I told Richard I wanted to become an expert on ego.

I said it half as a joke. Thirty-one years of sobriety and I still hadn’t heard that Jung stood behind the whole thing — Rowland Hazard, the Oxford Group, Ebby Thacher, Bill Wilson, the whole chain of custody that runs from a psychiatrist’s office in Zurich to a folding chair in a church basement. I’d gone looking, found spiritus contra spiritum, and something in me wanted to go deeper. Master it. Know it the way I know a motor.

Richard didn’t let it pass. That’s perfectionism, he said. That’s the very thing you’re trying to understand, showing up in the trying.

I sat with that longer than I wanted to.

Because he was right, and I could feel how right he was in the particular way my stomach dropped. Wanting to become an expert on ego is not the opposite of ego. It’s ego finding a new costume. The same architecture that needs to be thorough, ahead, competent, the guy who’s done the work — that architecture doesn’t care what the subject matter is. It’ll take spiritual formation as readily as it took tuning, sobriety, fatherhood. Anything can become the next arena for the self that has to earn its way into being okay.

So I let it go. Or tried to. Landed on something simpler — an attitude of love and kindness in every circumstance, which depends on loving myself first, which depends on knowing who I actually am in God’s eyes rather than who I’ve assembled myself into being. Let go and let God. I’ve said those words for three decades. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the floor of them the way I did in that chair.

But I pushed back too. Awareness of the enemy is good, I said. You don’t disarm what you can’t see coming.

I still think that’s true. I just think I had the terrain wrong. I’d been picturing awareness as a body of knowledge — three frameworks, cross-referenced, footnoted. Freud’s ego as mediator between drive and reality. Jung’s ego as the conscious center that starts posing as the whole self once it forgets the unconscious, the shadow, everything it split off to survive. AA’s blunter version — self-will run riot, the insistence on running the show, being your own source of security. And under all of it, the Christian frame that’s been forming in me for thirty years: ego as the self trying to be its own generator instead of its own receiver. Self-built instead of self-received. Ephesians 2. Romans 10. The whole argument I had with Robert’s book, really, compressed into one word.

All of that is true and none of it is the terrain. The terrain is a Thursday night with a guest at the table and my wife interrupting me, talking over me, again, while I was already running on fumes from a week that had eaten every hour I had — a crisis at work, her father declining, nothing left in the tank. And something old and fast rose up in me. Wounded. Overlooked. The kid who learned to read a room for signs he didn’t matter.

I didn’t reason my way past it. I prayed. Sat with it. Didn’t defend, didn’t perform hurt, didn’t let the old verdict — I am wrong, I am invisible — write the scene. I knew where she was. I knew what she was carrying. I chose not to make her interruption about me.

She rubbed my back. Stopped. Something passed between us that didn’t need words. She knew. I could forgive her, easily, because there was nothing left to forgive that hadn’t already been met.

That’s the whole essay, really. Everything else is commentary.

Because here’s what I keep circling back to: the study has a ceiling and the practice doesn’t. I can know every framework — Jung’s, Freud’s, Bill W.’s, Paul’s — and still get run by the same reflex at the dinner table if I haven’t actually let go of the need to be right about being hurt. And I can know almost none of it, the way I knew none of it months ago before a friend stopped me mid-sentence and said you know Jung was behind all this, right? — and still, in the actual moment, love instead of defend. The knowledge helps. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t; I’ve built my whole recovery on the conviction that understanding matters, that words for things are how you get free of them. But knowledge was not what happened at that table. Presence was. A fast, unglamorous return to who I actually am underneath the reflex.

I don’t have a clean resolution for the divide I felt — between the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of just being kind in the room you’re standing in. I suspect it isn’t a divide so much as a sequence, and I’m impatient about the order. Understanding is supposed to serve the moment, not replace it. The three frameworks are a map. Madeline’s hand on my back was the territory.

Spiritus contra spiritum. The spirit against spirits. Maybe the same is true of ego and love — not two forces in equal contest, but one that only ever masquerades as strength, and one that’s been the real thing since before I had language for either.

I just have to keep finding my way to the right door. Apparently even the search for the door can become the wrong one, if I’m not careful.