The Ego Is Not the Enemy — Though the Armour We Inherit May be Programmed to Attack

A personal reflection on family conflict, inherited patterns, and healing the lineage

A few days ago, I had an argument with my father. I said my boundaries. He hung up the phone. And then — silence.

For days, we were both stuck. Not just in the argument itself, but in our own versions of it. My interpretation. His interpretation. Layers of old hurt sitting between us like walls.

And then something shifted.

I realised — the only thing I can actually control is my own approach. My own perception. Someone standing outside this situation would see it completely differently. That thought cracked something open.

It wasn’t really about the phone call.

What I was watching — in both of us — was ego at work.

Not ego as arrogance. Ego as the accumulated armour of generations. The compressed experiences of our grandparents, their grandparents. The things that were never healed, never said, never released — passed down quietly through blood and behaviour.

This is where the work of Heide Göttner-Abendroth speaks directly to what I experienced. Through decades of research and as founder of the International Academy HAGIA for Modern Matriarchal Studies, she documented something we in this space already feel to be true: that matriarchal societies are not built on dominance — they are built on consensus, balance, and maternal values.

But to understand this fully, it helps to know one distinction. Matriarchal describes a whole system of values — egalitarian, care-based, rooted in the mother as the centre of cultural and spiritual life. Matrilineality is one of its most visible expressions: the practice of tracing lineage, inheritance, and identity through the female line. In matrilineal cultures, something essential is preserved — the knowledge that where you come from passes through the mother. That memory, land, and belonging are carried in the female line across generations.

We see this in the Mosuo of Southwest China, where the grandmother holds the household together and property moves from mother to daughter across centuries. We see it in the Minangkabau of West Sumatra — the world’s largest matrilineal society — where the guiding values are not competition but care and nurture, and where the family home has belonged to women since anyone can remember.

In both cultures, the family is not a collection of competing individuals. It is a living lineage — tended, passed down, and nurtured across generations.

That is what I kept returning to when I thought about my argument with my father. Not who was right. But what we were both carrying — and how long it had been carried before either of us was born.

Ego as protection, not attack.

Here is what I deeply believe: ego was never meant to attack others. It was built to protect us. In previous generations — in families fractured by war, displacement, silence, or shame — a hardened, impenetrable ego may have been the only thing that kept someone alive. It learned to close before it could be hurt. To attack before it could be rejected — because rejection was what previous generations feared most. And perhaps still do.

Think of it like an internal AI — trained on old data, running old programmes, doing its best with what it learned.

But here’s the thing about AI. And about ego. We are still the ones in charge of how we use it.

The real us — underneath the defence mechanisms, the inherited reactions, the ancestral fear — is something much quieter and cleaner. Ego puts a blindfold over our eyes so we can’t see what is true and pure in other people. It keeps us fighting shadows instead of reaching for connection.

Healing the lineage is a choice. Sometimes it takes generations.

I don’t think healing a family happens in one conversation. Sometimes it takes lifetimes. But it starts the moment someone in the lineage wakes up and says: I want to understand where this comes from. I want to break the pattern.

That is the matriarchal impulse — not dominance, but stewardship. Tending to the roots so the whole tree can breathe.

If you are in a difficult relationship with someone in your family right now, I want to offer this gently:

Their ego reacting is not the whole of who they are. It is evidence of how hard that ego had to work, in some previous chapter of your shared story, just to survive.

A few days after our argument, my father sent me a weak joke. It was a small thing. But I recognised it immediately — it was his way of reaching out. When he later told me he had been facing an eye procedure, I understood. He had been scared. He had been carrying something he didn’t know how to say. His ego had reacted. But underneath it — he was just a person trying to navigate his own fear.

We are all, in our own way, navigating remnants of lineage we may or may not be consciously aware of, as so many of our family stories include traumatic disruptions. In remembering who we really are and where we came from, we have the opportunity to choose if we want the healing more than we want to be right.

This is part of an ongoing reflection on matriarchal art, ancestral healing, and what it means to carry your lineage with intention.

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