"The ego is the worst confidence trickster we could ever figure, we could ever imagine. Because you don’t see it…” -Dr. Yoav Dattilo, Ph.D.

"It disguises it’s thoughts as your thoughts, it’s feelings with your feelings, you think it’s you.” -Leonard Jacobson

"People’s need to protect their own ego knows no bounds, they will lie, cheat, steal, kill, do whatever it takes to maintain what we call, ego boundaries.” -Andrew Samuels, Ph.D.

The ego is present to teach you that fear is created by you in your own thoughts.  To become friends with your ego is to identify it as "not you" and see it as highlighting your fears and then use this to cause self growth.... 

To feed your ego and seek others to feed your ego is the loop that keeps us asleep " at an awareness level" and in Groundhog Day repeating the same patterns over and over again, sometimes the same characters and sometimes new ones. Most loops become addictive with highs and lows but the highs always dependent on external so not able to be given to you by you and co-dependent.  No self growth becomes a boring and depressing pattern to be stuck in.

So instead of feeding your ego, you can starve it by testing your fears and seeing how real they are and how much bullshit your ego convinced yourself...

You can do this by first identifying that you feel and think fear about something and ask yourself "what am I most afraid of?" "What is the worst that could happen?" Get to the most bottom cause of that fear, not the surface one. Keep drilling down to the most basic reason of why you are afraid.

If the answer is about other people's perceptions of you, you are listening to ego chatter and tell it to f@#$k off! It is none of your business what other people perceive of you and is really out of your control. To think you need to worry about, change or be concerned about another's perception of you is a form of control over you and others. Subtly you let the inner dialogue control you into doing things you really have no need to do.

Remember the ego is not you, but learning programs that have been given to you to deal with and grow through or choose to suffer in ego and losing touch with the real you that loves. Can self love. 

These programs were not with you at birth. They were installed by you over time by listening to the cult-ure you grew up with. Some of them are very obvious but others not so much since there is mass indulgence of ego across the planet. Some serve a consumerist, capitalistic and controlling economy and steal people's time, health and money.

Simply testing your fears by seeing if they are real helps you break out of the prison in your own mind you create that stops you from doing what you want because you are afraid.  So maybe the opposite of ego is courage to face your fears. To go, I am going to see how real this self talk is and know what is "real". Instead of letting (destructive self talk) ego be the bully and push you around, start to push back and ask how real are you?

Your ego is not you, not your friend, not anything other than a mechanism for your growth past your fears.  It mirrors your anticipation of fear and doubles down harder when you listen to it.....

Ego is weak when you realise it is not you and you can start to see it come in and hear the nonsense it goes on with and then steal time from you by being in your thoughts for as long as you let it..... Start noticing it and tell it to piss off!

"People have no clue that they’re in prison, they don’t know that there is an ego, they don’t know the distinction.” -Leonard Jacobson

"There is no such thing as an external enemy, no matter what that voice in your head is telling you. All perception of an enemy is a projection of the ego as the enemy.” -Dr. Deepak Chopra M.D.

"In that sense, you can say that 100% of our external enemies are of our own creation.” -Dr. Peter Fonagy, Ph.D., FBA

"Your greatest enemy is your own inner perception, your own ignorance, is your own ego.” -Dr. Obadiah S. Harris, Ph.D.