Unloading the Camel

 

Have you ever heard the phrase, “The straw that broke the camel’s back?”


Here is a camel herder piling straw on the camel’s back. He has a lot of straw. He keeps piling it on until finally the camel has reached his limit and can’t carry any more straw. The man lays on just one more piece of straw, and the camel collapses.


Lets look at it another way.


[Illustration goes here]


Here is a stack of cinder blocks. Here is another. Here is a board laid across the blocks. And here are some bricks on top of the board. Now we pile more bricks on to the board. And more. The board starts to bend.


[Board bending]


Now we load some more bricks. The board bends more. Finally we have one more brick. But never mind. This board has reached the limit of it’s resilience. We don’t have to put on another brick. We just add a little, tiny stone, and crash, the board snaps and it all comes down.


The board represents someone who is very angry, stretched to his limit between two points. One point is “doing what others want.” The other point is “doing what he wants.”


[Add to picture]


There he is stretched in between because in life you have to do both. The bricks are upsets, conflicts, failed purposes, and disagreements.


[Add to picture]


There he is, overloaded. He did his best to handle all these things, but when he was overloaded, it takes only a tiny bit more weight to bring everything crashing down.


He walks around overloaded. He has lost friends. He has family he can no longer communicate with, or be with. He has been hurt by people. He has hurt people. He has been frustrated. He has been challenged and threatened. And he has further separated himself from other people by frustrating, challenging, and threatening them. He is overloaded.


Do you know someone who has lost a friend? Do you know someone who has a family member he can no longer talk to? Do you know someone who has been threatened? Do you know someone who has been hurt? Every one of those events are bricks on his back. If he doesn’t unload the bricks he will come crashing down again.


If we could pull out the bottom brick, all the rest would fall off the board. That would unload the whole board all at once. But there are too many bricks. There are “They lied to you” bricks. There are “You lied to them” bricks. There are “They cheated you” bricks and “You cheated them” bricks. There are “You punched them out” bricks and “They punched you out” bricks, and dozens of other kinds of bricks. They are all in this huge pile. The weight of them is too much. We can’t pull out the bottom brick.


We could take off the top brick, and the next and the next and the next, but that would take years.


But, some of these bricks are wired together. There is a wire that goes through this brick and down through that brick, and that brick and another brick and they are all tied together by a wire.


If you pull on this brick, you can start to pull on the others that are wired to it. So there is a way to grab on to and pull out a whole series of bricks all at once.


For example, let’s look at the “Lied to you” bricks. “When did someone lie to you? When else? What were other times someone lied to you? What was the earliest time you can remember when someone lied to you?”


If you can unload the bottom brick of the “Lied to you” bricks, the one that started the accumulation, and all the rest of the “Lied to you” bricks unload and take stress off the board.


Of course, the “Lied to you” bricks are balanced by the “You lied to them” bricks. Once the “Lied to you” bricks are out in the open, you can easily unload the “You lied to them” bricks.


You would be amazed at how much anger disappears after a session of just that.


We call that “Unloading The Camel” to relieve a whole lot of tension and stress and make life a whole lot easier.



Removing the bricks


Copyright Joseph Belotte 1997