The Elephant Hunter

However one wishes to define “Elephant Hunting” it is being defined as the emotional, psychological, and spiritual elephants that are in play. Willy might have been a spotter of big game, and he might have tracked the game, but having been trampled a few times he finally found it best to let other more experienced hunters finish things off, and they did. To them goes the credit.

The other elephants in the room were more complicated and left no footprints, at least not on his body. Abandonment, fear of abandonment (shame) was the single most powerful force underlying the motives for most of what he did. It was also a fear that might be called generational. What the word generational implies is that what gets passed along to the offspring has more to do than just height, weight, color of eyes and hair.

How one has been parented heavily influences the type of parent one becomes. If there are abandonment issues, whether or not a parent has physically, or psychologically abandoned a child, the scars are real and have a real affect. There too are other maladies for which no one has given a truly adequate explanation, such as alcoholism.