I don’t know about you but I’m done (“sick and tired” is the trite expression I believe most used), making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, again! I want to be healthy and operate from a wise, confident disposition for my sake and for the sake of others. I owe it to myself. And you owe it to yourself. You’re not your mistakes. You’re not your feelings. You’re not even your personality. True, we’ve all made mistakes; we all have feelings; and we all have a personality, but that only speaks to our species—Homo sapiens, anthropologically speaking. But you’re so much more. You are who God designed you to be—His beloved, spiritually and psychologically speaking. And that should be enough.
Ironically, one of my main concerns writing about the topic of the human ego or personality adopted for survival, which is not necessarily who the person is or who the person has become, is that I’d inadvertently write while operating under the false pretense of the ego—the false self/the borrowed self/the shadow self/the imposter—in order to fulfill “ego manifestation goals.” Put positively, to best help others understand how they can be truly authentic and alive and thus thrive, I needed to be honest about my motivations for writing such an empowering and life-changing article about the core of who we really are and our associated actions.
Before I define EMGs, I believe it’s important to clarify the difference between the human ego and the true self.
They both claim the identity of a person, but only one does it justice because of the authority given to it by its Creator. The former assumes who she is as a product of nature and nurture—her personality, while the latter desires to understand the effects of nature and nurture on her identity out of a sense of discipline and devotion to God au fait with His loving disposition.
So what are “ego manifestation goals” (EMGs)? Let me start by telling you a story. As my friend and confidant, Kevin Kridner, and I walked around the park near my house on a sunny Saturday afternoon, we talked about the human ego and how deceptive it can be if not exposed, understood and ultimately loved. That got me thinking about how we—each of us—protect our false identity and its desires by justifying harmful behavior. Then, with an attitude of confession, we went round-and-round sharing our “ego manifestation goals.” (I’d never heard that term before our cathartic walk. As it turns out, he’d coined it on the spot.) EMGs are actions that are not necessarily bad in and of themselves but are done out of inauthentic motives to be accepted by others (and thus unknowingly entrapped to their imperfect image of who we are, see Proverbs 29:25) instead of seeking to better know and be known by our gentle and kind Creator as His beloved children, as well as the image bearers of creativity, truth and justice He created us to be.
An example I shared with Kevin was my academic trek to earn a PhD in systematic theology from a prestigious university, some years ago. I’m convinced that if I were to take a sociological poll, the majority of people surveyed would agree that there’s nothing wrong with desiring to accomplish such a rigorous intellectual goal. Matter-of-fact, I’d go as far as to say that it would be considered admirable and honorable. But what if done with supercilious motives, reasons that only look for the good of the person seeking to be rewarded at the expense of other people’s well-being? Then, not so much. Assessing EMGs is a game changer. Self-examination is of utmost importance (see Psalm 139:23-24). As we witnessed with my personal debacle, the goal ceased to be honorable and can best be described as an “ego manifestation goal.”
No matter the goals or accomplishments, no matter the accolades or amount of initials after a name, if a person operates with an “end justifies the means” mentality, she is not being true and thus loving to others and herself. Sadly, it’s been my experience that most of us operate from a similar frame of mind. We want results so we do whatever it takes to accomplish them. But at what cost? The cost of a marriage? The cost of a friendship? The cost of morality? The cost of a true identity? My endeavor to be a beloved university professor with the initials PhD after my name engraved onto a name plate on my desk was my greatest desire, no my most obsessive desire, greater even than the financial, emotional and spiritual well-being of my own family. Ironically, I dreamt of being a loved spiritual mentor and teacher to my students but I was failing as a loving, spirit-filled father and husband at home. I identified most with the desire to be a prodigious professor as part of affirming my borrowed identity of how others viewed me, not my true identity as a perfectly and eternally loved child of God.
The reason EMGs are so destructive, no matter how great the accomplishments, is because the person who is unaware of who she really is, sadly, is merely a shell of a person like an oyster that creates a pearl from an irritation inside itself. No matter how many layers of beautiful minerals that give it its shiny iridescence, it’s still a foreign object to itself at the core of itself. Perhaps Socrates was right: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”