When I first began attending Tibetan Buddhist teachings, what I repeatedly heard and understood, is that suffering is primarily the result of a self-centered orientation, and that in order to solve this problem, I had to re-prioritize from catering to the demands of my ego into service to others. To this end, numerous prayers, meditations and mind-trainings were undertaken if I ever hoped to make a crack in the “me first” way that I was supposedly functioning under. But what if your ego points in the other direction? That is, what if your ego does the opposite — moves toward annihilating the self and feels more comfortable denying and or sacrificing its needs in a distorted version of “service to others.” My teacher referred to this as “idiot compassion” — which sounds harsh but was meant to alert us to not bleeding out because someone or something seemingly required it.

I had enough of an intellectual grasp to understand this meant I had to work double time: I had to simultaneously be translating this teaching to fit my upside down ego, and painfully, still realize that even though I felt essentially worthless, that was still “ego” and therefore, an imploded kind of selfishness that was maybe even worse.

The definition of ego is very different depending on context. Sometimes Buddhist teachings give the impression that ego is the sum and equivalent of all negative emotions. Therefore, ego must be vanquished, overcome, corralled, transcended, transformed, etc.

From the lens of Psychology, a different definition is put forward. Ego is a strength that must be developed if a person is going to be able to function in the world. Ego means a part of the psyche that has reasonable distress tolerance, an adequate sense of self-worth and the capacity to have satisfying relationships, starting with clear self/other boundaries. These capacities would be the pre-requisite human functioning that Buddhist teachings assume a person already has in place before they begin trying to actually deal with why it might be a problem.

However, since many people who are suffering from developmental trauma of one kind or another are seeking relief in a variety of ways, they are often the same ones who look to spirituality for help. Buddhism offers a lot in the way of help, but in my view, there is not enough attention given to this very important topic of where the person with an inverted ego should be focusing.

To be clear, Buddhism recognizes that ego takes many forms. For instance, arrogance is seen as a distorted ego perception, but this distortion can also manifest in its opposite — low self-esteem. Both take basic self-worth and exaggerate it, but neither an inflated sense of superiority, or self-deprecation, accurately assesses a person’s “worthiness.”

There are many examples of how this might go. Aggression for example, can be detected in a way we can clearly observe: anything from a playground bully to domestic abuse to rape and murder. However, aggression can also turn inward and manifest as self-torture instead. From internalized derogatory remarks to an inner life that amounts to living 24/7 under a cruel dictator, leading to depression or behaviors that harm the self. For such a person, thinking, meditating and praying for the benefit of others will often only reinforce the shame of feeling self-centered or controlled by ego.

What I have noticed in the majority of people who come to psychotherapy, is that there is a tendency to sacrifice/ignore/denounce themselves for the sake of some “other” –be it a person or an ideology. The reasons and methods for doing it are numerous, but the impulse to disregard the self is primary. What is most needed is to learn how to navigate the self/other duality, which takes various forms, depending on the person.

That is, learning that the self is equally as important as others –not less. For some people, the habit of self-sacrifice/self hatred is so strong, even the notion that what needs to happen is to assert their right to exist can feel like an “impossible” task, and it can take years before they are willing to admit all the sacrifice and faux smiles are actually expressions of fear and self-loathing. Even after understanding and admitting this is true, acting on it is a whole other skill set that must be approached slowly and deliberately. If meditation is undertaken, it is compassion for self that is most needed, not more focus on “others.”

There is a Buddhist teaching/concept regarding equanimity as a ground for spiritual development, which is exactly what I am talking about when it comes to navigating the self/other duality. However, once again, this teaching is traditionally approached from the point-of-view or assumption that the practitioner is seeing/functioning in the ways that regard themselves as most important, and seeing others as less so.

There is a way that the traditional Tibetan Buddhist teachings are presented that make it seem that within these teachings, everything about suffering is addressed, and if you continue to suffer, it is likely because you have not understood or applied these teachings properly. Perhaps there is some truth here though it is famously said that the Dalai Lama himself did not understand the concept of self-hatred when he first heard it from a western Buddhist practitioner. This does not translate (to me) as reason to valorize indigenous Tibetans as superior because they do not “have” self-hatred, but instead, clearly shows the cultural disconnect faced by those who enter into Buddhist practice who are not actually ready to work with the complexity of ego from the bias of how it is traditionally presented.

There are many Psychologists who are drawn to Buddhism. In fact, a whole area of treatment called Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) — a deepening of the more popular Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — was created by incorporating Buddhist mindfulness meditations into learning skills to develop inner resourcing — the ability to hold space for the self. These methods are extremely useful to the person whose psyche is still trying to negotiate the self/other duality.

If you are a person whose ego strength has been compromised due to developmental trauma, meditations for developing Great Compassion -defined as a primary goal in Tibetan Buddhism as the ability to encompass all sentient beings equally — is not the best place to start. In fact, I would strongly caution against it, and instead, work with awareness, self-compassion, and establishing inner resources. As far as I can tell, there is no way to skip this foundation. It is not a “lesser” motivation, as is often implied by the attention given to the development and dedication to the “greater” motivation. It is primary and without it, compassion itself is reduced to a dry concept, and will not be able to do much for anyone — self or other.

Waking up Wanting

I can hear the echo-y sounds of shoppers and muffled fountain water. The clang of the tall pointy multi-spear modern sculpture slow-motion tipping into itself at the very top, and feel the cool, looped neck of the giant marble goose as I slid through it. We used the golden egg as a step up to climb the goose and what is it about that egg that emphasized my own fierce and silent yearning? And what of the peculiar unease of watching a real bird trapped inside, stuck fluttering at the ceiling and globe lights? This was the shopping center of my suburban 1960’s youth. It had an aquarium, a large cage of colorful birds, popcorn and a creamsicle-like drink to try. It was a place that ignited and fueled what was already restless inside of me.

I wish I could explain just how much desire always burned inside my small body, hushed down by shame and fear and manners. I still feel the rawness of it, and the helpless feeling that followed it like a dark twin. That darkness would later grow up to become a liar, sneak, thief, and addict in order to sideways or backdoor get some kind of relief from the abstract doom of something deep and incomplete. It never took over completely, but it also never let me go.

Such a large appetite for such a small person — it didn’t seem natural. It wasn’t polite. What happens when a child feels unseen and unlovable while living a so-called privileged life? This kind of neglect is not detectable. Everything looks right. Girl is clean and bright, blonde and curled. She has books, toys, sisters and friends. No one actually sexually molested her (a small miracle, she comes to know later). Only she knows the weight of the imploding blackness inside of her, and the moat of silence she created around it.

She might have tried to express it early on, she might not have. It doesn’t matter now — this reflection isn’t about the lack of capacity of the adults, who did their best in spite of the difficulties they had to manage — it is about her relationship to desire. Its about how time will not cure its velocity, medication will not entirely undo its ferocity, and spiritual practice will not deliver you from its pain. In fact, it will clarify it. It will bring you to its hiding place, and it will bring you there on your knees — not in your head.

While everyone who understands the rigors of inner work will tell you this is good news, this is the point of meditation, this is the only way out/through, I will nod my head along with them, but also tell you it is lonely, it can feel like a relentless looping spiral and it is damn difficult to turn away from the myriad distractions of every hue and stripe, and instead, turn toward the pain and stay the course. Also, will power can only take you so far.

Desire, by its nature, will usually have you moving in the direction of looking for relief by addition. We are shown a million times over in a culture dedicated to capitalism and its dark twin, advertising, that you can get what you desire — be it the American Dream or Spiritual Enlightenment (and probably both if you are savvy enough).

Is there any way to vanquish the pressures of desire “once and for all?” This I have looked at time and time again, through the lens of a variety of disciplines: Psychology, Philosophy, Spirituality. And within each of those, various schools of thought. I have been nothing if not relentless in my search to understand desire. If it is a problem (most often regarded as such in spiritual teachings) when does it become one?

According to developmental psychology, we are born with definite and specific biological and psychological needs: to be loved, touched, held and fed and kept warm. To be looked at, looked into, mirrored and encouraged. To be seen for who we are and not who our caretakers wish us to be. Almost no one gets these very basic human needs completely fulfilled. More or less we are tended to, and yet many, many people quite simply never feel adequate in who they are — manifesting in adulthood in a variety of ways: relationship problems, imposter syndrome, unbridled ambition, failure to thrive, addictions, self-hatred, eating disorders, sexual issues, power trips, free-floating anxiety, depression, physical illness, etc., etc.

When basic human needs have not been met, and on top of that are judged, punished, shamed, or ignored, where do they go? They go dark. They become part of what is known in transpersonal psychology as the “shadow” elements of our personality. The dark twin. They control us from behind — not to torture us further, but because they still want what they always wanted — to be met with attention, acceptance and love.

No surprise that suffering will be the result if basic needs go unmet. In adulthood, this suffering really compounds when needs and desires become confused. Relationships, substances and otherwise normal behaviors like sex, work, even spirituality are employed as a substitute or a way to bypass unmet human needs. Even if we manage to avoid it for a time, the pain never really stops. It often shape-shifts into personality “traits” that we believe is just the way we are “wired.” Maybe we become shy, delinquent, or perfectionistic. Is that who we really are? These needs may lay dormant but will not die like a plant that you put in your closet instead of the window. They will find ways to get your attention and will do so with increasing intensity the longer they are ignored.

Four of the five stages of grief will circle you: denial, bargaining, anger, depression. Maybe these states will circle for years, in various ways. I have a personal tendency to make the ideal of “balance” into a shadowy bargaining session with addictive tendencies instead. “If I do this, then I can have that.” I understand this kind of thinking can be framed as a motivational strategy, and I also understand when I am making an excuse. After awhile, you get to know your own tricks, but that can lead to anger at yourself, maybe then you go back to denial as the whole cycle loops again.

The last “stage” of grief is acceptance. Just like any other model that is meant to show a process, we can get duped into thinking it’s a linear, once and for all kind of thing. I wish that it were so. Sometimes, rarely, that happens. But mostly, even acceptance gets revisited over and over. There is the kind of dawning, sobering experience of acceptance, when we clear-eyed see that we can’t “escape” or “fix” our longing in the usual methods we have been trying, and then there is the integrated, walking around version of it. This one often takes its time to root and grow and become stable.

The more something is repressed, the more it feels unwieldy, unmanageable. Like if it were really let out, there would be no end to it — it would simply devour everything in its path and still go unsated. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is an image given for a being that is dominated by desire. They are called Hungry Ghosts, and are described as having giant bellies, tiny mouths and thin throats that cannot swallow what they try to ingest. Not only are they constantly hungry, but when they try to satiate their hunger, the object that they are craving and about to “possess” turns rotten — dissolves into ash, or otherwise becomes non-viable. Kind of like the old stories of fairy glamour suddenly disappearing, and the sumptuous banquet is revealed as straw and dirt and fetid water. And so they wander, haunting and haunted by a hunger that can never be fulfilled. How many times have I wandered a store, a person, an ideology feeling exactly this way? In the midst of bright lights and big ideas, it feels like the wind of a desert is blowing right through me.

By the time we are naively convinced that we can see through the ploys of advertising, perhaps we turn our attention in earnest to relationships, babies, self-help regimes, diets, exercises, meditations, classes, degrees, certificates, credentials. For those who believe these are not “materialistic” goals/desires, I invite you to consider why you are engaging in them. It’s certainly not wrong to want to expand experience, but will these things bring us to a place that allows us to feel complete? Are they in fact, truly our own goals/desires or have they been implanted through culture? What is the motivation behind all this accumulation? If it is to attain the sense of finally being “enough” it simply won’t work. That is, not in the long run. I’ve traversed almost all of these pursuits, and still — the specter of “not enough” remains. This sense was once a feeling “fact” that was determined to prove my worthlessness to me. Now, it is more of an inner coaxing — a feeling of being on a scavenger hunt, only to find clues that keep repeating: There is nothing wrong with you. Nothing missing. Nothing at all.

Desire is not your problem — but how you relate to it can be.

The joy that I know of that comes from doing depth work isn’t the kind that pops the cork or gets a raise. It is as private and intimate as the wound itself. It isn’t something that can be planned for, and bears no resemblance to the barrage of pop-culture images of spiritual attainment — something along the lines of perfecting yoga postures, special diets, and never getting angry.

Even the idea of an “attainment” can become a huge obstacle. My experience has shown me repeatedly that the path of wholeness is not a building up process, as in accumulating information, virtues, teachings and practices. But instead, a deconstructing process — becoming aware of what is in the way of directly experiencing myself, exactly the way I am, exactly the way the world is — like it or not — and the slow, loving patience required for the unraveling of survival strategies.

Personally, I no longer wish to examine the precise origins of personal pain. Also, I don’t actually believe it can be “ultimately” found. Analytical processes are often very helpful for the person who has not yet looked at their own patterns of self- abandonment or are not analytical people by nature. For someone who is new to inner work, understanding the historical source(s) are useful to see how the psyche has been shaped and why those old patterns are still creating painful experiences. For a person who tends not to be an analytical processor, sometimes this kind of understanding serves to “move” energy in ways that manifest practically. But for someone who grew up honing their analytical capacities because of the pain of their inner world, it tends to create more distance between knowing and being. You want to build a bridge, not a super-highway.

If I conclude that desire is not my enemy, yet my experience of following it has led me to a variety of disastrous results, ranging from a hang-over to an over-drawn bank account to a painful reckoning in relationships and world-views — what next? Is this something I can re-learn to trust, after understanding the innocence of unmet needs, and how there is no way to have avoided it? A child cannot control her environment or “make” her care-takers become more competent. And yet, this understanding does not cancel the reverberating pain. It can actually deepen it in the person who has “known” this for many years, but feels unable to resolve it. What is it that can change desire into a true ally and not an enemy, burden, or suspicious tendency?

My Buddhist teacher used to say that compassion, like mindfulness, has become a “buzz word” and therefore, has lost its capacity to actually reach our deep, personal pain as well as our collective suffering. Some people still confuse compassion with sympathy or even worse, pity. When looking at others who struggle, many of us can feel something like compassion — that is, a sense of wanting to remove the pain, maybe even wishing to take it on, if it is a being who we really love. But what I have come to understand about compassion, is that it absolutely, without a doubt, is not truly compassion unless we can feel it equally within and for our own selves/life/experiences. If we can’t, its not really compassion — its sympathy — maybe even empathy. But even an empath can hate themselves and often do because they don’t realize they are absorbing negative thoughts and feelings from anyone and everyone, including the environments they spend time in.

So compassion — real, healing compassion — must include if not begin, with the self. It doesn’t matter how much back-tracking is needed here. If we don’t meet our oldest needs with a loving response, we will skate on the icy surface of ourselves, scratching in patterns — lovely or ugly — but nevertheless looping any number of figure eight shaped hope and despair dualities. If this same figure is toppled, it becomes the symbol of infinity. Meaning, no end to this polarity.

As adults, we must understand that what was left unmet, was not our “fault.” However, it is now our responsibility. If we don’t take that seriously enough, looping, blame, avoid and /or fix strategies will endure. We will never know the pleasures in befriending and loving ourselves. We will never feel free of the dark twin and its desire to be seen, known, integrated.

This waking up process is everything you can imagine and lots you would never have been able to conjure in your wildest dreams. I can feel, see, hear, smell and taste the depth of childhood memories that are ripened and ready to finally digest in the warmth of compassion. I know there is always going to be “more” to integrate, yet it doesn’t often register as a problem or a deficiency that must be spanked into being/not being through will power or diffused through fantasy. Mostly, my feeling is that compassion is desire appearing in its natural form — part of human life — part of spiritual life. The bridge to sanity, safety and deep, deep relief.