Its been a while … but here goes:
There are moments in conversation when the air shifts. Words fall, but they don’t land as words. They arrive like stones hurled against glass, colliding with the scaffolding of where and who we believe ourselves to be – to others and ourselves. Our chest hardens, our ears go deaf, and suddenly we are no longer listening—we are bracing for impact.
This is when the mammoth stirs.
This ancient beast inside is not metaphorical, not mythological—it’s biological. A creature of bone memory and survival instinct. Jonathan Haidt calls it the Social Mammoth: the part of us that still believes exile equals death. And it did, once. Once, if the tribe cast you out, you would die beneath the teeth of sabre-tooth tiger. The mammoth was your guardian, your shield.
The mammoth is your subconscious—the one who has witnessed, and vividly remembers, your entire history. Every flinch, every punishment, every sharp word, every cold silence. They don’t say the memory of an elephant for nothing. The mammoth remembers it all. Its job is pattern recognition. Its job is survival. And it will protect you—at all costs.
But today? Today that guardian has become the jailer. Your subconscious can’t tell time. The mammoth cannot tell the difference between discomfort and danger. Between six-year-old you and seventy-year-old you. Between disagreement and death. And so it roars when your partner disagrees. It panics when they go quiet. It thrashes when their truth rubs raw against yours.
We like to pretend we are modern. Civilized. Independent. But most of us are still tethered—umbilical, invisible—to the moods of the people we love. Their calm becomes our ground. Their warmth, our oxygen. Their smile, the fragile rope bridge we cling to over the abyss.
And when that smile disappears? The bridge snaps. The mammoth bellows. Inside us, alarms flare like red sky at night: Danger. Rejection. You are not safe here.
So we shrink. We fold into silence. We sulk, not out of wisdom, but out of terror. Silence becomes a cave where we mistake withdrawal for protection. We lash out in anger, we push people away with our words and actions – because if they aren’t around to upset us, we are safe. At all costs means, AT ALL COSTS. The mammoth curls around us, whispering: hide, hide, hide—or starts lashing out screaming: run, run, run.
But here is the truth, sharp and cold as steel against skin: the more we outsource our safety, the more fragile we become. We turn into addicts, feeding on the dopamine of our partner’s approval. Their affection is the hit. Their indifference, the crash. Their disapproval feels like the ground tearing open beneath our feet. Every sharp word, every missed gesture, every flash of their authenticity is received as catastrophe.
And still, we hand them the leash. But it was never their leash to hold.
Safety is an inside job.
It’s not glamorous. Not easy. The work is sweaty, primal, undignified. You cannot expect a standing ovation when you do it. It is sitting with the mammoth when it thrashes, when it claws to run, when it begs to hide. It is feeling the thunder in your chest, the tightening in your throat, and choosing not to drop that weight into someone else’s hands. It is whispering, I can survive this storm. I can stand steady even here. It is remembering that no matter what chaos is happening outside, you have lived through worse and you are still here. You will always be fine, no matter what happens.
This isn’t about hardening into isolation. We are wired for connection; to deny that is to deny our beating hearts. But connection was never meant to be a crutch or a bandage for the wound. Love is not a hiding place. Love is not a shield against your storms. Love is what happens when two whole, rooted beings choose to meet—not to rescue, not to cage, but to witness.
Everyone will let you down at some point. This is truth. But trusting that they are doing the best they can, for themselves and you, is where love grows. We can never change anyone. We can only trust them.
So where do we begin? In the fragile pauses, in the cavern between what was said and what was heard. When your partner retreats after your truth, do not collapse into story. Ask: When I said that, what did you hear?
Or flip it: When you said that, I heard you don’t love me. Most often, that is not the truth. But if you have lived with ghosts in your chest, echoes in your caves, the mammoth will twist words until they sound like war cries.
That is the battlefield: the gap. Between intention and reception. Between what was meant and what was felt. If left unnamed, that gap calcifies into resentment. And resentment is the slow poison that drains intimacy into dust.
And in that gap live our silent scripts—our expectations. The hidden commandments we’ve written in secret: they should soothe me, they should know, they should make me safe. Expectations are predetermined disappointments. They set us up for heartbreak before a word is even spoken.
That is why the courage to ask—What did you hear? or Here’s what I heard—is an act of love. It breaks the trance. It pulls us back from the cave mouth, where the mammoth is pawing the dirt.
Because the real love story is not the fairy tale where someone saves you, or you save them. It is the one where you learn to hold your own ground. Where you build a home inside yourself strong enough to weather storms, so that when you step into connection, you step in it whole. And your strength also allows authenticity in your partner.
And then love can breathe. And grow.
Not as dependency. Not as safety outsourced. But as presence. As freedom. Two beings standing steady, choosing each other not from fear of loss, but from the raw, unglamorous miracle of authenticity.
Love is not the taming of the mammoth. Love is the meeting of two people who have walked into their caves, faced their beasts, and returned carrying fire in their hands.
That is the inside job. That is the only ground that holds.
kofi pods 