make sense of them is key to a mature thought process.

When we are able to hold contradictory ideas in the same space and see validity in each one, an amazing thing starts to happen. Seemingly contradictory ideas become part of a larger picture that is not contradictory at all. It only looked that way from our limited viewpoint. If you’ve ever had the “aha” experience of suddenly understanding a concept that was previously baffling, then you know what this means. If you are on a path of growth and personal betterment, you will have a lot of these moments. With each one, your model of reality expands and your sphere of knowledge increases. Every time this happens, there is a little more compassion in the world, a little more tolerance, a little more understanding, and a little less ignorance. Seeing more and more shades of gray may not solve all the world’s problems, but it is certainly an essential aspect.

You hear people talk about inappropriate behavior, inappropriate language, inappropriate this, inappropriate that. It’s become a popular word to use to describe when a person does something out of line under a particular set of circumstances. Telling a joke at a funeral, wearing a revealing dress to a business meeting, telling a person how to discipline their kids—anything that shows poor boundaries or lack of respect for social norms. It’s a fancy word for “wrong,” and it’s powerful because it’s softer, yet implies a superior awareness of the norm not being followed. It’s especially popular among the “I’ve graduated from therapy” crowd.

I’m not knocking this crowd (being one of them). I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, however, and it’s not limited to this group but we tend to be the biggest offenders, to use “inappropriate” to describe behavior we just don’t like. The behavior doesn’t offend a norm, it just offends us. There is a huge difference, and understanding it opens up a good opportunity for increased self-awareness.

First, let’s clarify what inappropriate is and isn’t. If somebody says something mean-spirited or critical, or offers advice where none was asked for or wanted, then he is behaving inappropriately. But if somebody says something that we simply don’t want to hear, he is not being inappropriate, he is just being observant and honest, however insensitive or untactful it may come across. For example, you’re talking about how much work your new job is, and your friend says something along the lines of, “I thought you were looking forward to this work! You’ve wanted this job for more than two years, and you knew what was involved in it.” Or, you’ve had a fight with your boyfriend and you say, “I just don’t know what to do anymore.” To which your friend says, “Yes you do. You need to break up with him because you’re miserable and you know you’re not good for each other.” In both cases, you probably wanted sympathy, but your friend, ever eager to help out, gave honest opinions instead. Because the opinion felt critical, and because you didn’t really want it, you think to yourself (or if you’re really assertive, you say it out loud), “How could she say that to me? That was really inappropriate.”

But just because it annoyed you doesn’t mean it was inappropriate. It wasn’t mean-spirited, didn’t mean to offend, and didn’t break any social norms. It was just honesty, coming at a time when you were looking for something else. Calling this “inappropriate” does a disservice to both the person who said it and yourself.

When you label someone or something, you automatically create a distance between yourself and it. A label dehumanizes. It turns the person or behavior into a category that you can neatly fit into your mental scheme and thus dismiss in any manner you see fit. And herein lies the problem. If you call something inappropriate, but it is really just something that irritated you, you’ve made your problem somebody else’s problem. It’s been said before, many times, many ways, but if you’re bothered, then you’re the one with the problem, regardless of how insensitive the comment might have been. If instead of blaming the messenger, you instead pause and ask yourself why it bothered you so much, you just might come up with some interesting answers. Maybe you’re sensitive because you think you complain too much. Maybe you’re feeling guilty because you hate the job you finally got after wanting it for so long. Maybe you know you have to end your relationship, but you’re afraid to, and it’s the last thing you want to hear about (and dammit, doesn’t she know that?). Whatever the reasons, they’re yours and yours alone, and if you’re bothered, it’s your problem—and your opportunity to do something about it.

If you own your annoyance, then you have an opportunity to take a deeper look at yourself and learn something potentially useful. You also haven’t alienated the other person and may even end up with a deeper intimacy if you’re able to be frank with her about how her comment made you feel and what it made you think about. Instead of being annoyed, you just may be thanking her.

Pay attention to how you use labels. “Inappropriate” is one of many emotionally charged words that people use to label people or behavior they don’t like. They say nothing about who or what you label, and everything about you. They can hinder you from learning important truths, about others, about the world, and most of all, about yourself. If that’s not inappropriate, I don’t know what is.

Do you understand the difference between having a big ego and being a narcissist? Maybe it’s a clear issue for most, but I think it can be confusing. Knowing the difference is important, because a big ego is generally healthy—contrary to popular belief—while narcissism is not. Having them confused can be detrimental to your growth and emotional well being.

Discerning Ego from Narcissism
“Ego” is the psychological definition of the conscious self, the “executive of the personality governed by the reality principle.” Coined by Freud, “ego” is used by most branches of psychology to describe the conscious self. This covers a lot of ground, from how we see ourselves, to how we see the world, to how we solve problems and form relationships. Our ego is our basic relationship with life.

It is not bad to have a big ego. In fact, if you want to accomplish big things in life, a big ego is necessary. Yes, necessary! A big ego means that you are confident, realistic, and able to care for yourself through the difficulties (hard work, rejection, naysayers, etc.) of trying to achieve something. People with well-developed egos tend to roll with the flow of life, stay focused on their goals, and keep a healthy perspective. They neither sink into hopelessness at failure, nor feel invincible with victory. They’re willing to do what it takes to get what they want and stand for what they believe in. Without a big ego, you will not have the self-sense necessary to persevere in the face of adversity.

“Narcissism,” on the other hand, describes an overabundance of self-absorption. The term, also coined by Freud, was taken from the Greek hero Narcissus, who was unable to tear his eyes from his own reflection. Narcissists tend to see the world and everything that happens to them in the same, self-centered light, with little regard for others, including spouses, children, and friends. (In fact, parental narcissism probably causes more emotional harm to children than any other single trait. It is at the root of most self-involved and self-destructive behavior.)

We all start out life as flaming narcissists. Infants, utterly self-absorbed and completely ruled by their impulses, are incapable of anything more. As they grow and develop, they become more aware of their surroundings, eventually communicating and learning how to have relationships. They learn that other people have feelings that must be considered, and they learn to share. They learn about right and wrong. Eventually, they learn about love, both brotherly and romantic, and they learn that sometimes, personal sacrifices are necessary in its name. With any luck, by the time they’re young adults, they’ve developed a healthy ego, and they’ve shed most of their childhood narcissism.

In one very real sense, personal development is the process of outgrowing our narcissism. As we grow, we become increasingly aware of belonging to something greater than ourselves: a family, a community, a class, a society, a planet, and pretty much in that order. The larger our sense of belonging, the less narcissistic we’ve become. For example, “Think globally, act locally” is a more sophisticated viewpoint than “Proud to be an American” because it takes into account the entire planet rather than just one nation. The most extreme example of a lack of narcissism is perhaps spiritual enlightenment. People who attain enlightenment disidentify with their “small” self, or personal identity, realizing it to be nothing more than a manifestation of Spirit (God, Emptiness, whatever you wish to name it), which is our True Nature. We don’t all end up here, but it’s important to understand that the ultimate goal of all personal development is, paradoxically, freeing ourselves of the personal. If you look inward and contemplate this for any length of time (which I suggest you do), you will know it to be true. Of course, the personal includes much more than narcissism (which I’ll get to in a moment), but enlightenment is the best example of a narcissistic-free state I can think of.

It’s true that a big ego and narcissism can look the same. However, they are vastly different; polar opposites, in fact. A narcissist only appears to think highly of himself, while a person with a well-developed ego really does. Narcissists have fragile self-images that must be coddled and pacified; truth takes a back seat to maintaining the desired self-image. If you’ve ever run up against a hard core narcissist’s self-image, you’ll know it by the viciousness with which he defends his house of cards; for example, confronting an addict who has no intention of changing. Ouch.

A person with a big ego, on the other hand, has a solid sense of self that does not require any delicate handling. He has confidence and healthy self-regard. Big egos can sometimes be irritating in their single-mindedness and unwillingness to compromise, but understanding how this is different from narcissism is critical to growth. If you have narcissism and ego confused, you may shy away from ego development for fear of becoming conceited or arrogant, and this is exactly backwards. Conceit, arrogance, and other aggrandizing traits are much more likely to stem from a lack of development, not from a healthy ego. This is perhaps one of the most important distinctions you must make if you want to stay the course of personal growth.

Including and Transcending
It may seem contradictory to say that a big ego is essential to personal growth and that disidentification with ego is also essential to personal growth; that to reach advanced levels of development (i.e., spiritual enlightenment), we must disidentify with our personal selves. Yet both are true, and here’s why: All development follows a similar pattern of “transcending and including.” That is, in order to master a higher level of awareness, whether it be rollerblading or spiritual enlightenment, we must first become aware of it, practice until it becomes a part of us, then transcend it by moving on to the next level of difficulty.

Like the pages in a book, we progress through life, each chapter dependent on its predecessor and necessary for its successor. “Include and transcend” occurs from birth forward. Once we learn to walk, we don’t think about doing it, we just do it. But we then move on to running, skipping, and jumping. Once we learn to talk, we don’t think about it, we just do it. But talking enables us to move on to reading, writing, grammar, linguistics, and all other language-related pursuits. Every skill you have, you once had to practice. But once you got it, it became automatic, second nature. You disidentified with it and moved on to something else.

This pattern is universal with all development. Everything starts out with less complexity and moves toward more complexity. The greater the complexity, the higher the level of development. Yet each level of development builds on and contains every simpler level that came before it. (This is why “Think Globally, Act Locally” is a more sophisticated viewpoint than “Proud to be an American.”) Disidentification is just another word for transcendence: when you move to a higher level, you no longer identify with the current level. This doesn’t mean you leave it behind. It means that it is no longer the object of your focus because it has become a part of who you are.

The crucial point is that a thing must be included before it can be transcended. It must be part of our psyche, second nature. When you try to transcend an aspect of the psyche that you’ve never fully owned (included), you end up not with disidentification, but with dissociation, or disowned aspects of your self that you repress from your conscious awareness. These disowned aspects can be both good and bad, and are what make up your shadow. They are fodder for all manner of psychological and emotional difficulties. In fact, many psychological and emotional pathologies can actually be defined as the “include and transcend” process gone awry at an early stage of development, usually due to some sort of trauma; the worse the trauma, the worse the dissociation.

For example, if a child suffers abuse at an early age, she may be too terrified to consciously deal with her powerful feelings, so she represses them. They fester in her unconscious and cause all sorts of problems, from low self-esteem to fear of intimacy, which as an adult woman she experiences only as confusion and pain. Unless she owns the powerful repressed feelings—that is, includes them in her conscious awareness—she is doomed to continued misery. Without conscious inclusion, she is incapable of getting past the feelings, of transcending them. It simply won’t happen.

The same is true of ego (as well as pretty much everything else). You cannot transcend something you haven’t included. While it’s true that ego must be transcended to achieve enlightenment, it’s also true that it must first be developed to a full, healthy state. As ironic as it might sound, if you want to grow spiritually, you must also grow mentally and emotionally. You can’t skip over these aspects of self in your quest for Awakening. If you do, you may achieve advanced states, and perhaps even some form of enlightenment, but it will be fragmented and incomplete, and your fullest potential will remain out of reach until you deal with the dissociated parts of yourself that you’d really prefer to ignore.

Ego Development
As stated earlier, ego is the executor of our personality, our relationship with the world. It isn’t really one single thing that you can work on. Rather, having a healthy ego is the result of growth in many areas. You must face and deal with the dissociated aspects of your self, which we all have to some degree. You must deal with addictive and compulsive issues, rooting out the source of these impulses. You must deal with self-esteem, self-image, childhood trauma, shame, resentments, and any and all other blocks to growth you know you have. We can’t get at everything, but we have to make the effort anyway. Along with this “uncovering” work, we must also develop ourselves spiritually, seeking to answer our questions of “ultimate concern.” We must develop and live by our values and understand our place in the world in a way that feels right for us.

All areas are dependent on each other and are necessary to develop if we want to reach our highest potential. Spiritual growth without emotional growth results in dissociation (which has all sorts of different faces, including the Spanish Inquisition, Jim Jones, Muslim extremism, and most branches of fundamental Christianity). Emotional growth without spiritual development results in more assertive narcissists. And mental development is essential for all growth, as cognitive capacity is a prerequisite for pretty much everything.

Thus, ego can only be developed by working on everything else. It’s not easy, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s a lifelong adventure, always unfolding before us, always just beginning, always promising more mystery, adventure, and excitement than the best novel we’ve ever read. It is a journey not to be missed.

Summary
In summary, ego development is a necessary aspect of the personal growth process, while narcissism is the thing we’re trying to outgrow. We are all to some degree narcissistic; we all have shadow aspects we’d rather not deal with. But we must be willing to face them if we are to transcend them. “Include and transcend” is the basic pattern for all growth, and explains why ego development is necessary on the path to spiritual enlightenment. Outgrowing our narcissism isn’t the only factor in personal development, but it is an essential one. Integral personal development—which ultimately results in enlightenment—requires both.

Further Reading
This essay is but a brief introduction to the ideas of narcissism, ego, spiritual enlightenment, and “include and transcend.” These are all extremely important concepts in personal growth, all rather complex, and I’ll be writing more about all of them in the future. For now, here are some links to further your research.

Owning Your Own Shadow (This is a great introduction to shadow, by the pioneering psychoanalyst Robert Johnson)
Integral Spirituality (Ken Wilber’s treatise on integral spirituality)

A Brief History of Everything (Ken Wilber)
What is Enlightenment? (YouTube video of Ken Wilber speaking about enlightenment)
What is Enlightenment? (Essays on enlightenment)