![]() ![]() Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself because the ego wants naturally puts ‘you’ first, it just means thinking of yourself less. The opposite of ego in addiction is humility in recovery. But it’s hard to resist temptation, especially when put back into the same environment. Addicts know that long-term sobriety will keep them happy and alive while the temptation of immediate relief (to get high) will not keep them happy and might even end in death. This is prevalent in the recovery community. There’s this concept called ego fatigue, which explains how people can exhaust their egos when tempted with the want of immediate relief versus the need for long-term relief. My narcissism had to be removed in order for me to get sober. In my addiction these thoughts and feelings were amplified and no one else mattered. The ego told me the world was out to get me, as if the world found me so important that it made its main goal to make my life hell. Ego kept me trapped and alone in selfish desires where clothes, money, esteem, pity, fear, and conceit ruled my life. It didn’t matter what I did, if it was out of ego, it was about me. The hidden agenda could’ve been to buy friendship, companionship, or to get something out of someone. Even when I thought I was being helpful, I was doing it with a hidden agenda. ![]() All of my thoughts in my addiction were about me. That everyone is a reflection of something better or worse than us, that everything bad that happens is happening personally to us and that everything good was meant for us. Ego in addiction has to do more so with the idea that the world revolves around us. Personally, I believe the ego is one of the hardest things to overcome in recovery. Many addicts exhibit this egotistical personality trait from a mixture of their drug/alcohol addiction, family and socio-economic upbringing, education, and/or mental health. Narcissism is the excessive pre-occupation of self-love. ![]() The super-ego is the part of a person’s mind that acts as a self-critical conscience, reflecting social standards learned from parents, teachers and other mentor-like persons. The ego is a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, and defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory. Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious. The ego comprises the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. There is no concept of hate, good, bad or morality in this stage of our lives. In infancy, people are driven by the need to satisfy their basic instincts of pain, hunger and comfort. Babies are often used as an example as to what the ‘Id’ represents. The id is the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains a human’s basic, instinctual drives. Sigmund Freud, the founding father of Psychoanalysis, proposed a structural model of the psyche which included the id, ego and super-ego. ![]()
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