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