When you grow up with a secret in your family, maybe a specific issue or problem or even a person you don’t discuss. You begin to live with an elephant in the room. You learn how to cleverly navigate around the elephant on a daily basis. At first you might wonder why your family is choosing not to acknowledge the huge elephant in the room but as you grow more comfortable with the elephant’s presence, you too feel more at ease if the elephant isn’t discussed. It becomes a way of communication, almost as if you have your own special family language. You become accustomed to living with elephants. One day, the elephant will begin to take up too much space and something will happen to cause someone in the family to acknowledge the elephant. Should you or your family choose to finally discuss the elephant and ask them to politely leave, you will be left with all the shit they left behind. Most families feel that evicting the elephant from the room is enough and continue to live with the shit in the room. But you continue to navigate around the shit, just as if the elephant were still there and it seems as though, nothing has changed. Even if you move, out of the house, out of the state or out the country, if you didn’t clean up the shit, you will only attract more elephants into your room. I know you thought the hard part was over and you could move on, but you will not be able to, unless you do your own elephant work. This means taking the time to clean up all the shit left behind, the mess and all that it might entail. This is such important work because it is only when we clean up our shit that we are able to begin helping others clean up their own. That is why we are here, to clean up our shit, left behind by the elephants in our room and to try our best to help others clean up their own.