The Solution to Ego Addiction

Dialectic Behavior Therapy requires a trusted facilitator with a psychotherapy background to help the client realize that the root of his problems is ego addiction.

A brief definition of ego addiction is the unhealthy exercise of a person's ego which results in negative feelings of abandonment, grief, guilt, psychic pain, and remorse out of proportion with any given situation.

Furthermore, ego addiction may be harder to recover from, because the afflicted have only a vague concept of ego and how it arises; yet they cling to it strongly.

Easterners have a stronger concept of ego and its originations. This is why they reject psychiatry and the DSM. It also explains their belief in karma.

In the East, it isn't the ego that leads to mental illness.

Rather, it is clinging to the idea that the ego is a permanent entity to the point where one fears nonexistence, and strongly believes the self-as-neutral-observer to be a permanent soul.

For certain Easterners who have carefully studied esoteric Buddhism, the five senses and their organs are the five consciousnesses, the mind is the sixth, and the ego and that "soul" are the seventh and eighth consciousnesses.

For advanced meditators, relief from mental unrest is found by visualizing oneself as the deity (usually Amitabha Buddha) and where one is meditating as the mandala palace (the Pure Land). In Vajrayana Buddhism, it may be White Tara and her Pure Land.

Amida Buddha and his Pure Land of Bliss is actually the symbol for peace of mind.

Thus the solution to the mental unrest caused by ego addiction begins by first stilling the mind through meditation in a social setting conducive to it.

Then, as a result of dialog and practice with a trusted master (therapist), the practitioner behaves in a peaceful and non-violent manner.