“I’m too open! Shut it down! Return my defenses!”
Why this is a wall:
You spent the better part of your childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood building up your ego. It has served you well, driving and protecting you, handing you your greatest achievements, and securing resources and relationships that kept you safe. Thank you, ego—you did so much! And then you took some psychedelics and your ego got disturbed, maybe even dissolved or transcended. In your non-ordinary state of consciousness, you might have seen the way your ego, despite its clear benefits to you, has also prevented you from flourishing, kept you from meaningfully connecting to others, contributed to your biggest mistakes and regrets, and maybe even propelled your least helpful beliefs, behaviors, and personality traits. Faced with the fact that your main operating system may be filled with glitches and broken algorithms, you bravely decide to shed some of its bloated claims on your consciousness. Post-journey, you take seriously the need to reconsider and recalibrate, perhaps to bring back those core parts of yourself that have been overshadowed by your ego.
But then life happens. Somebody says something shitty to you. Your day goes badly. A difficult experience triggers old wounds and patterns. You try to make a new move based on messages you received in your journey but it fails. Suddenly, your ego jumps back into the driver’s seat and takes the wheel, and in a snap you’re back where you were, muddling along with an old tool that wants to stay in charge of this new consciousness you were trying to access. As you try to integrate, you might confront self-doubts and fears, and you might feel a strong urge to return to old, rigid patterns of thinking and reacting to protect parts that are still afraid of the light of day. This is called an ego backlash. It’s normal, common, and totally okay. Seriously—it’s a thing you should expect. Be gentle with yourself when it happens. Your ego isn’t your enemy, but it can be a bit bossy. Finding ways to acknowledge it, notice what it is doing and what it wants, then set it aside without judgment can help you take an ego backlash and turn it into just a temporary ego surge that soon subsides. You are who you are because of your ego, but you will only be who you’ll become when you get that ego to relax a bit. And remember: the ego backlash is not a failure; it’s a natural part of growth. Be patient with yourself, and realize that the insights you gained in medicine are not lost—they’re just settling in.
Potential ladders:
Feeling the fight-or-flight impulse and getting underneath it. Go ahead, acknowledge that these insights from medicine have left you more open than you’re used to, but the world is still a scary place. Though emotional threats are not grizzlies in the bushes our neurology still reacts to them as if our lives are at stake. Your hypothalamus and amygdala—the lizard brain we all have—will still activate when you perceive a threat, and then it’s game on for the fight-or-flight response. But you don’t have to let that automatic safety system rule the day. Try this instead: faced with a stressor or trigger, pause for a minute and just feel the rush of the perceived threat in your body as it goes on red alert. Feel that. Where does it go in your body? Trace it. Watch it like a curious observer who wants to listen to it, know it, understand it. Breathe. Don’t try to suppress the feeling or tell it it’s wrong—this is not a time for argument or judgment. Receive the feeling and honor it. Maybe even thank it for its service and protection. If you’re with others, excuse yourself and get a few minutes of solitude to do this noticing, tracing, and thanking. Then make the turn to what’s underneath it. Ask it: What wants to be felt here? What is the need this red alert system is trying to satisfy? What exactly are you afraid might happen if you don’t fight or flee? Let the answers to those questions reveal the tender parts of you that want to be seen, heard, held, and nurtured. Then see, hear, hold, and nurture them.
Befriending the resistance. We can reduce paralyzing self-judgment by exploring our ego’s resistance with curiosity. Shame and blame, labels and judgments—these reactions to a surging ego will only force its hand. If we confront it head on, our ego is likely to just bring a “Come at me, bro!” kind of energy. We don’t want a bar fight; we want a calm, careful, loving engagement. How to do this? Take a few minutes to unplug from the situation that’s bringing the ego surge (journaling can be a great way to do this because it slows us down and gets us in creation mode which is naturally opening rather than tightening), and ask yourself: What part of me feels most resistant to my psychedelic insights? What is this resistance trying to protect me from? If I could meet this resistance with compassion instead of frustration or judgment, how would I respond? What is the need I am experiencing that is convincing my ego that it needs to dominate? What are other resources I have that might get this need met without allowing the ego to control it all? Or simply ask, “Hey ego, I see you there. Seems like you need something right now. What is it? How can I help?”
Rewriting your inner narratives. Sometimes we can be pretty hard on ourselves. We yell at the parts of us that are resistant to change and we get super judgy about our capacity to do things better than we did them yesterday (or decades ago). But yelling just isn’t the best tool for us here. An analogy: drill sergeants can be very effective when you need to get a platoon up a muddy hill, but you wouldn’t want them teaching kindergarten where compassion, patience, and understanding should be the priorities. Our soft, vulnerable, tentative, and often wounded inner selves need care and tending, not commands and tirades. If we lapse into old patterns or ego-driven reactions it’s not an indication we’re bad, weak, or dumb and need to be disciplined. We may just need to tell the story differently. If we shift from fear-based to growth-based storytelling, we open space for our inner selves to relax, release, and recharge. For example, rather than saying to ourselves “I’m not capable of change,” which is a very limiting assessment of what is likely just a temporary resistance to a new way of being or behaving, we might say instead, “I may not see all the changes yet, but I am open to transformation.” This re-telling cuts you some slack, gives you room to grow, and avoids labeling your setbacks as ontological flaws. You’re just a human figuring stuff out, doing the best you can, getting a little better at it every day. Extend some grace to yourself and tell the story in a way that recognizes both your effort and essential goodness.