I have been told that Elephants are kept in place with a cuff around their lower leg attached to a rope or chain which runs to a stake, maybe 3 feet log, driven into the ground.

This seems a problem considering that this is a huge animal that can pull trees up with their root systems.
How come they can be held in so easily?

I have heard that trainers take baby elephants and cuff and chain them to a stake in the ground, only the stake is connected to a huge concrete block.  The infant pulls and struggles for hours or days before quitting.  Once it quits, it doesn’t try again. 

In captivity, elephants often pull the stakes up from the ground by accident, even in their sleep!  However, they stay in place.  I have been told that elephants have stood and burned to death in fires, chained to a little stake in the ground; they are that completely convinced.

There are dozens of examples of this kind of thing in nature.

Honestly, we aren’t very different.

While learning about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder back in school, we were told about a soldier who had recently come back from a combat tour in Vietnam.  During debriefing, one of the questions he was asked was:  “how do you enter a house?”

His answer was “Run up, kick in the door and throw in a grenade.”
They reminded him that he was back in the U.S. and wondered if he had any other ideas.  He could not creatively come up with one.

I remember wondering about him; I would bet that he hadn’t thrown grenades as a 14 year old.  Back then, he knew to knock on the door and wait for someone to answer, I assume.

However, we had put him in a world with different rules.  In that combat zone (each one has its own idiosyncrasies), you didn’t light cigarettes after dark and you didn’t walk in the middle of a path and you didn’t knock on doors and wait for someone to answer.

If you did those kind of things, you didn’t last long – and many of your friends might have died too.  These are called survival rules…
and we all have them.

If you haven’t been in a truly traumatic situation, they may not be as firmly rooted; but over time, we develop strong rules to survive the world we grew up in.

Perfectionism, being too critical or easily angered, keeping people at arm’s length, stuffing emotions, addictions, disorders and others can all be skills we learn in order to survive.

They can be very dear to us, but there is a problem.  They may have kept us alive in the family we grew up in, but as we saw in the soldier’s case, a rule that keeps you alive in one world can get you killed in another.  People frown on throwing grenades here.

The rules helped you as a child may be destroying your marriage.  Look around…
Anything you do that you don’t know why you do it?  Habits that don’t make much sense?  Ask yourself why you learned them.  Then ask yourself if you still need them.
These rules can become “baggage”.

I typically hate psychobabble words, but this one is pretty good.  Learning a skill, like kicking in a door, isn’t necessarily bad… but it needs to only be applied in the right situations.

Learning not to care if people criticize can be a great skill, but not all of the time.
Learning to manipulate people can have some great rewards, but not in most relationships.

Baggage – it isn’t bad to own ski boots and a parka, but it is unwise to pack them for the beach.   The snorkel and swimsuit are likely to be a bad choice in the the mountains!

They aren’t always bad, and if they keep us alive, they have had value…
some rules can have some great value in life if packed for the right event.  However, some have served their purpose and need to be send packing, themselves.

One woman had an eating disorder that had virtually kept her alive in her abusive family.  Without its false sense of control, she might not have made it!  However, as a healthy woman, she didn’t need it anymore.  We celebrated its role in keeping her alive and bid it farewell (Bon Voyage).  It took time, but eventually she pulled up the stakes and stopped tossing in grenades and was able to embrace her roles as great mom and great wife and free woman.

Look around, see any three foot long stakes in your life?  When are you still kicking in doors?