How to eat an elephant. Part ii.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences of counselling and how difficult identifying the problem and actually dealing with it can be. 

Since writing about this, I've found that throwing the elephants out of the window maybe isn't as easy as I originally thought.  If you tie a piece of string to the elephant's tail and hold tight, you're never going to get rid of it.  (If you're confused about the elephants, read this post).

Since leaving my job, I've spent a lot of time reflecting and realised I've been clinging on to a lot of pieces of string.  And now they're all starting to get tangled.  Having a lot of metaphorical string in my head is not fun.  It turns out that even just working through the "easy" stuff isn't actually that easy.  Wish I'd seen that brick wall coming! 

This week, I tried a new approach.  Instead of trying to store a herd of elephants in my head, I reverted to revision-mode and put my elephants down on paper.

Cue cards

Putting them down on cue cards took the elephants out of my head, and introducing my counsellor to my elephants lifted a massive weight from my shoulders.  The brick wall just got a little bit smaller.

But now I have a stack of issues staring me in the face.  It's hard to hide physical pieces of paper in the storage unit at the back of my mind.  Probably impossible.

Maybe this is what I need.  Maybe to get over that wall, I need to stare those elephants down. Bring it.

(NB, I'm aware I'm using a lot of metaphors.  There's probably some psycho-babble that would suggest I'm trying to avoid talking about something.  That's ok.  I like metaphors.)