Loitering on the edge

Loitering on the Edge    by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Nov 2011

     Last Sunday I went to a jazz gig at the Lismore Bowling Club where I reflected, as I always do, on the nature of jazz as being a music that plays with the edge of things.  There are planes and angles, 3D shapes and near misses; tangents and elaborations; edges and precipices just avoided. I like jazz for all this. It isn’t about melody for me, with this kind of music; it really is its geometry.

     In this article I want to explore the edge and loitering around it. I work at the edge of things as a therapist. The nature of the work I do is spending beautiful time with other people exploring their edge. This is a profound space:  a richly textured and evocative geography that merges tears of sadness, love and laughter. It is where discoveries are made, insights found, connections explored, and old ways of seeing discarded. It is where our mutual humanity is met and shared. 

      The edge is a thick place, in the sense of its intensity, and as such one meets in oneself tremendous resistance in going there. Much nicer, it seems, to flitter around on the edge, or loiter with intent to postpone the learning that comes from actually engaging in what one knows needs to be addressed. I know this loitering very well, but this is not a bad thing. I have come to appreciate the loitering. Too often in our culture, we are told to go for the jugular, as it were. To go directly to the thing that we feel called to do, and to regard hovering around as wasted time.

      I think of loitering at the edge a useful time of preparation, emotionally, cognitively and soulfully. The art is, however, to jump when you are actually ready, and not suppress that realization. The art is not to loiter longer than required by your innermost heart.  Things get really sticky when you have postponed  going to the edge and doing the jump in new ways of thinking, or any new enterprise, actually.  Here in the stickiness,  actions are iterative (things done over and over and over, without resolution) and  are classic procrastination.  A jazz musician would be crippled if she/he got stuck. The whole art of jazz is in letting go, but, paradoxically, also returning to the place already explored – and playing with the two states. 

      Many of us know procrastination intimately. For instance, I have been hovering around doing my tax this year and left it and left it and left it. Fortunately, I finally mobilized my energy and went and saw my tax agent who looks after me wonderfully.  I don’t doubt that this a common experience, but it is an interesting one. What is going on in this place of apparent overwhelm? Why did other things suddenly become more important? Why didn’t I tackle the thing that was just there looming bigger than Ben Hur? What became of my usual intelligence? Why the fog around the item procrastinated upon? It remains a mystery to me. Is it the fear of being made look stupid and paying for that stupidity; is it a fear of being accountable; what?

      Artists loiter at the edge of their blank canvas, and sometimes cannot begin. They can struggle. Will this work be nothing more than a pragmatic, “let’s just get this thing painted”, or will this work explore the depths of one’s being? Will this nurture the soul in its doing, its process, or will it be a superficial thing, a mere product that will bring a quick buck? It can be hard to get going, but there is a need to begin. I know for myself that beginning gently, beginning softly, with little steps and nurturing the infant idea till the energy of doing takes over and the work is done. The engagement in the process becomes the food for continuing. The work drops down from a superficial doing to a wonderful enriching working. Time, though, is required to simply allow the process to be. This is when loitering on the edge becomes a rich time. The plunge into the work then is an entirely natural event; not forced, not artificial, but real and exciting. The embryonic idea grows, is tamed and yet remains wild and, in some way, a bit “other”, a bit “self”. 

      I used to paint a lot and when I felt the work done I’d take it to the bathroom where there was a large mirror. I’d look at my painting in the mirror. I’d see the work and I’d see my own face. If I liked my work, my face would glow. Somehow or other this knowing of my own delight would be reflected in the eyes of other people when the work was right.  Thus painting became a reciprocal process, a bit like therapy. The shared engagement in the exploration of the edge, and the playing with it in all its intensity, is mutually held, nurtured, and let go, and new ways of being is discovered and built upon.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Seeing new

Seeing new  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD
Dec 2011

  
     I’ve been travelling by sea around New Zealand getting daily intense glimpses of various places in South and North Islands. It’s reminded me of ecology excursions that I used to go on when I was at school where we threw small quadrants onto the ground as we walked and noted, in great detail, the minutii of plants, soil types, rocks, and insects of each falling of the quadrant. 
 

       I loved these excursions and loved what I found: the excitement of seeing the variety and interconnectedness of each element in each microworld.  This recent travelling has felt similar to me. Here we were hopping from place to place, getting a sort of anthropological view of things without much engagement in the daily happenings of the places – yet aware that our presence essentially changed things for the people and the places. Tourism injects big bucks to local economies, and the people – coming and being there - get a chance to share old things with new people. It was fun connecting to others in this way. Our footsteps up hillsides contributed also to the wear-tear of pathways and the ripples from our ship shaped shore lines as only ripples can.

      As I mull on these things, two other parts come to mind. Each new day of life is like an extract in the process of becoming life. And a therapeutic session is also in the process of becoming, and yet also an extract of life. These two ideas, I shall set aside for the moment and bring into play another idea that came up during this travelling time.

      While away I set myself a daily task of seeing whether I could merely observe each new place, captured, as it were, in a quadrant, without bringing remembered other places, other geographies, into the picture. How hard that was, for each place evoked memories of other special places: the uplifted and valleyed lie of  land, the angle of the trees, the smells of mangrove and seaside, the pattern of houses, the blossom here and there, the cultural blends of peoples, the lilt of voices familiar and unfamiliar, etc, etc. Is it possible, anyway, to hold away the memories one has in the face of new encounters; is it possible to see new, without the shaping of one’s eyes by the old?

     The early paintings of Australian and New Zealand animals and plants  by visiting European artists show clearly the influences of the old homeland: kangaroos with deer faces and bandicoots that look like large rats with stripes, and trees shaped by the sight of exotica found elsewhere in the world. Sorting the classifications of flora and fauna is still continuing: this from the more familiar that. So how possible is it to perceive things as new? 

      It occurred to me that this latter task is certainly a useful meditation, but though to see new maybe an admirable and barely achievable  aim, the very awareness that one is not seeing new but rather through eyes that alight upon the new as though upon the familiar is a valuable part of the exercise. The exercise is essentially one of awareness, after all. Just knowing that the eyes we see with are the eyes we customarily use in seeing is perhaps useful enough.

      Yet it isn’t the whole truth of it. We can see new in increments, sometimes, and see new in leaps and bounds as well. The old European artists learned to see Australian and New Zealand critters and flora more truly to their actual forms, processes and types as they studied them with more knowledge and saw them interacting in their environment. Knowing is a valuable key to seeing. The thrown quadrant is not an exercise devoid of previous learning, but a coming to knowing through previous comings to knowing. The knowledge acquired is a culmination of other knowledges, inside and beyond the discipline the knowing may (for this time) be located. Thus one piece of knowledge is shaped by many pieces of knowledge from a variety of disciplines.

     All these musings have a profound parallel to the therapeutic process. When a client embarks on their journey of self discovery they bring their old, as well as newly discovered, ways of seeing into our conversation and I contribute my way of seeing, combined with the various other knowledges I have acquired, plus the experiments we might do together, and the blended insights forge a new alchemy, a new seeing and  new, but not foreign, possibilities for an enriched life. No knowledge is every wasted nor unacknowledged.  Seeing new in the therapeutic situation is extraordinary for it may be started in a single session of one hour and brewed into the week or weeks that lie ahead.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Seeing consciousness as a rolling ball

Seeing consciousness as a rolling ball  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. of Counselling, PhD
Dec 2012 

      Imagine a beach ball rolling around in a swimming pool, or in the ocean. The top surface of the ball rolls to below the surface of the water and then rolls right over so that what was previously on top returns there. The ball rocks a bit in relation to small waves, rolling again, rocking once more. Maybe you are imagining you are the rocking ball in the water, maybe you are not. Maybe you can sense the water around you; maybe you cannot sense the water. Maybe…, maybe not? Whether or not you are the ball or are watching the imaginary ball, its rocking and rolling motion in water has a nice calming quality to it. It’s hard to resist.

      This scenario could well be part of a hypnotic induction process where relaxation and yet concentration and focus allow for some profound changes to take  place at a holistic level in the person being hypnotised, but it also serves to illustrate how non-psychodynamic, non-psychoanalytic theorists  are thinking about consciousness. The rolling  ball image contrasts with the image of the iceberg where the conscious mind is illustrated as being the small bit above the surface of the water with the unconscious mind the huge iceberg below. Psychoanalysts, following Freud, think of consciousness in terms of an iceberg; non-psychoanalysts view consciousness more like a ball in water. I much prefer the rolling ball metaphor. There is fluidity here, fluidity and flexibility, and endless shifting change. 

      There are implications for therapy according to how we see consciousness and unconsciousness. For iceberg theorists and therapists, the work is always about ameliorating suffering at an unconscious level, as what is viewed as the conscious mind is only the “tip of the iceberg”, and a symptom is seen as coming out of  “the unconscious”.   “The unconscious” according to those following psychoanalytic thought is an actual place;  a cauldron of psychic energy which fizzes out in uncontrolled bursts in neurotics. I realize I have lots of mixed metaphors here, but they are only metaphors, which we can make up however we please and according to how we see the world.  The cauldron of psychic energy metaphor was that described by Freud (1856-1939), following his interest in the new technology of steam engines. Neurologically, there isn’t an unconscious mind nor a conscious one, but of course, the mind isn’t well accounted for in neurology. That aside, I want to promote consciousness in terms of the rolling ball analogy because I believe it is a very useful one.

     A rolling ball theorist/therapist has a view of consciousness that sees consciousness as that which is visible now and invisible next and visible again. Notice how this analogy does not talk of an unconscious as an entity. Here is a view of consciousness that is visible sometimes and invisible sometimes as well. This is a consciousness of awareness and unawareness that is always relational to actual contexts, memories, and ideas. There is no storage place of  unthought thoughts, but emergent or forgotten thoughts and emotions that under the right circumstances are remembered. These remembered thoughts and emotions and experiences may or may not be objectively or forensically verifiable, but have a veracity for the person involved. It is this sense of truthfulness that matters and can be brought into therapy, or not.

      My work is with what is and what next emerges in my conversation with my client at that time. There is only what presents itself  in our interaction. Insights arise on both sides, for me and for her. These are insights that enrich and expand my client’s awareness, as well as my own. This contrasts with a psychoanalytic approach where the therapist sits in a position of power and decision working with what they decide is important. The client’s input is restricted to what the therapist considers important, just as the image of a solid iceberg (clearly not one melting under the impact of climate change) restricts an understanding of what consciousness is actually capable of: in this view, fixed and inflexible.

      The rolling ball view of consciousness has changed how therapy is done substantially and it has also changed how clinical hypnosis is practiced, just as a matter of interest. No longer a swinging watch on a chain, no longer a “look into my eyes,” no longer “you are going deeper and deeper,” no longer a maestro controlling a patient; instead there is now a gentle collaborative process with a recognition that the client will hear what is important to them and make meaning according to their own experience, that a good hypnotist and therapist will change the course of a therapeutic session according to what is reported by the client and what is observed as present by the therapist. Hypnosis and other forms of  non-psychoanalytic psychotherapy becomes a nurturing and change making process. 

     What emerges in therapy and hypnosis can be extraordinary and a powerful generator of change at  a habit reducing level, the level of psychological and physical pain, for managing obsessive behaviours, for lack of self confidence, and a number of other debilitating issues, as well as bringing a greater number of choices to every day life. The beauty of the rolling, rocking ball in water analogy is that we can choose, or not choose, what we want to change.

Copyright @ 3013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Listening to the Call of the Little

Listening to the Call of the Little by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Mar 2013 

     The tables have turned. For the past month I’ve been the one on the couch, as it were.  I’ve seen my clients, and they have seen me, from the perspective of me half lying on the sofa in my living room, rather than the more professional space downstairs.  I think we have liked this turnaround a bit. I know the shift in my position has made the relationship that I share in this therapeutic space much more horizontal (excuse the pun) and quite useful overall. 

     I’ve been ill and uncomfortable in my body this last month. I’m healing, though, and with my growing strength I am appreciating the subtleties of small things. 

      In deprivation of a capacity to perform big dramatic acts, when “doing” something has actually been difficult and time consuming, when you have to think about its completion a long time before actually getting down to doing it, then you have to deal with exactly what is at hand. I am somewhat slow to appreciate this, and yet in coming to know it in my own bones I also get a better sense of the value of  being gentle with time, of being patient with very little. I am realizing in myself what I’ve said to others, that it is in incremental shifts that brings change of an enduring kind, not the big sudden changes that perhaps we all hope for.

      There is a walking meditation I like to do, and which sometimes I suggest my clients do, that consists of nothing more than bringing focal awareness to the act of walking slowly. Each foot carefully placed on the ground, rocking this way and that, of finding the centre point, of rolling and twisting slightly, of regaining equilibrium, and the urge to place the other foot down, and slowly lifting the first foot, and feeling the shift in balance, and so on, brings challenge to something usually taken for granted. The mindfulness achieved in this meditation can be expanded to every other act a person might engage in, in the course of her life.  Nothing ever needs to feels as though it just happens; that things are being done to oneself that one has not agreed to. The act of mindfulness restores a sense of agency as well as an awareness of the interconnectedness, and rhythm, of all things.

     Each movement in this walking meditation brings to awareness its reliance upon all that has gone before and what is about to be achieved next. Without this proper consideration you are liable to fall.

In the rhythm of nature there is a flux and flow and a counterpoint to big acts are the gentler small ones. It’s when we try to do the big stuff, without balancing it with the little bits, that we come unstuck. I realize that my recent illness was probably promoted by my lack of listening to the call of the little, for I was caught up in the grand designs of life-changing restructuring, of new directions planned for but confined to tight pieces of time. I have been like an actor trying to perform Cats, playing all the parts, on a stage the size of a shoebox.

     It is in the attention to the little that, paradoxically, a sense of expansiveness arises; a timelessness that emerges from the concentration upon the minutiae of attending to the little things in this small moment.

     It is in this attention to the small ordinary acts of everyday life that healing takes place. The poisonous excesses of big acts unrelieved by gentleness literally do poison the soul, and the body (in my case). So after the big stuff, I urge you to enjoy the small, to savour every drop of its sweetness, its ordinariness, and delight in not what this little piece of life can bring to you, but what inventiveness and creativity you can deliver into this small space of gentle – and exceptional – littleness.  Therein lies healing  for us wounded ones, therapist and client alike.

 Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Speaking Mindfully

Speaking Mindfully   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. of Counselling, PhD
Feb 2013

     I often wonder how I can speak more truly in a therapeutic session. By that I mean, speak accurately and not miss the mark: to really reflect through speech, as close to my intention as possible, what I feel is most appropriate at that time and with that client and to speak in response to what is arising in our dialogue, as well as to do my job better.

     The therapeutic conversation is just this. It isn’t the same kind of conversation that occurs in everyday life. In the kind of therapeutic conversation that I engage in, I draw upon the direction and style of  Narrative Therapy as well as Solution oriented Therapy. I also use, when it is needed, a much more intuitive integrative style. The first two therapeutic approaches have a definite aim: to look for and find experiential exceptions to those feelings of stuckness a client feels is holding them back from living a more healthful life. So, in this endeavour it is useful to find and speak the words that will have the greatest effect. 

     This is an active and collaborative therapy where client and therapist are both engaged in the healing process. It cannot be successful by merely sitting back and listening to the issues a client brings. I have to be actively engaged in listening and responding in speech in a way that is as accurate to my intentions as possible.

      It  isn’t always possible to know exactly how my words are received. When I do speak, I am looking intently at the person in front of me. I can see when my words hit the mark by a lightening of the face, a smile, a glimmer in the eyes, and mouthed words of “Yes!”. I can see, also, when I’ve missed the mark horribly. I seen, then, confusion, or a raising of an eyebrow, or worse, total disinterestedness. But, what is the client thinking when their face doesn’t change at all? Where is the conversation heading then? I don’t know.

     So, how do I speak truly, to speak those words that are required at that moment? Before I mull about this further, I shall take a short detour.

      I have been fundamentally and enduringly influenced by a book by Eugen Herrigel, first published in 1948, called Zen in the Art of Archery.  Archery is all about hitting or missing the mark, and its art relies on the establishment and intense practice of judging distances, understanding wind intensity and direction, holding in tension the bow, fingering the arrow, twisting the body just so, having one’s feet firmly on the ground, yet easily able to move quickly, being mindful, absolutely present, and able to simply let go of the arrow. It is a skill that takes a lot of time to acquire. 

Most skills are like that. As with archery, the practitioner of any acquired skill must practice and practice and practice. She needs to have an intention of doing it well. Interestingly though, while she has to have confidence that she will succeed, she cannot let her ego get in the way. She has to sort of hold her confidence present, as well as her doubts, and yet – almost uncaringly – let go of the arrow.  Only then, in this lightness of touch, can the mark be hit.

     Speaking truly, with intention, within the therapeutic conversation is not so dissimilar. Speaking truly for a therapist is an art and a skill. We are trained in the art, but only become skilful through practice, and then, rather sweetly, we become artists in the craft, but never perfect.

I have seen master therapists at work, and have had sessions with them, and what I’ve noticed is that what they say can be still a bit hit and miss. There is however a purpose to the hit and miss-ness (and maybe the therapists are not conscious of this), as it allows the client to say, “Yes, that’s right, or no, you’ve got it wrong,  or, maybe…”. What is going on here is the recognition that a therapist doesn’t have it all in the bag, and that the client is still the expert of their lives, and that it is actually in the conversation, in relationship,  that the work is happening. Things are not being done to the client; the client and therapist are working together on this thing called “stuckness”. In this way, the therapeutic conversation is not archery; it is something much more rich and wholesome. It is bringing health, playfulness, and creativity to our lives (mine as well) so that problem stories no longer take hold and make us stuck.

    One final observation. An endeavour to speak truly by the therapist and hit the mark, or not, is an exercise in mindfulness, and as such is useful as a model for the client. One of my clients has incorporated, very deliberately, this mindfulness, and is thereby becoming very conscious in all her interaction in life. I thank her for  the wisdom she shares in practicing speaking truly.

 Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Singing and the Therapeutic Process

Singing and the Therapeutic Process  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. of Counselling, PhD
Jan 2013

      Singing is 90% mental, so my singing teacher tells me.  Of course, practically all of human existence is carried out in the mental realm. What is wonderful about singing, though, is that the very act of doing it brings into sharp focus the wilieness of the mind and the slipperyness of intention.

To put one’s intention squarely on the act of music making, in the production of sweet notes is to be present in the art of it.  

      I am reminded again and again of the way in which we set ourselves up for failure by concentrating on past problem stories in a recursive back-peddling that really gets in the way of fresh and decisive being right here, now.

       I love what I’m learning about myself in my singing practice. I’m enjoying being able to watch how and what and why I trip myself up. Watching, too, what it feels like when fully present. It is the difference between unadulterated clear musical notes and the murkiness, and blockedness, of my inner stories. I am no different from anybody else in this regard. 

      Having singing lessons is like having good therapy. Therapy isn’t just about finding ways to lessen feelings of anxiety, depression, grief, etc; it’s also for bringing awareness to what we do to perpetuate our difficulties and thus find other ways of doing things.

       There is, of course, just the pure pleasure of participating in the making of incredibly beautiful music. And this, too, is coupled in the therapeutic process. How so, you might ask? The therapeutic conversation is often intense, but this is interspersed with soaring moments of insight where the dialogue becomes incredibly beautiful. I’m thinking of a fairly recent example where a client realized his overly lenient behaviour towards a disrespectful relative was paralleled in his extremely generous gifts to a person in his employment. He realized in an instant that both behaviours were both similar and inappropriate, as well as extremely costly emotionally and financially. He had not seen a connection before, and, seeing the connection, allowed him to reconsider what he was doing; the first step to altering his behaviour. It was an ‘Aha’ moment, just like the making of a clear, pristine note, the beginning of a lovely melody.

      I am endlessly curious about the way I, and the people I work with, get in the way of myself/ourselves. Why do we do it? Again, I’ll refer to my singing lessons to attempt to trace what happens to me so that I can hint at what I think happens to other people, recognizing that my processes are both unique to me and similar to others, as far as my studies and experiences have indicated.

     At my last singing lesson I was having difficulty singing a particular phrase. I wondered about it, and remembered then a conversation I’d had with an acquaintance who’d said, as he sat down to speak with me for the first time, that men and women were as different as apples and pears. I’d said to him, that we were still fruit (!) and in my life I’d come to realize we were not really as dissimilar as some had made out, and clear delineations between men and women was problematic. He then went on to say that really women were inferior and needed men to survive. That got my goat, and in that instant, I realized why my throat felt stuck. I told my singing teacher of this event, and then set about singing the phrase again. This time, my throat opened and I sang clearly. I’d stumbled on my own indignation, upon my fury at some lingering social arrogance regarding the supposed differences between men and women. I’ve had to carve my path through a lot of this cultural nonsense throughout life, and some of it still has the power to seize my throat.

     In the above example, I trace a bit of my internal processes, pointing to a way in which recursive thoughts tripped me up. When I’m working with a client, I can hear the old ideas that trip him/her up. I can also hear, much like my singing teacher hears when in the presence of a student, the beautiful quality of their, as yet, not fully realized inner voice (their unique me-ness). Talking about what it is that gets in the way of speaking, hearing, and acting on the integrity of their being really helps, for singing and in therapy. 

      Singing is creating beauty in process. Doing and receiving therapy opens us – in a process of the therapeutic conversation – to our own beauty and less problematic modes of being. Ah, to find our clear note of awareness, our simple unique voice.

 Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Exploring communication

Exploring communication             by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Aug 2011

     I am sitting in a plane on the way to Perth for a long awaited holiday and thinking about what to write for this issue of the Nimbin Good Times, but by the time you read this I’ll be well and truly home. Two topics spring to mind and I wonder why they arise together. Terminals, on the one hand, seem a worthy topic and the business of a friend trying to get me to organize his stuff is the other topic worming its way through my mind. Are they somehow connected?

 

     I am intrigued. Let me wander around these ideas for a moment. Of terminals I am reminded of two things. The first is the movie The Terminal, with Tom Hanks in it, and secondly, a wonderful book I read years ago called Angels, a modern myth by Michel Serres. Angels is about creating a philosophy of communication, of movement between people, while the Hanks movie is concerned with miscommunication, getting stuck in a place (denied entry into the US and unable to return to his own revolution-riven country) more usually associated with transitions. Interestingly, both book and movie are set in airports, places where normally you arrive, you leave, you arrive… 

     As to this other topic, of this friend attempting to get me to solve his problem by asking me to organize the removal of an item of furniture from his house to store in mine, prior to his departure. The item was attractive to me, but not so much that I was prepared to drop everything I was doing in order to get removalists doing the job in time for an, as yet, unknown departure date. Here was a mixed message from my friend: you can enjoy a beautiful, difficult to move object, but you’ll have to organize its removal because my friend was going away (when?). The problem was, I was leaving on my own holiday soon too. Ultimately I simply refused to do what was asked of me. The dynamic, if I may speak in this way, was all wrong and I resisted it.

     Good and honest communication between people needs to be a free flowing thing, not bits obscured, and withheld. It was not up to my friend to request I organize the removal of a large object from his house in time for his undeclared departure date, just because he thought I would enjoy using this object, and my enjoying it was a good enough reason for off-loading his own responsibility onto me. He really needed to organize the transport, or disposal, of the object himself.

     Angels are intermediary entities, transporting clear messages between, classically, god and humans. Airports, those massive tracts of strange spaces warmed up by homely touches of shops and eateries, are intermediary places. Both connect meetings across vast skies and both depend on clear communication at all nodes. Travellers, and meaning makers, need to know their journey will be safe. 

     So, now I know why the topics of terminals and my friend off-loading his responsibility onto me occurred together. It is about communication and the  between of communication that interests me. Clarity of intention is needed; muddied desires obscures too much unsaid stuff that can easily terminate friendships. Funny, this word “terminal” and that word “terminate”. The Terminal, the movie, was about, as I’ve said, getting stuck and yet airport terminals are determinably not places to get stuck (though sometimes it seems airport staff are hell bent on making this happen). The word terminal can mean “end” and it can imply articulations between nodes (as in electric power stations). Words are articulations between sender and receiver: the clearer the intention and the delivery of all the facts the more favourable the reception. Understanding depends on it.

     I have much faith in the writing process, and recommend to many of my clients to keep a journal, for it is in writing that greater understanding is reached. The printed word is an intermediary, like angels and terminals, and connects thought to thinker and writers to readers. In writing we come to know what was once half intimated, half felt – an inkling that doesn’t really go anywhere. Writing connects.

 Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Doing therapy with awareness

Doing therapy with awareness by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD (2010)
Nov 2010 

     I'm sitting on a balcony overlooking the ocean up in the Tweed shire and watching the sun rise. There is a meringue of clouds on the horizon with bands of coral orange breaking through. The sea is low today, a crinkle of waves.    A bush turkey hurries by. I should be content, but I am only partly. I want to be home with my beloved cat; the home I haven’t been in for nearly 4 weeks. I’ve been travelling overseas, attending a conference in that old city of Heidelberg in Germany, and then enjoying Amsterdam and Iceland on a much needed holiday. 

     Here I am on the coast, north of home. Why? I am attending a Gestalt training residential, to deepen and expand my psychotherapeutic skills, and bring to more awareness my own processes.  To be effective as a therapist, it is necessary to understand – and keep up to date – knowledge of the field and understanding of oneself. To do therapy effectively is to be able to separate out the issues that belong to the client and those that come from the therapist, otherwise the actual needs of the client are not heard.

     “Doing therapy with awareness” is a double-meaning-ed title I’ve thought of for me as therapist, and the kind of therapy  work I do with clients. My  work is essentially an existential-phenomenological therapy (of which Gestalt is a part) that aims to bring the client to awareness of how and what they do in their daily experience of life that isn’t nurturing to the uniqueness of who they are, to bring to a closure half-finished emotional business (stuff that gets in the way of change), and to allow them greater access to their capacity to make choices for themselves. What is true for clients, is also true for me as a fellow human being and me as therapist. To be an effective therapist is to practice awareness.

      To be attuned to what is important for a client, I need to be finely attuned to what is important for me. I need to look after myself as much as I encourage my clients to look after themselves. A stressed-out-of-her brain therapist is not able to do her job; she’s ceased to be a therapist, in fact.

I enjoy the sea, the flux and flow of water and sand turned up and around and wind in all its moods matches my energetic process exactly. Qi gong practice, which I learnt some years ago, also employs this flux and flow. Here there is a strong movement outward followed by a gentle one inward, followed by a strong movement, followed by a gentle one, and so on. Qi gong is an exercise and meditation practice akin to tai chi. The pattern of strong-gentle-strong-gentle is the pattern I follow when working with  clients. It is a rhythm that nurtures and challenges in turn, centering and bringing awareness as it goes on. The Chinese may be wrong in many things, but in this fundamental Taoist truth, I believe they are right. Tao observes the rhythms of nature; a rhythm as natural and as complex as life itself. 

     Psychotherapy and counselling, in my book, should not be viewed as peculiar goings-on for the unstable, but accessed by anybody wanting aid, support and challenge in order to go about life more fluidly, with greater awareness, astuteness and grit.

Musing on assumptions

Musing on assumptions     by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
June 2010

     The other day a friend and I went kayaking on the Wilson River in Lismore. What an amazing place we live near, yet barely know. I was blown away by the tumble of lushness tingling with unexpected flowers; a richness of life practically hidden beneath the bridges that link South Lismore to cbd.  We saw a raft of branches and weed ferrying a little group of ducks downstream. I was reminded of the little rafts ferrying Thai children across rivers to school. 

      Fish were leaping, water birds scurrying, as I, in my kayak skimmed across the perfectly glassy surface, amazed, yet again, how easy it is. This expedition was my first in this part of the world. I regularly took my kayak out on the Swan River near Fremantle in WA close to where I lived until early 2009. Sometimes, and that was the most fun, I kayaked on the ocean.  There, I was sometimes visited by dolphins paralleling my movements as we slipped a wave or two together. Ah, the magic of it all.

     It is mucking in, on, and around water that inspires me. I am a swimmer, snorkler, diver, and kayaker and playing in this way I come to know my own thoughts on things, what matters to me, and how I may achieve what sets my heart on fire.

     So, it was in kayaking in Lismore that I began thinking, yet again, about life, death, the inbetween, and assumptions we make about what’s normal. Fortunately, though, this bit of thinking was short-lived on the water.  Kayaking is for being present with water.   I resumed it over coffee, later.

I’ll start with assumptions. Life, death and the inbetween will have to be written about some other time. It seems to me that when we make assumptions about what’s normal behaviour we are short-circuiting a process that is really much more complex. What is normal is open to dispute. My passion for water play (I can’t call what I do, sport) is distinctly non-normal for women of a certain age who relish rounds of golf. The estimation of what’s normal, in this example, arises from a comparison between preferred activities. Is such a quality of estimation reasonable when deciding what’s normal behaviour in matters of the heart: falling in and out of love, grief, feelings of loss, reactions to trauma, etc.?

     What’s normal?  When two people declare love for each other, yet one does not act in a loving way and the other is grief stricken, is the experience of the latter  non-, or ab-normal? This scenario is quite common and one I occasionally witness in my clinical practice. The depth of grief experienced by the person, who has declared her love and meant it with every fibre of her being, is not emotionally met by the empty words of the other, even though the words sound right. Writing this, it seems obvious. No, the loving one is the ok one. Yet, quite often, it is the grieving, loving one who comes to therapy – sent by the partner who speaks well, but means not much. My work, in this regard, is to validate the realness of this person’s experience. 

     How is it that we, so often, doubt ourselves so much, and take on the assumptions about our experiences that effectively undermine what we know intimately to be real? In the example above, it is in terrible heartache and the confusion surrounding the double-speak of the partner that the capacity for seeing clearly is lost. 

     Assumptions subvert the complexity of human interaction. They make things seem to make sense, without necessarily doing so. They are slippery and very unreliable, yet they do serve a purpose in shortcutting across the multiple possibilities of life, the number of which we would have difficulty negotiating otherwise. Getting through a day without making some assumptions would be really difficult. I assume, for instance, that my shoes will fit, my car will go, I’ll earn enough money to stay alive, etc.

      Tragedy comes when assumptions are made about other people, nature and the cosmos and never consciously questioned. Knowledge about the world would be miniscule and our relationships with one another well and truly stuck.

     The art is to apply awareness – and counselling is a very useful tool to learn how to do this – to what is felt and being said by others and ourselves and to determine what is authentic and what is not.  Separating out what belongs to us, emotionally, and what belongs to others is empowering, and a necessary skill in the art of life. 

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Meaning?

Meaning?               By Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
May 2010

     I went into a bookshop the other day and a display consisting of discounted tarot cards caught my eye. I am rather fond of beautiful objects and these were definitely attractive. Just as I was about to pick a deck up, a man I didn’t know asked me whether I believed in these things. I replied I don’t believe in the cards per se, but am intrigued by the stories they tell and the meanings I make of them. I don’t believe in newspapers or telephone directories or street signs, for that matter. All these are merely means of communication.

      The man then asked me was it true that people commit suicide after using tarot cards. I replied, people who try to commit suicide are just as likely to do so after assuming a voice on the radio is telling them this is what they must do; in other words it is the psychosis that makes the difference, not what the person blames for suggesting they act in this way. A person who hears voices coming from a toaster cannot convince me that toasters are intrinsically evil.

      The fellow understood my drift, for he then spoke about the Tom Hanks movie, The Castaway. Hanks portrays a fictional FedEx employee, Chuck, who is stranded alone on a deserted island after the plane he was in crashes over the South Pacific. He manages to survive using remnants of the plane’s cargo. He finds a volleyball  on which he marks a face, gives it the name Wilson and talks to as a friend. Though this is “crazy” stuff to those of us thinking about it now, the making meaning by making “alive” an inanimate object kept Chuck sane and allowed him eventually to get off the island. The making of meaning is essential for human life, but the medium for it is only a stimulus to this process.

       The capacity to make not only sense of something, but to allow this to enliven and empower us is essential for human life itself. Viktor Frankl, a remarkable Jewish psychiatrist who has deeply influenced me, developed a branch of psychotherapy known as logotherapy in response to his experiences in Nazi death camps. There he noticed that those who used the experience of being there as an opportunity for self growth as well as discovering how to be present for others (see Man’s Search for Meaning), lived, while those who found it all meaningless and closed their eyes and lived in the past, weakened and died. The attitude of nihilism is already a death and a disconnection from life.

        We are much more than our biology, social and psychological conditions, heredity and upbringing. We are selves in relation to other selves and in relation to our time and place and the meanings we make are carried in some form across generations, yet all these enable us to interpret something. Subject to time, space and place, and coming from our particular psychological and bodily state (alert, tired, moody, psychotic, grief stricken, buoyant, sick, hunger, satiation, etc), as well as our belief systems, family conditioning, education, and how influenced we are by our peers also shapes how meaning is made. Every meaning we attach to something is in a process of becoming something more and is always open to interpretation.  Interpretations that are especially nurturing and full of meaning for us personally inspire choice-full behaviour. Inspired by the meaning we have made about something we can then choose to live in creative and empowering ways. 

      This is one very important purpose of psychotherapy and counselling. Such therapy opens up, client and therapist together, innovative, soul consoling, self-nurturing ways of understanding present circumstances and enables the client to move in directions that really matter to him/her.

      The symbols represented in the tarot deck allow for creative meaning making and are neither intrinsically evil nor good (whatever these terms mean), nor can be blamed as an inspiration to suicide – despite what some religious groups claim. The outright rejection of tarot cards on the grounds of hokus pokus, also, misses the point. The cards are a stimulus to self-examination and awareness of inner processes. As such a trigger, the cards are very useful as much as any book that touches, challengers, and inspires us. And, of course, they are often very beautiful items to look at.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

On knowing the essence of the other

On knowing the essence of the other by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD
Jan 2011

     Call it empathy, called it emotional compassion, call it ‘putting yourself in the other person’s shoes,’ call it what you will; at the heart of the matter it is knowing the essence of the other. It is  recognizing the realness of the humanity, in its complexity, of the other person in their flesh and blood.

      We are not born having empathy, for it is something we usually grow into.  As little children we start to recognize what another person is feeling from cues such as facial expressions, laughter, or crying, and how they might be responding from various contexts or situations, like cutting a finger. At first we may experience the distress of the other person as our own distress  (their tears are our own) – which can be overwhelming, but then we develop something called reflective empathy where we gradually learn how to helpfully deal with the suffering of others. This reflective empathy may eventually develop into altruistic behaviour. Altruistic behaviour is where you act for the benefit of another person, without necessarily seeing their discomfort first.

     So what does this word empathy actually mean, and is it adequate in its present form? Does it actually connote a much deeper interrelational process?

     The word empathy is a relatively recent concoction combining two Greek roots, pathetos referring to “suffering” and the prefix em referring to “in”. As such, the whole word means “in-suffering”.  The dictionary defines it as ‘mental entering into the feeling or spirit of a person or thing’ as well as an ‘appreciative perception or understanding’.  But is it merely mental? It is useful to dig deeper into the origins of the word.

     The term empathy was coined by Titchener in 1909 to serve as a translation to the German word einfühlung, which had been appropriated by a man named Lipps in 1903, to be applied in a psychological context. Einfühlung was originally used in the study of aesthetics to describe the way in which observers are able to project themselves into a work of art or a thing of beauty. To know the grain of the art work within the body of the perceiver. The Greek word aisthetikos meaning "sensitive, perceptive," from aisthanesthai "to perceive (by the senses or by the mind) is origin of aesthetics. So the origins of both words, empathy and aesthetics, are far from being understood as arising from wholly mental processes.

       Unfortunately, as with the drift of the study of aesthetics to an elitist value-driven critical study of the beautiful, so the word empathy has moved from the realm of sense-perception, of knowing in your bones, to a moral cognitive one. No longer concerned with our participation in another’s sufferance as part of a matter of knowing the essence of the other, the term has come to mean anything from an imagined feeling with the other person to a communicated by parallel-felt distress. Thus a group I’ve come across known as “Laws of Attraction” adherents can say that as empathy is a mental activity,  taking on the negative emotions of others is a harmful practice because you are attracting those same negative circumstances into your own life. Better, they say, to empathize with people who have what you want!!! There goes any consideration of the needs of others and any reason whatsoever for working towards a more equable world, and here comes a totally selfish way of being, where all work is for the satisfaction of ourselves. The spiritual dimension of empathy, which is what I know as “knowing the essence of another”, has been abandoned by these “Law of Attraction” crowd, for the pursuit of self gratification.

      Choosing not to be empathic and not knowing how to be are two different things. It is possible to learn how another person feels. In my clinical practice when something of this nature comes up, I might get them (M.) to “put on the shoes” of the other person they are not “getting” and speak the words the other person might say, using “I” words (swapping roles around).  For example, “I can’t seem to make sense of M.,” “I feel M. is missing me; she’s not feeling my pain.” “M. just wants things all her way…”  Something often happens, a sparkle of recognition occurs. A small bit of awareness of the other person twinkles into being and broadens and shifts the whole feeling situation and changes the way they interact with this other person.

       Knowing the essence of the other is a deep process. It is much more lovely than a mere cognitive acknowledgement of another’s being. It is a whole body, mind, spirit, sharing that allows us to not only acknowledge the rights of others to their unique experiences, but puts us firmly into being here on earth ourselves in inter-relationship with them. Knowing the essence of another is being with them in a vital, sensitive way; it is being here-now with zing and being in community with the capacity for interactive sharing.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Alleviating Chronic Pain

Alleviating Chronic Pain  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip CH
Aug 2013

     I know pain. I know it intimately. I have had fibromyalgia (an autoimmune disorder) for 15 years, contracted originally from a flu-like illness I got in China. I’d gone to there to give a paper at a health conference in Nanjing. After the conference I, and our little group of Australian travellers did a special acupuncture course, working with de-skinned corpses soaked in formaldehyde. Perhaps it was the toxicity of the formaldehyde, or the environment in which we worked wasn’t all that clean, perhaps my illness had more to do with the ages old dust stirred up by the intense building activity going on in the midst of China’s ten year rebuilding plan. Wherever it came from, it made me very ill. Since that time, fibromyalgia expresses itself in my left leg that cramps spasmodically when I get over tired. There used to be a constant chronic pain, but now, after intensive acupuncture and remedial practices, I’m much better. I do know, however, really know pain.
 

     Pain is inevitable, but suffering is not, so says the Buddha, an observation that is very useful to know when we contemplate alleviating it. Pain is necessary for survival. It allows us to avoid injury or respond to injury as quickly as possible. When it becomes chronic, this purpose is less clear. Neurological evidence suggests that chronic pain imprints itself on our brains, amplifying its experience and getting in the way of its resolution. I’ve watched how fibromyalgia works with me: a cramp is felt, my attention goes to the cramp, the cramp intensifies, intensifies until the cramp is all there is, and stays like this for days, unless I break the cycle with massage or acupuncture or some other effective intervention. I wish I’d known more about hypnotherapy, though. This would have broken the cycle much earlier, perhaps not to get rid of the disorder, per se, but then again, maybe it could have.

     Chronic pain (defined as pain that continues longer than 6 months) infiltrates our lives, affects our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviour infecting our relationships with one another, our work and our enjoyment. Understanding this multidimensional quality of pain is most useful for how we go about working with people in pain, as pain managements units attempt to do. 

     I work with people in pain, mental, bodily, emotional, spiritual and social, and psychotherapy, of which clinical hypnotherapy is essentially a part, is very useful in this regards. It’s significant that most research work on the efficacy of clinical hypnotherapy has been done on pain (over two centuries of research). Hypnotherapy was and is used by doctors and dentists and has a respectable place in surgery, in the alteration of heart beats, in the control of bleeding, and even in the diminution of tumours. It is used in childbirth; used when a person can not take chemical anaesthetics, used to reduce the levels of body damaging medications (when morphine is no longer an option), when pain management is now too expensive, and/or doctors no longer know what to do with a person with their ongoing pain. Clinical hypnotherapy when used by psychotherapists, work to manage physical pain as well as psychological issues.

     We now know a lot about pain and also hypnotherapy, although the shifting paradigms of mind-body relations have altered this understanding quite substantially. Where once pain was thought to be psychogenic (originating from the mind), we now know there is an interrelationship between what the body feels and how the mind interprets this. There is still much to be learned about pain and its effective alleviation.

     Pain is a matter of the whole organism and thus its management  is not about convincing the person that it is “all in the mind”, for it is not. What we now know is they we are complex beings where an intervention on one level affects the experiences we have across the board. This is possible because of the plasticity of the brain and each new experience forges new neurological pathways, essentially and fundamentally changing us.

     Pain is a subjective phenomenon, and privately suffered. The way a person explains their pain is really useful in allowing the therapist to structure an intervention with hypnosis or other therapies. The narrative is an affirmation and acknowledgement of the pain’s presence and effects. This chronic pain narrative is a story told over and over, thus increasing the effects of imprinting on the brain.  This phenomenon is what is known as the symptomatic trance state. The art of healing is in breaking the circularity of that state, which is more about suffering than pain itself. The Buddha was right. Pain is inevitable, but much suffering isn’t. 

      Pain alleviation isn’t about getting rid of it, but changing how it is experienced. This can mean shifting the physicality of it from totally dominating our awareness to somewhere else in the body that isn’t so all encompassing.  The clinical hypnotherapist has tools up her sleeve that seem almost magical, but they are not so much magical as transformative. This is why I do the work I do. I am interested in participating in the transformation of lives. This is collaborative and empowering work, and deeply nurturing of client and practitioner alike.  

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

It isn't always the way you think it is

It isn’t always the way you think it is   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD
Sept 2011

     Many years ago I read of a 1970s (I think) experiment whereby human subjects were artificially physiologically aroused and presented with pictures of happy or sad faces and their resulting emotions reported. Those shown happy faces said they were feeling happy, those shown sad faces said they felt sad. This experiment, performed by numerous others since, shows the plasticity of our capacity to make meaning from our felt bodily state in relation to the contexts we find ourselves in. This is a three-way process, though it looks like just a two-way one: bodily arousal plus context, but the content of the meanings we make are more than just what are presented by external context. The meanings we make arise out of our historical individual take on the social and cultural stories of the environment we most identify with.  This take is built up over time and with reinforcement from family, peers, schooling, and other pervasive institutions. 

     Meanings are not fixed, but fluid and adaptive; indeed they are shaped – endlessly – by alternate views of things. This means that we are able to change how we see, respond to, and inhabit our world as well as experience our own lives. This fact lies at the heart and raison d’etre of effective therapy, along with care of the body.

     I find it very interesting that the body first feels, and then we make meaning – sense - of this first feeling. There is a perceptual gap, a window of opportunity to shift our reactions from habitual responses to perceiving the experience in new ways, or even just observing the physiological sense without attaching meaning to it. By being able to choose the meanings we make allow us to wend our pathway through life less reactively, more choicefully, and wisely. 

      We have a lot to contend with, however. Threats to our existence, whether direct or indirect (for example, being in the presence of a bomb going off, or a bystander to a bank robbery), or just injury (like falling off a rock and breaking a wrist) shakes the foundation of our being; we feel the reverberations for a long time and fear resounds around us. Trauma and abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional) can sometimes cause us to freeze like terrified animals so we cease to be able to respond with more than a rigid repertoire of feelings in relation to those around us. We might turn to drugs and alcohol to “loosen” us up, but such a solution ravages our bodies and minds, rather than offering actual healing. Bereavement, likewise, has long lasting effects on our bodies, as well as our minds, and may be experienced as on-going depletion of our energy. We feel too weak to do what usually interests us.  Depression, as it is now being described, is a likewise a “frozen” response to trauma, and one solution is more exercise and right diet.  The prescription of “exercise” is too generic and fails to appreciate the diversity of exercise styles possible. It isn’t just a case of moving your body more, but moving it in ways that delight you. Right diet can be generically prescribed as well, forgetting that it isn’t necessarily what you eat, but how and with what level of enjoyment. Chocolate may perk you up, if that’s your thing and if you believe it will (I recognize here that the chemical components of substances and activities do have an affect upon the brain), but there is more going here than just this one-to-one correspondence. And, in the case of the experiment mentioned above, there is more to just giving a context to physiological arousal. The meanings we make have to have something to do with us personally. 

     The subjects shown pictures of happy or sad people and then reporting feeling happy or sad after being artificially physiologically aroused had to have been conditioned to respond that way, and conditioning is what being a social animal is all about.  Social conditioning doesn’t end in a person’s childhood life; it is life-long flexible process.  It is also responsive, but not bound by one expression of it, to what arises physiologically. As noted above, there is a perceptible gap between what is felt in the body and what meaning is made of it. There really is a window of opportunity in every moment to change how we view our lives and thus alter how we feel about ourselves, and how we act upon others. Therapy can bring insight into ways we prevent ourselves seizing the day and how we can enliven ourselves to new ways of being, as well as finding ways to not resolving old traumas  but moving on from them.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Intimacy, not fusion

Intimacy, not fusion  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD
June 2011

     I often hear people talk about their partners, husbands, wives, as “their better half” and words to the effect that “the other person completes them” and find myself drawing back in horror. Even more repugnant to me are the requests some men make  regarding the women they supposedly love to subordinate themselves to them, and for women to believe it is right that they give up their hopes and dreams in order to be there for their men 24 hours a day.  Here is a lack of understanding of  what intimacy  and love is.

     The wonderful writer Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet, 1954, writes thus, 

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen… it is a great exacting claim. 

     Our work is not to dissolve into another person, but be clear and clean in our authentic contact with the one and ones we love.  Rilke’s idea of love as a ground for ripening of self speaks of an interaction between persons that is rich, full and not needy or clingy.  Partners who cling to each other and attempt to exclude  a multi-facetted world shrink from life itself. 

     Society has shaped our expectations about intimacy in the following ways. Many women are brought up to consider normal “losing themselves in a relationship” while many men think of intimacy as unmanly or just another word for sex, but intimacy is a subject much more complete than this.

      Intimacy is a substantive relationship between two  or more individuals of equal status. It is a deep reciprocal closeness and it is, as someone described it to me,  like a bridge over the silence of the universe joining people on either side.

     I believe that most  people yearn for intimacy, though some neurotically crave fusion (an undifferentiated disappearing into another person). Intimacy has a number of distinct characteristics that distinguish it from fusion. 

      To be intimate with another  (man and woman, woman and woman, or man and man) is to engage in closeness, time together, nurturance, physical intimacy, communication and consistency. Intimacy is shaped by an ability to face conflict and not shirk away from psychological, emotional or physical rupture. Intimacy distinguishes itself from fusion through a lack of intrusiveness: no separation anxiety, respect of another’s need for privacy, lack of possessiveness and jealousy, lack of overreactivity to the other person’s life problems; a distinction of minds (little mind-reading), lack of thinking we know what the other person wants or needs better than he/she does, lack of aggressive criticism, blaming, hurtful attacks, or a desire to diminish the other, and a lack of attempt to dominate the other in disagreements. To be fused is to see the physical absence of the other as a threat to our very existence. It is to think as normal to walk into the bathroom while the other person is on the toilet (as the husband of a client of mine did on a daily basis). It is to want to sit inappropriately in on an exam with one’s partner or attend an interview between a wife’s boss and one’s wife. A fused relationship may be one in which arguments never take place, or when they do, both parties are convinced that the relationship is crumbling. Fusion in a relationship may express itself when the man “knows” exactly what his partner wants for her birthday, without actually ever asking her (or vice versa). Fusion is found when one member of a relationship dominates, belittles, and undermines the other on a regular basis and thinks it is his/her right. When individuals leave these fused relationships they often go into crisis because they no longer know who or what they are, for they have identified themselves totally as an appendage of  the other person. When people leave healthy intimate relationships (and they are free to do so, for healthy intimacy is permeable and not an end itself) they  ripen further as the individuals they are made to be.

      Intimacy is a choice and not a neediness; it may be a yearning but it is not a craving. It is a natural desire for closeness in an environment where one can express oneself clearly and authentically with another person; it is not a place where one dissolves oneself in the greater powerfulness of the other like a sugar cube in a glass of water. To be intimate is to know and be known by the other as a separate and beloved self. Two (or more) people in relationship.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell