My forthcoming book carries an unlikely title: The Elephant and the Turtle: A Metaphor for the Work of Psychotherapy and Personality Change. People smile when they hear it, which is precisely the point.
After more than two decades as a clinical psychologist, I have come to distrust language that makes therapy sound solemn and mechanical. Change, in my experience, does not arrive on a schedule or respond to instruction. It tends to sidle in when a person feels safe enough to stop performing — and often it announces itself with something surprisingly close to laughter. The elephant and the turtle are my shorthand for two truths about that process that I have watched play out again and again.
Two animals, two truths
The turtle is the part of us that moves slowly and carries its home on its back. It is cautious for good reason; it has learned that the world can be unsafe, and it withdraws into its shell at the first sign of threat. Much of what looks like resistance in therapy is really the turtle doing its job. I have never found it useful to pry a shell open. The work is to make the surrounding air calm enough that the turtle chooses, on its own timeline, to extend its neck and look around.
The elephant is memory and weight — everything a person has carried for years without quite being able to set it down. Elephants are intelligent, emotional, and slow to forget, and they do not respond to force. But they do respond to trust. The therapeutic task is not to make the elephant smaller or to pretend the load was never there. It is to help a person examine what they have been carrying, decide what still belongs to them, and discover that some of it can finally be put down.
Why humor and play belong in serious work
I trained in an era that treated seriousness as a proxy for rigor, and I hold my clinical training in high regard — a dual-track doctoral education, a pre-doctoral internship on a psychiatric hospital's most complex unit, and a post-doctoral fellowship in neuropsychology. None of that taught me what a well-placed moment of humor can do inside a session. My patients did.
Humor, play, and creativity are not detours from the real work; they are often the vehicle for it. A shared laugh signals that two people are, for a moment, genuinely together. Play loosens the grip of the story a person has told about themselves for years, making room for a different one. Creativity lets someone approach a painful truth from the side rather than head-on, which is sometimes the only way it can be approached at all. These are the catalysts my book is really about.
Personality change is possible — slowly
The subtitle of the book includes the phrase "personality change," which some readers find surprising. We tend to assume personality is fixed by adulthood. My clinical experience suggests something more hopeful and more demanding: people can change in deep and durable ways, but not quickly, and not through willpower alone. Like the turtle, they change when it feels safe; like the elephant, they change through trust rather than pressure.
This is why I think of therapy as both an art and a science. I value evidence and careful assessment, and I never lose sight of the human being in the room. If you want to understand the conditions that make this kind of slow change possible, I have written separately about creating a safe-enough therapeutic space, and about the way my years with horses shaped my belief that trust and consistency change behavior more reliably than force ever could.
Conclusion
The elephant and the turtle are not a treatment protocol. They are a way of remembering what actually helps: patience with what moves slowly, respect for what has been carried a long time, and a willingness to let humor and play do their quiet work. That is the spirit I try to bring to every person I see, and you can read more about the path that led me to this way of working on the about page.