Elephant Trails

Last post I talked about the shadow and how common it is to do something that keeps you in the position you’re in, but be determinedly unconscious of it.  The most common (and often substantial) problems in our lives are also the hardest to see, the largest elephants are somehow the most stealthy.

Our elephants are a funny lot, we’ve trained them so well to hide from us, but people that know us are kind of amazed we keep on making the same dumb mistakes. Over and over, the repetition strengthens them. Identifying these patterns is central to not just hating everything, as they happen in all major areas of our life, in formative relationships with family members, significant others, and way too often everyone else. Look for the times when you are feeling a strong, usually negative, emotion, or when other people just aren’t a fan of you. Look at what happened.  These patterns give us these beliefs (about ourselves) that make no sense except for the fact we cannot stop believing them.

Giant hoofs have been plodding along on that trail since we were children, and many elephants are doing the same walk their ancestors did.  We seemingly wonder how these illusory pachyderms can infiltrate our life in the same ways. It is often not until we accept that we are our own elephants that life shows us how well-trodden their trails are.  Our trails, our problems and solutions, are located in the same place. It is something that we all dimly realize, and our normal solution is to put up so many walls that we think, because we can’t see it, the elephant doesn’t exist.

The most damning thing about our elephants, and our monsters, is their trails are so rigged and hidden that others can’t help but fall into them. Even if they themselves don’t fall into them, we place others there because we feel like we need someone in that trail and then we can project whatever onto them.  Everyone else is to blame or you are the only one that deserves it and both answers are half-right. How do you rework the path? Blaming yourself for blaming others will just keep you locked in that circular trail, which is exactly what created it in the first place.

To rework it, you have to realize you are the elephant and you are making a new trail. Trails and elephants are varied, and while I use them to describe the common problematic cycles in our everyday life, everywhere you look you will see a cycle,  from the mundane and common to our most difficult and specific problems. The elephant that I will use in this analogy is addiction, something that has bested me for half my life (everyone has their own path, this is speaking in generalities because I am me and different from you, you must make your own specific trail.).

1. Map it Out:  First, you want to be able to map it out, scout out how you want your new path to look. begin clearing the brush, believing that this new trail can take you where you want to be.  Identify your problems with the path and the bigger things you will need to remove.
2. Stumps: There will be trunks of big obstacles that spring up from your memories, these trees will be cut by standing up to them and facing them. Don’t feel dumb if you run into a tree, just mark it to start cutting down. You might cut down a tree in a burst of energy or do it slowly by doing something like cutting down on your intake. Once cut, you are left with a stump, and then the real work begins.  There can be stumps of the feelings and memories, stumps of your fears, or concrete visible problems still in your life. Stumps are a bitch to move. You have to dig around the stump, gaining traction by changing behaviors, building yourself up with new hobbies, ways of thinking and positive groups of people and situations, until you can remove a stump safely by fully cutting its roots.  
3. Roots: All those stumps have roots, and there are far more roots than you will first see.  Most of these roots will be dead, something that you still cling on to but don’t know why, and are things that are far reaching in every way and were first planted long before you knew it.  You can remove roots by looking at the similar cycles and coping mechanisms that you negatively fall into and begin working on them individually.
4. Water: The way water accumulates can destroy a trail as it washes out a path and causes ruts.  There will be times when you are flooded, and you never suspected it. Sometimes you suspect it and are still swamped. This flooding can take the way of temptation, and without small ditches dug–emergency plans for you to do something to hold low water–you are engulfed.  You will mess up and be in a bad situation sometimes, and emergency plans when you are tempted are needed for something automatic to hold on to. Sometimes you will get flooded and you just need to remind yourself that the trail is still there and the water will dry.
5. Landscaping: This is the most important part.  Some cycles won’t need every step here, but you will always need this one. This is the pruning out of negative thoughts, the loving yourself, and the mindful redirection that you deserve this change. It sounds cheesy, because it kind of is. It also sounds cheesy because you probably aren’t too used to actually loving yourself, feeling like you deserve a new healthier trail and are capable of creating it. No matter how developed your trail is, it will just become overrun again without landscaping.

I am very excited to now know that my undergraduate degree of Recreation, Park & Tourism Sciences was not in vain.  Keeping a path is hard, that’s why it’s harder to deliberately make one instead of letting life and nature make you an easy one.   

This is a big, demanding cycle that really takes a lot of change and determination to make possible. If you think because you’re a big ole elephant and you can walk anywhere you want you need to realize your a big dumb elephant and you are always on some trail, even when you are standing still. We are all big dumb elephants sometimes, and sometimes we are really, really smart, and we can be dumb and smart at the same time. We’re just elephants. Staying mindful of that is a helpful way to keep your trail manageable.

All the wonky cyclical stuff our brain does from being addicted or depressed or whatever interests me and I am jazzed to talk about it later. However, our elephants aren’t the only thing that have these trails, and you can find cycles in your life everywhere.  The ones that are the easiest to see and the ones that brought the most change for me are the ones that deal with interpersonal relationships. They are the ones I mentioned earlier that deal with your reaction to events, and how your reaction perpetuates the cycles that you are often caught in.

Also, the quickest way to do all of this, for me, was to get myself a good therapist or analyst.  They are professional trail builders. You aren’t going to find all your trails on your own, you literally can’t because they are unconscious. Dummy.