Author Introduction

 

It is often said that “love makes us do strange things”

 

Like most of us, all my life I’ve heard people saying this or that about their emotional needs. With couples we hear comments like “he only thinks of himself and doesn’t care about my needs.” What’s really interesting is that while we may know there is a truth and a deeper meaning to those types of statements, I do not believe that it really means people are uncaring. Maybe more accurate is that most of us just don’t know exactly what these needs are or have any understanding of how they work or tie together in our overall lives.

We do want to understand. Useful exploration of needs like love and purpose have struck a cord of universal interest with philosophers, deep thinkers and the rest of us throughout history. Huge amounts of information have been compiled over the years, especially in the last few centuries. Still, for the most part much of this information is unknown or has no practical application. Seemingly we have raised more questions than we have answered and people are no more fulfilled now than before.

 

Today the need for communication, understanding and the ability to maintain deep meaningful relationships with ourselves and others, is at an all-time high. In this book, I have set out to tie together these treasures of our past left us by forward thinking people from history who were ahead of their time. For me, this had to be done in a useful way, not only to clarify, but also to create understanding with practical use.

 

My unique perspective on this comes from developing an intimate understanding of our needs while spending four years speaking with people from all backgrounds on crisis and suicide lines. What I learned is that we all experience similar emotional desires and we share the same predictors for whether we feel fulfilled, or suicidal. Whether we have strong relationships or experience pain from not being able to meaningfully connect with others.

 

I have developed a simple concept for tying together our needs with a tool for understanding them that anyone can use. From casual relationships like sales, to important family or business relationships. This tool makes you immediately recognize the needs that are important to you and others, along with the ability to understand and shift how we satisfy them (the strategy). While this is a huge benefit, if only to improve your own life. For me, the greatest advantage and benefit is; to have a real tool of understanding for those difficult times when you absolutely must make a critical difference in the lives of those who you care about most.

 

When you think about it, it is almost guaranteed that at one time or another an important family member, a child, our partner, parent or friend will be in the midst of some emotional turmoil or faced with heartbreaking decisions. When that happens, this core strategy tool will help you to be the one who can make a meaningful difference and change lives for the better.

 

 

Chapter 20 Strategies, Not Stubbornness or Ego

 

Everyone, consciously or not, is running a strategy they have developed and that they believe is the appropriate way to behave in relation to themselves, others, and their environment. So when we see somebody behaving in any particular way, we can know that unconsciously they believe what they are doing should satisfy some or all of their top needs.

 

They are revealing their strategy in their actions.

People believe and feel at their core that what they are doing is right, and that if there were a better way to act, behave, or feel, they would have noticed it and made the appropriate adjustments themselves. If you, as an outsider, question their behavior or offer better solutions, you will likely be dismissed as not understanding the overall perfection of that person’s strategy. Because a person’s strategy is so unconscious and invested in the person’s judgment and experiences, any criticism is generally taken at a highly personal level. The person may not feel that you are questioning what they are doing, but rather you are judging them on the level of identity. You could be accidentally telling them they are wrong as a person. To be effective in helping anyone, including ourselves, we must separate “the way we are satisfying our needs” from, “who we are as a person.”

 

I did not come by this understanding easily. While doing many different kinds of research in human behavior, including years of helping people on crisis and suicide phone lines, I realized there were some interesting commonalities in people. For one thing, I noticed that when a person was feeling bad and admitting their life was not working, they still believed in and condoned what they were doing. They were desperately clinging to their beliefs, even if they felt suicide was the most reasonable option. While they might listen to someone else’s opinion how their situation could be improved or looked at differently, there was a level of conviction where a persons reasoning could not be penetrated unless their beliefs were validated or sided with. When you think about it rationally though, it’s ridiculous to even consider as a possibility that ending one’s life is a good idea. The thing that made me a believer in strategies as a need was that no matter how desperate someone was, everybody was always willing to perk up and give advice to me about their own strategy and how I should become more like them. Odd perhaps but when I inquired, everyone happily gave me their recommendations. This reveals the existence of a level where we all validate ourselves as making the best choices and responses given the situation.

 

Before this experience of talking to thousands of people in emotional and situational difficulty, I (and most people, for that matter) may have labeled this sort of behavior as defensive, stubborn, irrational, or egocentric. Instead, I now saw a universal pattern. A pattern so simple that, once it is recognized for what it is, will greatly assist someone with a desire to change. It is quite different from the idea of ego. Although similar to ego, it is also a pattern so strong that it will allow the person to approve of behavior that is destructive or even fatal to the self or others.

The key to unlocking this pattern, when it is destructive, it is to understand that it is a pattern of choices someone is making to satisfying their needs. When we understand what needs they are trying to satisfy, we can find behavior and vehicles that serve everyone involved better. This is true of a repeated pattern of self- destructive behavior or an isolated incident where someone is truly desperate, having lost their inner belief that they have a strategy to satisfy their needs that works in their current environment.

 

The reason we haven’t seen through to this pattern before may be largely due to looking at individuals as though they were their behavior, or that their behavior reflected some undefined part of themselves such as their ego or unconscious. I think it’s time we asked, “Do these old ideas lead us away from clear thinking that could give us solutions?” Do terms like irrational, stubborn, egomaniac, actually prevent us from thinking of solutions?

 

As part of a behavior model for explaining unconscious processes, Freud introduced the id, ego, and superego. It is well accepted that this model was perhaps good theory that did not translate into good practice. The initial definitions of these terms have changed over time, and today the ego is more understood as someone’s self-esteem or an exaggerated sense of self-worth, and in some cases is linked with our sense of identity.

 

Creating the term ego may have been fine if the theory had stopped there. Unfortunately, speculation by some clinicians and the general public did not stop there; many went on to assume a connection that egocentric behavior comes from some permanent physical part of us called the ego. This is a stretch of reason that sounds good because it identifies a cause. So good, that it was accepted as practical. This, even though we are usually using the term to define a behavior, there is no part of the human anatomy called the “ego.” Logically we know reasoning based on the existence of something that does not exist may obstruct clear reasoning and should be reconsidered.

 

To describe how someone is behaving or acting as being influenced by their ego causing them to be an egomaniac is not reflected in practical reality. To suggest there is a part of the human anatomy called an ego and another part that must keep it in check is to falsely create a map of nonexistent attributes. When this is done on a physical or identity level, it accidentally presupposes that change must also be made on those levels, rather than in behavior or our inaccurate maps.

 

I think Freud probably had the right intent though. Whether it’s ego or strategy, we are talking about a model for changeable behavior. In this case, I am clarifying and describing the behavior more accurately as a “process.” It is not an attribute of any individual; it is only our best unconscious effort to satisfy our needs.

Consider the following simple problem as an example of attribute misuse. Someone who does not know something can be taught it, right? At least usually. Whereas, if we say the very same person is “a dumb person,” we might consider that person to be incapable of learning. (It’s their identity.) In the first case we know how to handle a situation. In the second case we are not empowered to take the correct action.

 

We may believe that we cannot be fooled by these things and that we would somehow know the difference between someone lacking information and someone who is incapable of holding or processing information. In our fast and frivolous lifestyles, those little distinctions of how we categorize people shape our lives more than we may realize. What about others? What if we tell a four year old that they are a dumb person? Just to make sense of what you had said, they will need to make a map or picture of themselves with “dumb” as an identity level trait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This cannot be helpful.

 

I believe the term ego can be done away with conclusively once it is recognized that what we’re really trying to describe is the strong emotionalized conviction with which we unconsciously value our strategies. By simply understanding correctly that we are talking about a very changeable process rather than an unchangeable attribute, we are redirected in a way that is helpful and empowers us to unlock the mystery.

 

Just to clarify, I am not saying that ego and strategy are the same thing. I’m saying, in my experience, that all we need to understand is strategy. When we do, there is no need for the term ego, freeing us from its unintentional obstructions and unhelpful negative bias.