“Power struggles are a major problem in love relationships, and
I have found that whenever a power struggle develops between
partners, at least one of the following aspects of ego is at
work: 1. The need to be right; 2. The need to be in control; 3.
The need to be distracted; or 4. The need to feel superior or
inferior.
1) The need to be right pits us against each other. When we are
attached to being right, we feel compelled to defend ourselves at
all costs. We don’t want to see the other person’s side of
the story, because if we did, it might threaten the case we’ve
built. So we dig in our heels, hoping to wear the other person
down. We do this because deep down inside we feel small and
afraid. The ego believes only one of us can win, so it’s
fighting for its life.
If we were to take a more spiritual approach and recognize that
the Spirit in me is the same Spirit in you, we would no longer
need to be right. Rather than fearfully clinging to our smaller,
more selfish agenda, we could shift our goal to finding common
ground.
2) The need to be in control is the ego’s way of urging us to
hold tightly to the reins if we want to be safe. We’d better
put things in their place, including our partners, says the
fearful voice inside us. When I get into control mode, it’s
usually because I am scared that things won’t work out as I
think they should, and that, at the end of the day, I won’t be
okay.
3) The need to be distracted is the ego’s way of coping with
the anxiety of going it alone. There is a tremendous amount of
fear and pressure that goes with the belief that you have to
figure everything out for yourself. When the responsibility
becomes too much, the ego looks for distraction; it is a way of
surviving. And in our society, there is no shortage of
distraction from the deeper issues of our humanity. Sensational
news, demanding work schedules, lifestyle pressures, sports
events, e-mail, computer games: these are just a few of the
stimuli that compete for our attention. And trumping all of these
is the drama we can create in our relationships; nothing beats a
good knock-down drag-out fight to get our mind off the gnawing
fear that we can’t keep it all together. When we sweat the
small stuff, we successfully distract ourselves from the larger
anxiety that the ego maintains of being separate and alone in a
big, scary world.
In other words, you may make a big deal about your husband coming
home an hour later than he said he would, or lay into your wife
for not running the household as well as you think she should,
but really, deep down inside, you are just trying to distract
yourself from the absolute terror of not being able to keep all
the pieces of your life together. But you see, we are not meant
to hold it all together; we are not the glue of life. Spirit is.
We are at our best when we accept our role as co-creators with
Spirit.
4) The need to be superior or inferior is the ego’s way of
keeping us apart from each other by focusing on flaws. It plagues
us with attacks of self-pity or delusions of grandeur that keep
us from the fundamental truth that we are all created equally and
from the same source. Because the ego has no awareness of our
inherent Oneness, it sets us adrift on our narcissistic
wanderings. Our sense of worth should never depend upon how much
better or worse we are doing than someone else. Rather, it should
be rooted in the knowledge that we are all created perfectly by
God.