The ego wants us to be important, and we are not. So it inflates our importance in our own mind. It creates an illusion and tries to convince ourselves that we are something special.
Sometimes it can do this directly, and we convince ourselves we are better than we really are...making excuses for our failures, distorting our memories and feeding on our highlight reel and convincing ourselves this is who we really are.
But othertimes our ego shows itself through criticism. We beat ourselves up for being mortal, flawed. This is actually the ego talking. When we criticize ourselves for things we would forgive in others we are really saying "Well, it's ok for the rest of the world to be overweight, but for ME this is unacceptable because I should be better than that". Holding ourselves to a different standard is actually egotistical.
When we try to eliminate the ego, it gets nasty, and says "but you NEED me, without me pushing you to be better you'd just be a worthless sack of crap, I am the one that whips you and drives you to be better...remember the time you did THIS, or THAT? That was because of what I did for you..." So we fall into the trap of serving our ego, thinking it knows what is best for us, that it will lead us the right way.
The ego feeds on feelings of inadequacy. I know a lot about it because I have battled inadequacy and ego my entire life. I'd say "I lost" the battle, but that is egotistical as it promotes false self modesty. It's a trap that I don't know I'll escape in my lifetime.
I have a lot more I could say on this topic, but the point I was trying to make is this- it is possible to grow and change without being unhappy with who you are. A baby learns to walk without beating itself up for being a pathetic crawler. We learn to talk without belittling ourselves. Learning is a natural process, and has nothing to do with self loathing or self criticism. Those are little extras we put in, as a backhanded way of complimenting ourselves on the fact we are so good that what we see in the mirror is a disgrace to how awesome we think we really are.
Me:38 XW:38 T:11 years M:8 years Kids: S14, D11, D7 BD/Move out day: 6/17/14, D final Dec 15
