When you were conceived, swam in your mother’s womb, and finally emerged into this world, you already had life, a soul in you, and yet no ego. In psychoanalysis, ego is defined as “the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity”.

Your ego began forming somewhere between the end of your first six months of life to age two and picked up the role of managing the business of being “you” in the world since that time. 

Every human runs into all sorts of life-related circumstances, joys and tribulations, throughout their life. Some are circumstances the little “i” of your ego has full control over, some only partial control, and some offer no option of control whatsoever. Suffering tends to increase the less control your ego has over these circumstances. And it is there that your ego begins to develop strategies to ascertain and maintain more control. While strategies start very early on in life, they tend to outlive their expiration date as you get older (think of the term midlife crisis for example) which in turn - as one fails to let go of these strategies - increases one’s suffering even further than the circumstances these strategies were originally designed to address. A classic example would be non-reality-changing worrying thoughts. Let’s say there’s a test you need to study for. It is surely enough that you have midnight oil burning studies to complete for this test, but having worrying thoughts about the option of failure likely will not change the outcome of the test for the better, but these worries can certainly contribute to anxiety which may hamper your chances, and even belly aches and possibly a need to use substances to numb these thoughts, substances which won’t necessarily help you with the studies or with clarity… you see where I am going with this, right?

But I actually do not mean to discuss here those circumstances which ego is aware of on some level or another. I want to discuss earlier life circumstances that preceded ego’s emergence and are thus outside of even its theoretical scope of knowledge. Case in point, safety and attachment, both are at the basis of the first core beliefs (in Hakomi speak) that babies form about the universe and the caregivers surrounding them. While there is zero guarantee of safety in this universe, every organism, even a single cell amoeba, will do its best to stay alive in the face of danger. When people around a newborn human are not safe, or the environment is one of, say, a war-torn region, a core belief about this universe not being safe can cement very quickly, even instantly, and every future outlook or observation about the nature of this universe following this belief’s onset is, implicitly and without egoic awareness, viewed through that lens. This view is very different from the view of an organism who had not cemented such a belief. Again, this has nothing to do with the objective fact that the universe in this material existence is entirely not guaranteed to be safe. It is about the subjective outlook on life and its circumstances. Similarly, our attachment patterns to key figures that are present in our life’s first and second year will impact how we attach further as we mature even though the ego wasn’t fully evolved yet when these beliefs set in. Consequently, attachment styles that match our subjective, initially favorable or unfavorable primary attachment experiences arise in us as humans as we mature: Secure, Ambivalent, Avoidant and Disorganized.

The way I like to think about it, is that when ego begins to emerge and form, it is very much akin to a moviegoer who entered the movie theater ten minutes into a fairly complex-plot film only to realize it has no clue about what happened in those first ten minutes. But it still views itself as responsible for addressing the “abnormalities” or difficulties arising from these first critical ten minutes. Since it has no clue about what actually happened, it can begin a life-long sisyphean task of throwing every strategy and the kitchen sink into trying to allay the pains resulting from those first ten minutes. To list a few such strategies, addictions to numb the pain, or heighten sensation; appeasement and manipulation attempts with other humans; and role reversals with a parent or parents, and later on with their own partners and children, to make sure it gets the love it does not really believe it deserves… etc, etc. Such patterns, which are really guesswork and patchwork attempts at resolving issues, the creation of which it was never privy to, often lead to very painful life experiences and complications.

It is my belief that talk therapy is quite ineffective in addressing core beliefs and woundings that are rooted in our preverbal states. These are woundings and beliefs that are literally stored in the body and in brain circuits that are not accessible to the egoic mind. I have seen people be able to address these beliefs and wounds far better than with talk therapy through a variety of somatic methods of which I will list a few methods which I personally love and appreciate: Hakomi; Tamura; Relational Somatic Healing; Aguahara and Watsu methods. These methods engage with the egoic mind gently and respectfully to relax the defense mechanisms around the woundings, but then use somatic practices to rewire the neurons that have fused together to create our responses to the challenging circumstances of our early lives. Each of those does this differently but they all take precious time to make sure no protectors (managers or firefighters) are being overrun on the way to exposing and tending to the exiles (to borrow from IFS terminology). I highly recommend finding practitioners of these healing arts if you have an increasing sense that your ego is not quite successful with its attempts at resolving your painful and your less productive habits.

Noam Kedem, 12-2023