Delayed Emotion after Trauma By Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 September 2025

One of my first clients years ago when I was starting out as a therapist was a Vietnam veteran. He had just retired as an aircraft mechanic when he came to see me in a state of deep anguish. He had been a helicopter pilot during that war responsible for picking up broken bodies in Vietnam jungles. He said that at the time he just did his job, just got on with it. Didn’t feel much. After he returned home from the war, he settled into his job with a couple of airlines: went to work, came home,  showered, cooked dinner, watched a bit of television, and went to bed. Same thing day after day for decades. No hanging out with friends, no intimate relationships. And then he took early retirement and suddenly found himself standing on a bridge about to throw himself in. Instead he went to his doctor and, after that, came to see me. Suddenly he was feeling all those emotions that he cut himself off from for all of his working life.

 I get this. In the past month or so I’ve been suddenly feeling the deep sadness from nearly dying this time last year when I was hospitalized with blood poisoning that damaged my kidneys. Suddenly sad, coupled with recurring iterative memories of being in three hospitals with tubes in me for blood transfusions, temporary dialysis and other indignities.

 I feel for those in the Northern Rivers, and particularly Lismore, who lost their houses, livelihoods and animals after the 2022 floods. I was lucky, living as I did in Lismore Heights above the devastation. The floods and aftermath are one reason I returned to my hometown of Perth, Western Australia where flooding doesn’t happen. The trauma felt, I know, was not immediately felt by all and many, I’m sensing, are feeling it now. I must admit that I’m feeling the feelings now delayed as well.

 Why are feelings sometimes delayed for so long? You’d think that in the face of immediate catastrophe that feelings would be running high. They are for some, but not for others. Our immediate reactions in the aftermath of trauma are complicated and shaped by our life experiences, culture, coping skills, and community support. Coping styles are individual and variations in how a person copes (including those who just get on with life, without feeling much) is not a sign of psychopathology. There is no “normal” response to trauma. The realization of this is relatively new to those who study trauma. When I was studying for my Master of Counselling degree this wasn’t really talked about and the advice given to us was to encourage the person to talk about their experiences at the time of the traumatic event. A person like my Vietnam vet client, or me, for that matter, would not be helped by this approach – until they were ready to feel their emotions; emotions  have to be felt in their own good time.

 Coping styles vary from action oriented to reflective, from emotionally expressive to reticent. There are those who just get on with life, and there are those who are left exhausted, confused, sad, anxious, agitated, numb, dissociated, confused, in emotional and physical pain, and feeling nothing much at all. Of course, these feelings can become crippling and lead to long term distress: nightmares, sleep disorders, iterative thoughts, flashbacks, anxiety and depression, suicidal thoughts, as well as avoidance of emotions that are associated with the trauma.

 Delayed emotional responses are not inevitable. Why this is so, is poorly understood. It could be that the event is not felt life threatening, or perhaps it is familiar to some lucky people. The thing is, though, that we cannot assume that if a person who has been in a horrible event is not showing much emotion is ok. Care and support is necessary whatever the person exhibits, or doesn’t.

 

Creative arts, therapy, mindfulness exercise, watching the breath,  and sometimes medication helps. What doesn’t, is self medicating with drugs and alcohol. The thing is, be gentle and practice self care.

 

 

Hypnosis as Everyday Trance by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

July 2025

 

 Quite a lot of people are frightened of hypnosis. They immediately think mind control and stage performances where people are made to do bizarre things, but clinical hypnotherapy is no more threatening than reading a book, walking on the beach, watching a movie, listening to music. It’s just an extension of a common, everyday trance state.

 

You know the sort of thing I mean here: you’re in the zone, you’re not really aware of what’s going on around you even though you can still hear extraneous noises (a dog barking, the wind in the trees), you are aware of passing thoughts, but – like clouds in the sky, they arise and depart; your focus is on reading the book, listening to the song, the rhythm of the walk. You are in connection with the process of where you’re at.

 

As a hypnotherapist I’m uninterested in attempting to persuade you to do anything at all. That strategy would, anyway, lead to a massive resistance on your part!  Instead, I invite you to explore your own experience and inner resources to resolve the thing that is bothering you.  Hypnosis isn’t a violence against you, but a gentle exploration. It is felt as deep, supportive, safe relaxation.

 

Hypnotherapy can have immediate results, or you can notice change happening over time. You may feel different or you may just notice that trepidation, or intrusive thoughts, or feeling compelled to do something habitual has evaporated.

 

I worked with a woman with a fear of flying. She had a planned a trip to Bali but was really worried about getting on a plane. I discovered through the first session (usually about three one hour sessions are what is minimally required) that she used to do really exciting things like scuba diving and motorbike riding. Given that I also have done these things I know the excitement. I know, also, that the body perceives excitement and fear in about the same way (a rush of adrenalin) and thus feeling afraid to fly can be experienced not as fear, but as excitement. By this suggestion alone, when my client flew she was happy and delighted by the whole experience.

 

Intrusive sounds, can likewise evaporate under hypnosis and be translated into the spaces where they used to be a massive bother.  Several years ago, I had a client having to use a dialysis machine at night that made a particular intrusive noise while he was trying to sleep.  Instead of trying to persuade him not the hear the sound (have you ever been successful not thinking about the elephant in the room), I encouraged him through hypnosis to listen to the sound in the same way as he heard the wind in the trees outside his bedroom window, or voices in the street, or anything else going on in the night. In this way, no sound dominated and he was able to sleep.

 

A woman came to me with a fear of falling and was planning a hiking trip through the Grand Canyon. I discovered in her first session with me that her birthday is in January, like me, and I commented that we were both goats. And thus the hypnotherapy sessions were about the magnificence of mountain goats and how they/we are able to climb mountains with great agility and ease. There is caution, carefulness, and confidence in distributing weight and movement. And so my client had a wonderful hike.

 

The process of hypnosis is an interesting one. Brain wave research shows that in a hypnotic trance state a person brains exhibits deep alpha and theta brain waves. Alpha is associated with imagination and theta, with meditation. When the therapist’s brain waves are measured while doing a hypnosis, both alpha and theta are also present, but with the addition of beta waves. Beta is connected to conscious thought. So, in other words, the therapist experiences what the client is experiencing, with the addition of conscious thought in the presentation and shaping of the hypnotherapy session.  You can see why, receiving hypnotherapy feels so good and why I enjoy doing it.

 

I offer hypnotherapy online, which works very well. Contact: dr_mccardell@yahoo.com for more information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Online Therapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

June 2025

 

As most of your already know, I moved to Western Australia a couple of years ago and yet I continue writing for The Nimbin Good Times, as I’ve done since March 2009. Why, you may  ask?  The reason is that as I’m mostly working online these days, it doesn’t matter where I live. I’m also still very much connected to the people of the Northern Rivers and consider your part of the world my second home. I lived there, after all, in Lismore, 14 years.

 

I returned to my home town of Perth for a few reasons, including the realization that I was missing my beloved Indian Ocean too much and I was getting home sick.

 

As the covid pandemic taught us therapists, counselling and doing hypnotherapy online works. In the case of the latter, after all, the hypno is done with the client lying down with their eyes shut and my voice drifting across the ether wherever you or I am. Computer technology is so sophisticated these days that we are generally very comfortable talking to the person at the other end as if we were all in the same room.

 

There are many therapists working exclusively online nowadays. I do see people in person here in Fremantle, where I’m living, as well as online. This is obviously only an option if you’re here in the West. For everybody else, it’s online therapy that I’m  offering. I have clients, these days, spread across the whole of Australia, which is really quite nice. I advertise in Psychology Today, which, like most things these days, is predominantly an online journal.

 

I follow the lives and politics of what’s happening around Nimbin and surrounding areas as closely as I do back here. You matter to me. If you wish to contact me, the best way is by emailing dr_mccardell@yahoo.com

 

It’s interesting how readily we humans have taken to online communication. It doesn’t generally feel very odd at all. Online therapy, also called teletherapy, has been found to be just as effective as in person therapy. It’s better than doing sessions on the telephone as we are very visual creatures. We connect better with each other when we can see the other person.

 

Online therapy, and I use WhatsApp and Messenger usually, allows for great flexibility as clients don’t have to drive to a designated place. We can do it from the comfort of our own homes. This opens the way to good therapy for clients living outside towns and those who are disabled in some way. Time constraints are also more easily managed for online sessions.

 

There are downsides to online therapy and these include dodgy internet connections, difficulty making sure the sessions are private (you need, ideally, to have your living space to yourself for your sessions), incomplete visual clues (we therapists learn a lot about our clients through careful observation), and some psychological issues are not well cared for by this mode of communication. Severe psychiatric crises are best treated by somebody in person.

 

One thing that is as true for online therapy as in person therapy is the need for quiet contemplation before and after each session. Such time allows the person to reflect and prepare for what is to come and to make notes as felt necessary. You might follow up a session with a hot bath and lovely essential oils or sit down to a delicious meal or just head off to the garden. Prospects that don’t include car travel. Not bad, really. The important thing is that you don’t throw yourself into the rigors of work and stress straightaway but give yourself a bit of space around your therapeutic sessions.

 

Online therapy is a matter of personal choice. If you prefer in person sessions, then find a therapist for that; if online suits you best, and you’re interested in my work, contact me, please.

Clinical Hypnotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip. Clinical Hypnotherapy.

 

May 2025

 

Clinical Hypnotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip. Clinical Hypnotherapy.

 

In 2013 I got into a conversation with my dentist about the use of hypnosis in dentistry. He loaned me a book on the subject written by a dentist working in  Australia who started using hypnosis with anxious patients and for ameliorating oral pain.  Until then, I’d had only a passing interest in the field, although I knew about the old experiments in psychology (Clark L. Hull etc) and also the mystique surrounding it (Mesmer, and all that). The dentist author, though, was hinting at more than suggestibility and magic; he was exploring the revelry of the trance state where anything can be attended to. This was the revelation for me and ignited a more profound interest.

 

I researched training bodies around Australia teaching hypnosis and decided upon the Australian Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy in order to learn how to do hypnosis properly, and to gain qualifications in it. And so for four days out of every month for four months I travelled down to Sydney to attend classes held in one of the  University of Sydney’s colleges: in theory and practice and essays, building up my expertise. I had to do 400 hours of practice in order to get my diploma. It was a thorough education that added beautifully to my existing training as a counsellor/psychotherapist; an education that continues.

 

My main interest in the hypnotic state is, as I hint above, that it opens our minds to other possible paths hitherto not considered. Anything can be attended to in equal measure to the otherwise iterative one track mindedness of a problem story. Recurring thoughts are the things that bog us down and get in the way of more creative solutions.  For example, a client I’ve been working with recently had two main things going on: recurring negative thoughts and feeling her life and career was going nowhere. I worked with her issues in two ways: shifting her awareness from the negative thoughts to the process of breathing in new cool air and breathing out and letting go of old stuff. The second arm was getting her to explore ways she can reactivate her intellectual and activist life through writing scholarly papers in the field of her expertise. Iterative thought processes are inward looking and depressing, while awareness of breath and focus on creating new work are outward looking, and break the mindset that behaves more like a mouse wheel than anything healthy.

 

Hypnosis throws up other ways of being in forms that excite and interest and appeal to the bigger picture of what a person sees in themselves.

 

Another patient has been bogged down with the problems of giving up smoking. He now wears nicotine patches which help with the chemical addiction. The physical pleasure of rolling the paper and stuffing the tobacco inside also has an addictive component. What to do? My suggestion was to practice making origami birds and little beasties out of paper, thus transferring the cigarette paper making skills to something fun and intricate and little animals that can be given to his grandchild – this bringing delight to her. From the insular process of rolling a fag to making a gift is compelling.

 

The thing about the hypnotic state is that it is a trance state and thus no different to the trance states we enter when we watch a movie, read a compelling book, enter into a dance, playing music, riding a bicycle, swim, walk. We are entranced by our involvement and we are very aware of what is going on at the same time. Minds are not taken over, but rather we allow our participation in a shared space that we choose. We can choose not to be there at any point along the way: that is up to us. The hypnotic space, in capable hands, is a secure and safe place and nothing is suggested that goes against a person’s wishes. In this safe place, new and creative ideas can be born and begin to flourish. Hypnosis nurtures this.

 

Doing hypnosis is beautiful and its good results confirm my ongoing interest in it. Both practitioner and patient benefit.

 

On Viewing William Morris' Tapestry of Adoration, by E. E. McCardell (1984)

 A poem I wrote in 1984 I think is worth revisiting. Here it is:

 

  Hwaet!

A dream came to me

At  deepest midnight

-       The dream of dreams!

I shall declare it.

 

Through wave over wave of wind

Lilies wove soft music

In the warm evening air.

 

By the gently lighted milk-white moon

I saw a lovely lady clothed in blue –

A babe at her breast

And angels bowed before them.

 

My eyes were undimmed, the glass to God

  clear

I saw the hard smeared rood

Heavy with blossoms

And sweet Miriam reach and pluck them

In her blessed hands.

 

And celestial psalmody sang:

“IT IS RIGHT!”

 

Set before me fair full of wine –

Or was it blood?

A fire wrought vessel

And bread –

  Flesh?

And in wave over wave of wind –

Evening shifted to darkest night

  and

I slept, my dream done.

 

Whither is this lady now?

She waits in love

within each our hearts.

 

 

Laying Down the Path in Walking by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

April 2025

 

Every morning I swim in the ocean, mostly doing backstroke so I can gaze at the sky and watch the clouds and the occasional bird or plane. The other day I bumped into a fellow (obviously I can’t see where I’m going) and his comment made me laugh. He said, you are going forwards yet backwards at the same time. Forwards and backwards simultaneously. It got me thinking.  As a metaphor for my daily life, this is as true for backstroke, as for life. As I go about my day, I reflect on where I’ve been = at the same time. Travelling forward each day, and reflecting on it,  wends a path in the process of making it and it is through the doing of it that I’m making sense of the world around me.

 

I’ve been mulling about this sort of thing for years. We think we are making decisions before we actually make them; we like to believe we plan our moves, but – as the Buddhists say, “we lay down our path in walking,” in living it. Our decisions are not made beforehand in a sort of clinical architectural office, but in the process of engagement, of everyday enactment.

 

This is not to say that any systematic organized strategy for going forward can’t

help, but it works because it utilizes earlier knowledge/skills. It is extraordinarily difficult to choose to do something we have no experience in.  I would have practically no clue in how to fix a car, for instance. I don’t have much of a knowledge base in this regard.

 

I’m reminded of a high school friend who used to spend all her time working out study programmes, rather than actually reading and writing her required school work. She never got around to doing the work because she really didn’t know how to do it, not having a background in the subject at all, and not having the wisdom to start learning either. You can’t start from nothing; you have to build up a knowledge base in order to move forward.

 

Encountering the next experience is an evolutionary one: just as choices are made according to what has gone on before, so the remembered experience fleshes out the next one. The accumulation of experiences, recognized as such, makes for a rich life. Just thinking for a moment how horrible it would be to lose one’s memory: for the process of remembering to be replaced by dismembering. The richness of the present moment would be replaced by confusion. The anchor to knowing where you are is lost.

 

I watched a short video of a woman with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease talking about her lived experiences. She, interestingly, said that she could make sense of the world when the light was on, but couldn’t grapple with any of it in  semi-darkness. If she dropped a newspaper while the light was on, she could pick it up, but in the semi-dark, though she would trip over the paper repeatedly, she didn’t have the wherewithal to stoop down and remove the paper from the floor. Her sight was her anchor to useful enaction in her world.  Jonathan Cole’s book Pride and a Daily Marathon describes how a man who had lost his bodily awareness through acute illness could only move if he could see where his limbs were in relation to the ground. Cole is an English neurophysiologist who remains intrigued by how bodily awareness, movement, memory and a sense of ‘I’ interact. Disconnecting parts of an otherwise ongoing interactive process amounts to dis-membering memory and confusion reigns.

 

Yes, we lay down a path in walking, but for the richness of that experience to be felt, we need to remember what has gone before and – at the same time – know our bodies as we move forward. The whole thing together is wonderfully rich and enjoyable.

 

Therapy is the art of drawing all these experiences together into an exciting whole so that we can use our pre-existing knowledge to explore new places in our lives. I note that I’m available to do counselling online. My email address is dr_mccardell@yahoo.com

 

 

Freedom to choose. By Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

March 2025

 

“So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I like this quote very much. It sings to me, especially after last year’s brush with serious illness and near death. Live abundantly, drink deeply of the springs of existence, don’t waste your time. Live and choose wisely.

 

We may or may not live again, who actually knows. Whether or not consciousness manifests in other bodies after our physical death, this is finally unknowable. Right now, this life we live is it.

 

Too much time in most lives are lived as though what is happening in this instance is just a preparation, a practice run, for a better life. But in this way, the experiences of now are somehow set aside, until we die – meaning lives are spent in anticipation: a dream for perfection, or heaven, or whatever.

 

Frankl’s observation about living now is living in all its messiness. This doesn’t mean just going along mindlessly with whatever crops up; what it does mean is living life with purpose. We are, after all, given free will and a sense of determination for living meaningfully, for us individually and as a community. Enough research has found that when we give up  a sense of a meaningful life we fall into despair and deep depression.

 

Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997), neurologist, psychologist, philosopher was a holocaust survivor, spending four years in three concentration camps. He lost his family and his wife and, effectively, was forced into the realization that the search for meaning matters to psychological health. Afterall, what was the point of all the suffering?

 

Several years ago when my brother and I travelled to Estonia to catch up with our relatives there, I asked my Estonian aunt what it was like under Russian rule during USSR times (the Soviet Union only recognized the independence of Estonia in 1991) and said, “Remember you are always free in your mind.” She was Estonia’s first paediatric surgeon, trained in St Petersburg. She knew really tough times, but difficulties didn’t constrict her. Freedom to think, yes, but Frankl goes further, freedom to choose what you respond to. 

 

It is hard not being reactive to everything, and this requires conscious effort.  I was put to the test repeatedly while sick in bed in hospital.  I had to practice equanimity (evenness of mind) on a minute to minute basis and sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes, I really didn’t. My temper flared in the face of what I perceived as the stupidity of others. It flared when things didn’t go smoothly and without fuss. It flared when my breakfast wasn’t the one I’d ordered. It flared when the nurse couldn’t come and elevate my legs to relieve the pressure sores that were forming on my heels. When I was cold and someone had taken away the extra blanket. When…. this and that happened. Suffering is no different a time for practicing self awareness and choosing one’s responses than when everything is going well.

 

How can we achieve equanimity and responding to things that affect us with conscious awareness?

 

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom,” so said Frankl.  This space is not somewhere where the mind is filled with conditioned responses, nor platitudes, but a short interlude in which a fairer response is possible. In Buddhism, this space between in where a compassion arises.  This is what I see the meaning of my life is: to know compassion and express it not just in times of comfort, but stress and awkwardness. We humans are beings of great potential. We can choose cruelty and greed and can choose fairness and love.

Whatever  we choose arises from our decisions, not the conditions in which we find ourselves.