by Abby Walker
I’ve heard it said: pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.
When you were born, you experienced a loss of connection from the Divine. What if I told you, that this feeling of loss has become your greatest wound. Confirmed every day by the evidence you collect. Every experience. Every conversation. Every single thing that has happened to you has confirmed this reality.
What if I told you that without realizing it, you have built your life around this narrative. This story of loss of our connection to the Divine. We all do.
From the moment you were born, or maybe even before, you started to internalize this loss, and it was too much to bear. But you had to survive. So you did what all humans have to do in development: you started to construct a shield of armor around this wound. Cue Ego! Your ego, what Enneagram refers to as Type, became your fortress of protection. It has protected you from the pain of your deepest wound. What an important role it plays. You would not be recognizable as “you” without it.
But it’s hardly the thing that will heal you. Or bring you growth.
Ego (or Type!) seems great, except it is the Thing causing your greatest suffering.
Because you have needed your ego to survive, your ego has started to believe that it is the Real You.
And this belief?
It’s why you’re stuck.
Let me use my own experience as an example.
I identify with Type 5.
“There’s rarely a room I walk into where I feel like I belong. ”
I have always felt like an alien.
An outsider.
An observer.
There’s rarely a room I walk into where I feel like I belong. I stand back and watch, taking it all in. Paying close attention to the ways I don’t fit. Noticing just how different I am. Collecting data to prove my point.
Now, I have learned how to adapt and not be a complete weirdo in social situations, but OH.MY.GOSH. It feels like constantly overriding my hard wiring. To make matters worse, my brain doesn’t even speak human. It’s as if I found an excuse not to communicate the tireless activity in my mind by thinking my thoughts in code. As I anticipate conversations, it seems impossible to construct words and sentences out of the chaos.
It’s taken me years to translate my thoughts into something other humans can remotely make sense of.
For me as a Type 5, that early disconnection from the Divine was internalized as separateness from all creation. At some point in development, I felt as if I detached from the Oneness I once experienced. This disconnection, I believed, was my fault.
If only I had more knowledge and understanding, I could have stopped it from happening. My lack of intelligence was obviously to blame. Where my smarts should have been, there seemed to be a giant void of nothingness. (How dumb am I?!) If only I had more intelligence, more information--then! Then I would find what I was looking for.
This inner “lack” created a gnawing fear that I might not be able to meet the expectations of the world around me. I learned to withdraw in pursuit of knowledge to fill the hole, and avoid dependence on others. I was certain their expectations would further drain me energetically and emotionally. There was nothing to spare. So I held tightly to my inner resources, hoarding every scarce drop. This has become the shadow piece of my ego.
You can see this ego of mine causing me problems, right?
The worst part about our defense mechanisms is that they ultimately become our suffering.
In order to protect myself from feeling separate from others, I convinced myself I didn’t need others.
In an attempt to not experience the pain of Otherness, I blocked myself from any opportunity for Oneness.
Here’s the thing. The thing I forget every night when I fall asleep and have to remind myself of every morning--and all day long.
I am not empty inside.
My resources are not scarce.
Withdrawing and living autonomously is what limits my resources.
Deep inside of me is actually spaciousness.
I have complete fullness connected to the Divine.
When I assert the protection of my ego from this pain of emptiness, I deny myself of connection to the abundance that exists beyond myself. What I desire most? This is only available when I move toward the pain I’ve been protecting myself from.
To allow myself to remember, I am more than my ego. And I always have been.
I am not Other, I am One.
My Ego is a False Self.
As a Type 5 on the Enneagram, I am so curious about getting to know you, the type you identify with, and guide you on your journey to rediscovering your True Self. If you’d like to better understand how your ego is creating unnecessary suffering, sign up today for a FREE mini session at abbyjowalker.com.