Frequency of “I”; The Psychology of Ego Statements
What does the frequency of using “me”, “myself”, and “I” mean psychologically? — OfPublicInterest.03
When we use “I” statements our ego is talking, and we can often think that someone using too much “I” is overly narcissistic. While that might be true in many ways, it’s not in others. It really depends on how we use it. Now, you might be thinking, “the ego is bad and must be killed”; however, that’s a ‘new-age’ type of quest that is firmly lodged in misunderstanding the ego. Our ego tells us how we feel about things in life and allows us to have confronting conversations in disarming ways. But if it goes uncontrolled, the ego can be a terrible thing that focuses on the “I” with toxicity.
The Dark Side of Ego, Our Shadow
Ego is intrinsic to all of us, operating almost constantly within our thoughts as the narrative that we perceive the world as, telling us first-person stories regarding our place in it. These stories may become somewhat stretched from reality because of the way we experienced childhood. Our childhood develops our darker shadow egos because as children we must find a place that protects us, somewhere that we feel safe when safety is not with our adults. Sometimes that safety is only available as fantasies in our heads, in self-betraying behaviour that doesn’t provoke anyone, or grandiose behaviour that pumps us up.
The other day I was out for a ride along the Nightcliff esplanade and as I approached a café, there was a sad kid dragging his feet ten steps behind his mother. She was moving quickly, clearly agitated. When I came to pass, I overheard her on the phone complaining to someone about how much he’d been complaining all morning. Read that again and let the irony sink in.
He could hear this from his mother. Imagine what a child is feeling, on top of being dismissed, when they hear the person that they depend on complaining about them and their feelings like that. Imagine where he learns to complain and pout. Imagine the scene when I came back the other way and they’d taken an alfresco seat in the sun, each looking sourly in different directions.
All I saw were two children using their egos to protect themselves, only one acting their age. I wanted to say something, tell the mother to look into her shadow, and tell the little boy that I see him. But I didn’t, I just rode by wondering if he’ll have to go through four or five relationships before he figures out that he’s valuable, and wondering if he won’t.
I also wonder if you nodded along as you read that, or if you picked up that it was my ego that told a conclusive story about this duo without directly interacting with them. I judged them in seconds. Why? Partly because my shadow-self got away from me and needed to tell me a negative story about a stranger to prop myself up, that I’m better, and partly because it resonated with me.
When I was a child, my schoolteachers would tell me that I should do things because they said so, that I shouldn’t talk back if I disagreed and that I had an attitude. My parents and other adults around me would say the same things. As most kids do, I made noise when I felt something raw, and I was emotionally dismissed and ignored. This would make me feel angry and ultimately powerless over my life.
I began to protect myself by being compliant to authority because what they taught me was that anywhere I felt inferior, whether to a legitimate hierarchy or simply a confident peer, I should betray myself. You can imagine what my anti-authoritarian rebellious phase was like, but it didn’t last. The result was being a pushover and easily used without the ability to stand up for my value. This was my core belief, I’m not valuable (translation: not loveable, worthy, or good enough). This “I” statement was what my ego had concluded about my identity.
The flip-side, and not a positive one, of this childhood conditioning was that anywhere that I didn’t feel inferior, I felt like I was the authority. I felt superior. I would state my point of view on a topic as though it was fact and completely dismiss any other perspectives because that’s what I was taught to do. I was taught to be narrow-minded by being taught to blindly respect authority without explanation. Because ultimately, blind authority is narrow-minded. Thankfully I’ve outgrown many of these things, but that work is a story for another time.
There are other ways that important adult figures can traumatise us. Such as parents that continually and unapologetically cross a child’s boundaries, like entering their room without permission or reading their diary. This behaviour teaches them that boundaries don’t matter, which may result in a grandiose core belief of I’m entitled (e.g., shoplifting, climbing on sacred sites) mixed with a vulnerable belief of I’m not valuable. We also see this on a social level, where one race or class continually, unapologetically, and inconsequentially crosses the boundaries of another, teaching the children of the former that they are entitled and of the latter that they aren’t valuable.
Through childhood we learn some variation of I’m vulnerable or I’m superior as our ways of protecting ourselves. Often both, depending on the context that we’re in. These beliefs come with us to adulthood if we don’t learn better stress responses or see and control our shadow selves. Beliefs that become vulnerable and grandiose narcissistic traits (NOTE, not narcissistic personality disorder, that’s a much rarer and more severe condition). These traits may be well hidden from society, but there’s only a matter of time before they come out in our close relationships. If you think you don’t have any of these traits, then you have them, you just can’t see them yet.
Dismissing, and even belittling, a child’s emotional state is what we adults do when we haven’t learnt healthy mechanisms to deal with our own emotions, let alone that of a kid that is reaching meltdown. We also dismiss the emotions of children because we have the power of hindsight where we can see that what they are upset about is not a big deal, but we have forgotten that for a small person experiencing things for the first time with an undeveloped nervous system, everything is a big deal. And that is valid. We have forgotten empathy for children. We don’t see them; we shut them up.
What I’m telling you, as former children yourselves, is going to be nothing new to you; to varying degrees, childhood is traumatic. Our parents, our teachers, all the adults in our lives traumatised us in big and little ways. We’ve all got our stuff, sadly some more than others. But all these adults were children once, traumatised by the adults in their lives. As adults we do the best with what we’ve got. This is no excuse for our behaviour, but an opportunity to grow our compassion. No adult is perfect, which means no kid gets through unscathed. If you’re judging that mother at the café as I did, or me for doing it, or my parents and teachers, saying I would never, then you and I both have work to do on the dark side of our egos.
As a 34-year-old, working on seeing and controlling my ego is still my biggest daily task. That’s another joy of adulthood; our childhood becomes our responsibility. Our feelings and behaviours do not belong to our lover(s) or our children, they’re for us to own alone and for us not to pass on. Unprocessed and misunderstood childhoods are why we talk about “I” too much, bending reality and conversations back to ourselves.
Next time someone is taking up too much space in a conversation, or being superior or manipulative, try to be compassionate. See that they were a child, once struggling for control or visibility. They are using “I” in narcissistic frequencies because their damage is still raw. Kindly bring them back to their responsibility. But doing that is easier said than done and requires the light side of our egos to be strong.
The Light Side, Killing Our Ego is Death
Our ego is deeply important to our interpersonal interactions. While we’ve seen that our shadow selves need to be seen and controlled, we don’t want to kill our ego. To kill our ego would be the most disempowering thing we could do. Not only is ‘ego death’ not healthy for us, but it’s also not healthy for our community. We need our ego to speak up for our emotions and feelings so we don’t get walked on, while not enabling toxic behaviour of the shadow kind. This is where “I” statements can be used for good. But first, “You” statements.
“You” statements are accusatory extensions of our shadow self, and makes someone else responsible for our emotions and negative reactions, paints them as bad, makes them defensive (validly), and ultimately starts an argument. For example, “you’re always doing something with your friends, they’re more important to you than your family”, or “you’re talking over me and it’s rude”. These are accusations that punish rather than heal.
But when we use an “I” statement here, it is disarming because we retain ownership of our emotion and open the door for understanding without accusations leading to punishment and defensive arguments. For example, “I felt resentment towards you when you chose to go out with your friends because we haven’t been on a date in weeks”, or “I feel dismissed when you talk over me because it tells me that my perspective isn’t important to you”.
By talking in this way, you do four things: you retain ownership of your emotion, you objectively name their behaviour, you objectively name why it affected you, and you open the door to being seen.
“I feel” statements own our emotions and are commonly used in therapy. But many of us were never taught to recognise and name our emotions, so getting to this style of “I” statement can require a lot of work. From my own experience, asking your partner for time before you respond can allow you to curate a rational, albeit non-instinctual, “I” statement. But “I” statements can be disguised as “You” statements.
A few months ago, my partner and I were discussing something sensitive, boundaries. I was uncomfortable with where it was headed and I said, “I feel like you …”. I had simply put “I feel” on the front of a “You” statement. It took me a long time to see how my statement, said quite calmly, led to an enormous argument. While my intentions were good, I had made a mistake that damaged our relationship. Talking this way takes practice.
When we take responsibility for ourselves, we can take control of our egos. The result is that we empower ourselves while building healthy relationships that can last the inevitable storms.
Perhaps rather than counting how often we or someone else uses “I” statements, pay attention to how those statements are used. We can’t escape our ego because our own point of view is overwhelmingly dominant. You have immersive information on yourself every conscious second of your life, while you don’t have close to that level of information about others. But with work we can have a healthy control over our ego, telling ourselves stories about our place in the world where we practice viewing other perspectives too, and having responsible conversations. Otherwise, we can tip into narcissism in ways that make us wallow in self-pity, make others responsible for us, and manipulate reality. One road is hard, requires years of witnessing the ego while practicing control, and involves many regressions, and one is easy, but lonely. Which do you want to take?
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This essay is dedicated to Chiara, who requested for me to write about what the frequency of ego statements means psychologically.
Key Resources
How to Do the Work by Dr Nicole LePera
Emotional Intelligence by Dr Daniel Golman
The State of Affairs by Dr Esther Perel
‘How to use “I” statements’ — tonyrobbins.com
