How to have agency over your addiction by understanding the EGO. #egodeath #addictionrecovery

The experience of the self is always a defeat of the ego. Carl Jung. This video, I'm talking about the ego, its nature, and the part it plays in addiction recovery. And I'm not talking about ego as in arrogance. Stick around with me and I'll promise you'll understand addiction in a whole new way. My name is Dr. Dallas Bragg. I'm a sobriety coach. So do me a favor and close your eyes. Clear your thinking. Now ask your nervous system. Or your subconscious to bring up the most impactful memories from your childhood. As they come up into your mind, I'll bet they are all 30 to 90-second snippets in length. This chronochrome of imprints have shaped your life's reality. They became Beliefs that you adopted about yourself that solidified into life experiences. So that introducing the ego, that is the nature of the ego. And again, not ego as in arrogance, ego as in its Latin translation, which is I, self, me. Ego as in what the Christians know. As the adversary, the devil. The Buddhists know it as self. The ego is the conglomeration of what you know as your personality or your identity. To understand your addiction, you must understand what makes up your ego. So let's begin at the beginning. When you came into the world, You were a perfect light mirroring that of God. Call it source energy, infinite intelligence, consciousness, whatever. You didn't know fear or worry, shame, nor did you have a preference between rap and country music. You were a clean palette, just about. There's, there's some caveats to that. We won't get into that in this video. Imagine a pure ball of light. Ready to shine and experience unconditional love. You could picture this light bulb. I wish I could get it to light up, but I mean, like Uncle Fester. But just imagine it lit, and that is your, your being, your essence. That is you coming into the world. But even as a newborn, the ego begins to assimilate. Right? So as early as day one, the facial expressions— this is proven— of your mother stimulated mirror neurons in you, and those mirror neurons detected emotions. It could be support or neglect. If you sensed anxiety, worry, anger, your light was obscured a little. As you grew older, more and more experiences caused more emotional reactions. So imagine for this discussion each negative emotion as an individual string wrapped around your light. So let's say this is a message of neglect. This is a message of I'm not good enough. This is a message of I need to study harder. All the, the negative messages you get become your beliefs about yourself, and there's some positive ones too. But for this discussion, as you can see, as the beliefs pile up, they form the nature of and give life to the ego. And with each string wrapped around, it obscures your perfect light a little more, the nature of God. The nature of yourself, you didn't have those beliefs coming in. So these bundle of beliefs create our personality. So how does the ego relate to addiction? Well, let's first understand its function and how it works. The ego is about safety. It's easy for people to demonize the ego because the ego is where it produces our triggers. Our emotional activations, and our repeated patterns. We as humans now view these responses as bad, but they were essential to us in our survival thousands of years ago. Right? That's where the ego came from. The ego's role, though, hasn't changed. We have. While the danger to our ancestors—it could have been an approaching saber-toothed tiger—the same motion. The same emotion signifying danger in us in the present day. It could be a call from your condescending mother, right? The ego doesn't know that. The ego seeks your safety. It seeks your safety through a flight or fight response. So when an addict misuses a substance, let's say I go through the pattern of using a drug like I did. Crystal meth. The ego records that experience as a pattern of behavior that avoids danger. The danger is the negative emotions, and it brought safety, just high levels of dopamine. I felt safe, I felt good, I felt regulated, but I wasn't. The ego will perpetually drive the addict to find safety in that same experience. To illustrate this point, think about Your pet dog attempting to eat human food. Once you allow that dog to eat food off the table, that dog will forever try to repeat that pleasure experience. So in basic, very basic terms, that is how the ego works. So fortunately, though, for humans, we possess free will. We can either succumb to the ego's will Or step into our own power. So next, about the ego. The ego is objective. We cannot superimpose human-like processes, feelings, and emotions on the subconscious. The ego doesn't understand how to determine what's good and what's bad for me. It has been created by your beliefs and will fight to the death to prove them right. Our beliefs— I draw here— our beliefs are the ego's algorithm. It will constantly work behind the scenes to bring up into your life experience what it thinks you want to see, which is the beliefs: I am not enough, I am dumb. It will constantly bring up situations to prove that belief. All addicts possess some version of the belief that they aren't enough, some flavor. The ego will constantly scan an addict's environment and find ways to prove that they aren't enough. So when we are reminded again and again that we aren't enough, we feel that negative emotion, danger. So some of us use drugs. Alcohol, food, sex, the phone, love, etc., to quiet that pain, to go through the process of feeling temporarily safe. The ego wants you to use drugs again because it remembers how safe and good you felt. Ironically, if you see how this is working, because we haven't worked to change our beliefs, we are allowing the ego to form a negative Feedback loop. Like Dr. Gabor Mate says, the ego can never get enough. It doesn't even know the concept. Let's look at this chart. This is my my way of hopefully making all of this align and make sense. This is ego's negative feedback loop. So in the middle you see ego. It's that ball of string, right? Obscuring your light. It has two roles: safety and proving your beliefs. If you start at number one, you start with a belief that I am not enough. The ego will bring life experience to prove your belief. That's part of its job patterns. You're reminded that you're not enough, and that brings an emotional trigger danger. The drug misuse brings your feelings of. Safety, so that drug misuse is imprinted by the ego as a safety plan. So the ego's working to prove your beliefs, and the ego's working to keep you safe. That goes into addiction. Number six continues because the beliefs remain the same because then you're back at the start. The belief that's running all of this is I am. I'm not enough. Of course, there'll be links to my newsletter, there'll be links to these graphics, and all the other sources that I use here. So the ego's role again is to keep us safe and provide evidence of our beliefs. This leads to the addiction cycle. So what's next? The ego thinks is malleable. We are the observers and the co-creators of our life experiences. That means we have the power to edit our ego, and so we can change our reality. But we must begin by changing the beliefs that run the ego. We must see our true nature. It's separate from what we call I, what we think of as I and self is not our true nature. Altering the ego, altering the nature of it, outlines a new identity for yourself. Change the beliefs, change your identity. Carl Jung also, also wrote, the first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego. The second half is going inward and letting it go. So whether our ego is healthy Or in most cases, maladaptive. Our role in recovery is to let go of the beliefs that shape the ego. Addiction recovery begins once you've become familiar with your ego's nature, what's running it. Your job is to remove the beliefs that are obstructing your perfect light. Quitting the substance for thousands of consecutive days does not Equal radical recovery. So to begin understanding the nature of your ego, you begin to pay attention to what triggers you, what activates your emotions in a negative way. These actually are gifts. They're gifts from the nervous system, gifts from your subconscious. They're gifts from the universe that are guiding you along the path to uncover what the beliefs are. The ego is proving the belief, but it's also producing the trigger to show you what the belief is. Now, I have a quick guide. It's an 8-step guide that starts with trigger and helps you go through the steps to get down and uncover what the belief is. It's very quick. It's very useful. I'm going to put the link in the description. So there are so many people in recovery who are addicted to not being addicted, right? The propensity is to numb that same pain that drove you to addiction with recovery. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. You know, you'd probably rather be addicted to recovery than addicted to the drug or the behavior, right? However, when you do this, You bypass the work. The ego goes unchanged, and when it goes unchanged and that belief stays there, it will find new ways to meet the same objectives. It will find new ways to prove your beliefs, and you can see the evidence of this by some people in recovery when they're being constantly triggered. They're disconnected from themselves. They're unhappy. They're struggling with a disease every day of their life and lost. Without a regular meeting. You have the power to create a life of self-love, a life of peace, and a life of fulfillment. Through this miracle that we've been given called free will, you can take control of the subconscious and become the author of your life. You don't have to be at the mercy of your ego. Giving you a lot to digest here. It's heavy topics, but I want you to really allow this to sink in. Meditate on it. Listen to it again if you have to. I've given you a lot of tools here, and there's a lot of links in the description. If you want more, reach out to me. My email is dallas@drdallasbragg.com. We can schedule a free session, go through a meditation. We can go through the, the quick guide. There's a lot of things we can do initially that'll give you some really valuable clues on this road to understanding what those beliefs are so you can begin to unravel. That's called ego death, right? So this is the key to addiction recovery. It's very, it's very powerful. Not just addiction recovery, but it's the key to changing your life. If you like this video, like you to subscribe, like it, share it. Um, I like to, uh, put out a video a week this year in 2024, but this video is valid any time of the year. Thank you very much, and I love you.