The Death and Rebirth of Our Ego

Here, the failed entrepreneur describes what came out of the trauma caused by the bankruptcy:

Until that point, I had lived my life through the eyes of other people. I had defined myself through object-reference—my sense of identity and my feelings of self-worth were tied directly to the outer circumstances of my life—all of these external references were stripped away. When I looked in the mirror, I did not know who I was. For me, the ego-death and subsequent “rebirth” was a wonderfully and powerfully transformative event. I experienced a sort of “awakening” in which I realized in a flash of insight that “I” was not my ego or the external trappings of my life. “I” was still all that [it] had ever been, my true self. Nothing that was real and certain had changed, just superficial aspects of my environment (Youngblood, 1997, p. 208).