The One With All the Elephants

My friend got me an elephant for my room.
I said thanks. 
They said, “Don’t mention it.”

Ba-dum-tss. 🥁
But it's accurate, right? The thing we absolutely should mention is the thing that we absolutely don’t mention, because naming the thing can feel scary. Naming the thing kicks up feelings. Naming the thing threatens the habit and safety of “Everything is fine, shh, nothing to see here, move along I SAID MOVE ALONG.”

And yet naming the thing also dissolves half the charge. It opens a doorway that you thought was a jammed up, rusted shut bank vault. It lets you step out of an old agreement and into a new one. It's freeing.

Which brings us to this newsletter's theme: Elephants Everywhere.

Why did the elephant paint his toenails red?
To hide in a box of Smarties.

Have you ever seen an elephant in a box of Smarties? No?
Good disguise, huh?

This is what so many of us do with the patterns that stopped making sense but were set in when we were too young, too scared or too hurt to question them: we minimize the problems, we normalize the absurd. We paint the toenails red. 🤷🏻‍♀️🐘

We rationalize the tension in our shoulders as “just stress.” We explain away the chronic alertness/tension/trouble in our gut as “just how I am. After all, my family is like this too.” We walk around with years of inherited survival programming and call it our personality. But trust me, your personality is FAR bigger and better than the traumas that happened to you. It's the fridge (so to speak).

How do you know if there's an elephant is in your fridge?
You can't get the door shut.

How do you know an elephant was in your fridge?
There are footprints in the butter.

Minimizing gets absurd pretty fast, because we have to keep the crazy storyline going.

This is a big part of why we do this work, and why we're doing up audios, especially Night 3 of Quiet the Pain, which works with Pain as Familiarity.
It looks at the elephant and acknowledges that it's there because at some time, the body tensed to survive. At some point the mind decided hyper-alert was the only safe setting. At some age part of you (or your ancestors) believed tension was protection.

So your system kept that agreement long after its usefulness expired.

Night 3 goes in and names that elephant, but with its real names, its real, current purpose and identity:

• You don't have to live with familiar pain just because it is familiar. You don't have to stay tense. You don't need to keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
• You can re-educate the system.
• You can update the agreement.
• You can walk the elephant out of the fridge.

Humor helps - that's why we use it so much. Humor is a nervous system reset. It signals safety. It lets your whole body know, in a real and visceral way, “I am here. I am alive. I can laugh. It's ok. I'm ok. I can handle this.”

It gives you the energy and space to remember that the real relief does not come from avoiding the thing. The real relief comes from finally facing it, naming it, and re-agree-ing your way into freedom.

And that's the heart of this work, and why we love doing it: because creating agreements that match the life you want to live is kind of freaking huge. Elephant-sized, but in the best possible way.

And if you want support while you clear out the herd, all three of our free audio sets are there to help you shift the old agreements your system is tired of holding.

Quiet the Pain for the patterns that became familiar.
The Craving Switch for the urges that feel bigger than they are (no matter how big or small they are).
Unweighting for the emotional heaviness that never belonged to you in the first place.

Really, they're for more than just what their titles say. They sort of...spill over into all aspects of your life; they're for clutter and fighting with your partner and feeeling anxious and running stressed, and they all overlap, because old trauma responses don't limit themselves to just one area of your life. They're for all of the inherited goo that goo's its way into every aspect of your life. But these titles are as good a placeholder as any.

You can grab all three, any time, right here on our Instant Access page.

Oh, and if you want to give your nervous system a directly-elephant-related treat, send it here: https://explore.org/search/elephant  (It has nothing to do with TDD but there are a whole lot of elephants. These are wildlife cameras, and if you want some calm, there's everything here from elephants to kittens, bears to toucans.)

Yours in safely escorting all of your elephants to freedom outside of your home, and your head,

Dana & Colleen