Elimination: What Happens If We Don't Think About It?

by Carol Campbell, MFT

In one of the most brilliant lectures I ever heard, the great management consultant Peter Drucker was offering wisdom to the presidents of the regional branches of a large national nonprofit organization. He presented a surprising suggestion: Never forget the necessity of elimination. All living things must regularly eliminate something in order to stay alive, whether you are talking about a person or a family or an organization or a belief system or whatever.

If a frantic parent calls the pediatrician because the baby has a very high fever, the doctor will be more concerned at first with whether the baby is producing wet diapers, not so much about how much milk is being consumed. Healthy families are ones that encourage the children to gradually leave their childhoods behind as they reach each new step toward maturity, as opposed to trying to keep your kids dependent as long as possible so Mom and Dad feel needed. A smart and thriving organization will eliminate its old traditions as times change and new traditions need to be developed. (Are you listening, Boy Scouts?) Beliefs, which I developed as a child, may have made sense to me then but could be keeping me from getting the most out of my life today. We all need to figure out what to eliminate.

But there's a problem. We don't like to think and talk about elimination. We think elimination is an unpleasant aspect of living. Polite people talk about nice things, like getting something new. I don't want to think about eliminating something from my closet; I'll just cram some more new clothes in, as if the constriction I have now created doesn't matter. If I'm honest, chances are that crammed closet is just a reflection of my inner world; I need to let go of something in my life that feels too scary to imagine being without.

It might be too uncomfortable to think about eliminating spending time with someone who is not good for you, rather than facing the reality that you may need to change your behavior in a way that someone else will not like. We tell ourselves we can't stop inviting an obnoxious, alcoholic relative to Thanksgiving, because the relative might get hurt feelings. We continue living with a partner who is deadening to us, rather than deal with the upheaval and sadness and rage of a divorce. But at what cost do we make that bargain?

Perhaps the greatest reluctance to embrace elimination is the way we try to either avoid or sanitize death, the ultimate elimination. When my grandmother died, I was not sure whether to laugh or cry when I saw that the door to the room where her body had been laid out at the funeral home was labeled "Slumber Room #3." Slumbering?? Really??

If you are having difficulty figuring out what to eliminate from your life, you might want to call a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Facing the realities of changing times, lost opportunities, fear of having things be different, etc. are often much easier tasks with the help of a professional. Stay healthy; keep eliminating what you no longer need!

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Carol L. Campbell, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for individual adults and couples in Palo Alto, California. She has degrees from Brown University and Santa Clara University and has been licensed since 1991. Carol is a graduate of the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program sponsored at Stanford by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and was a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco from 2010-2011. She is also a clinical member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.