Franz Kafka said, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Any book or program that aims to help people break bad habits must reveal the whole iceberg that lies below the surface.
You can’t eliminate the whole thing in one day, but if you take a step- by-step approach, you can eliminate the bad habit sooner than you thought possible. It is going to take effort on your part. You can’t eat whatever you want and loose weight, no matter how many times you hear it on the talk shows. But you can lose weight, and you can learn to enjoy healthy foods more than the unhealthy foods you’re eating now.
David has constructed a verbal cage for himself. His definition of the problem seems to give him no choice; he avoids having to take responsibility for himself. To receive the benefits that come with daily meals, hot showers, clean clothes, a bed, medical attention, companionship, and as much help as a social worker can give him— bus fare to El Paso, if that is indeed where he should go—he must break out of the cage.
But David is convinced that he cannot go to the shelter, for doing so would mean that he might miss his ride to El Paso. That is how people get trapped in verbal cages of their own making. I talk about some extreme cases in this report, because I see them every day. But I also think that these extreme cases make it easier to see the real issues and challenges faced by people who are not in such obviously life- threatening situations.
David isn’t conscious of the elaborate mechanisms he has constructed to hide the truth from himself, but he is hiding it all the same. To free ourselves from bad habits, we must stop hiding the truth from ourselves.
Overeaters, smokers, and chronic procrastinators have more in common with people like David than meets the eye. We all go to great lengths to hide the truth from ourselves about the destructive nature of our bad habits; too often, lives and families are destroyed before we become aware of the verbal cages that keep us trapped in self-destructive behavior.
