You Can Do It!

“The circus elephant doesn’t run away because he’s been chained to a stake like that since he was very, very little.”

Dr. Jorge Bucay, Let Me Tell You a Story

Before recovery, many of us had a favorite motto: “I can’t do it.” People would lovingly tell us we needed to start helping ourselves, and we would say “I can’t do it. I need you to do it for me!” Or others might suggest that we seek help from a therapist or a support group and we’d quickly blurt out “I can’t do it” as we adamantly listed every reason why we couldn’t possibly help ourselves.

Recovery has taught us that we alone are responsible for ourselves—and that no one else is. As a result, most recovering people learn to trade-in their “I can’t do it” motto for an “I can do it” motto. We have learned to be responsible for our own self-care by partnering with a Higher Power, and by setting the proper boundaries that allow us to take care of ourselves. And we’ve learned that we must care for ourselves first if we are to have the necessary resources to help others.

But recovery can be like a cha-cha: we take a few steps forward and then a few steps back before we move forward again. This means that we sometimes revert back to our “I can’t do it” stinking-thinking.

In his book Let Me Tell You a Story, Argentinean therapist Dr. Jorge Bucay tells the story of his childhood fascination with circus elephants. He says that as a child, he often wondered how a small little stake in the ground and a chain could keep a giant elephant trapped in its place. As an adult, he came to realize that most circus elephants had been chained to small stakes in the ground from the time they were baby elephants. They had learned as babies that they couldn’t free themselves from the stakes, and this was a lesson that these elephants had never unlearned as they grew into adults.

Baby elephants learn “I can’t do it” and they never unlearn that lesson; they never challenge this belief. If they did, they would learn that they could indeed, as adult elephants, free themselves from any stake in the ground. They possess the power.

And so do we. Yet, how often are we like the circus elephants in this story? We learned as children that we were often helpless victims and we came to believe in the words “I can’t do it.” We then grew into adulthood and never challenged those beliefs until we entered recovery.

But even in recovery we still find it easy to be trapped in our old victim thinking by holding on to outdated childhood beliefs like “I can’t do it.” We don’t embrace the fact that as adults we can do what we weren’t able to do as children. As a result, we find ourselves too afraid to take risks and to grow even further in our recovery and in reclaiming our lives from the past.

If “I can’t do it” is a favorite default phrase of yours, take some time to discover the history behind this belief. Have you been saying this since childhood? Is it really true that you “can’t do it?” Are you really incapable of helping yourself, or it this old motto just a crutch for you? We are no longer babies. There is much we can do, by the grace of God, to help ourselves today. So let’s do it!