Transcending Self-Interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego

by Heidi A. Wayment

individuals (and, ultimately, society at large) may be best served by sustaining a flexible, situationally appropriate balance between the two orientations: Turn down the ego volume when it means expanding the self to incorporate new experiences, celebrating others, and acknowledging personal limitations in a reasoned and constructive manner, but turn up the volume when it means offering personal gifts, advocating creative solutions, and rallying against malevolent voices.

Optimal self-esteem, which reflects the sum of secure self-esteem markers, arises naturally from the following: (a) successfully dealing with life challenges; (b) the operation of one’s core, true, authentic self as a source of input to behavioral choices; and (c) relationships in which one is valued for whom one is, and not for what one achieves

Compassion for the failings and misdeeds of others is also met with understanding instead of harsh condemnation that simplistically reifies people as bad, so that unskilled actions and behaviors are seen in the context of shared human fallibility. Self-compassion involves taking a similar stance toward one’s own suffering, so that one is kind and understanding toward oneself when failure, inadequacy, or misfortune is experienced. Self-compassionate individuals recognize that pain and imperfection are an inevitable part of the human experience, something that we all go through instead of an isolated occurrence that happens to “me” alone. Having compassion for oneself also involves taking a balanced perspective on negative self-relevant emotions, so that personal pain is neither suppressed and denied nor exaggerated and dramatized.

Self-compassion can be thought of as a type of openheartedness in which the boundaries between self and other are softened—all human beings are worthy of compassion, the self included.

self-compassion represents a quiet ego, because one’s experience is not strongly filtered through the lens of a separate self.

Self-pity emphasizes egocentric feelings of separation from others and overdramatizes the extent of personal suffering. Self-compassion, however, allows one to see the related experiences of self and other without this type of distortion or disconnection.

the self may be thought of as a construct of attachments and aversions, which need to be transcended.