Choosing to Smoke, or Not

Choosing to Smoke, or not. 

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

Sept 2013 

     It isn’t good to inhale ash  and chemicals of any kind, but that said, we have the capacity to choose. Or do we? 

     Smoke tobacco, if you wish and actually enjoy it, but don’t if you smoke just because you identify yourself as a “smoker”. Smoke from choice; don’t smoke from habit. Is it, though, that simple? Before I untangle that question, I’ll just diverge a little. 

      On television relatively recently the writer, Clive James, being interviewed by Kerry O’Brien, said of stories that  it isn’t the story that is interesting, per se, but the story of the story. This resonates with me strongly for what we identify about ourselves drives much of our behaviour. Thus calling oneself a smoker, or a binge eater, or a booze artist, facilitates a routine for indulging in these follies, because we can then say, well I’m a smoker, binge eater, booze artist, and that’s what I am, as opposed to what I sometimes do. It’s a story of a story, and being so, can just as easily be changed to something else. 

      Let me be clear here, I am not a smoker, binge eater nor boozer, but I do know the making of stories about oneself. I have stories about me that drive me to some extent. I am a swimmer. As such this story is as much a story about what I do, and what I identify myself as, as a person who defines herself as “a smoker”. My story keeps me healthy, for I love swimming, but I am no more to be defined as a swimmer than as one who swims. I choose to swim and know that when I don’t swim I get irritable. Perhaps, and I feel it to be inconceivable, I could channel my love into some other pastime, but being a healthy pastime, I see no reason to. I do have other stories of stories that drive me and they aren’t healthy, but that’s another topic to be explored on another day.

Smoking isn’t a healthy pastime. It’s an indulgence in a toxic activity. Toxic and addictive, and therein lies the difficulty of what constitutes a choice. 

      Nicotine is the tobacco plant’s natural protection against being eaten by insects. It is thus an insecticide. Interestingly, though, nicotine mimics the brain’s neurotransmitter acetylcholine that controls the flow of dopamine and over 200 more neuro-chemicals. Dopamine, among other functions, stimulates the brain’s desire for satisfaction, thus nicotine, in playing a dopamine-like role, promotes a desire for more of the same, more satisfaction. It creates a craving. 

      Understanding this doesn’t completely explain it all: why do some people manage to smoke one cigarette only when they feel like it, while others smoke all day, every day? The story of the story fills out the picture, I suggest. 

      A story of a story (a person who identifies themselves as “a smoker”), establishes a neural pathway in their brain by repeating the act of smoking, and enhances the effect of nicotine in the brain, thus accentuating both the intention to smoke and to enable the effect of smoking to increase craving desires. It’s both: story of story and chemical dependence (illustrating a mind-body connection in the act of smoking) that drives the habit (apart from the social dimensions of doing what your friends do, etc).

       Others, who enjoy a smoke occasionally, but who don’t identify themselves as  a “smoker”, choose when to smoke, as opposed to smoking because they see themselves as a “smoker” (who smokes because that’s what smokers do). This is a state I prefer to encourage in clients who come to see me for clinical hypnotherapy. Yes, ideally, it would be good if they gave up smoking entirely, but why not consider the idea that it’s possible to choose to smoke just for enjoyment, as opposed to craving a smoke because of an addiction? Abstinence may, or may not, be ideal for many people, and for those who have smoked many years, such an ideal state may be difficult to attain, for the act of smoking comes with multiple social and sometimes creative situations that are less easy to drop. I know of one man who smokes as a way into conversation with women. I know another who smokes to enhance cognitive acuity (focus).  Nicotine, like dopamine which it imitates, stimulates cognitive acuity as well as craving.

      How much better it is to achieve the ability to choose what one does, as opposed to doing things just because you feel compelled to. My interest as a psychotherapist/clinical hypnotherapist is in enhancing a person’s choicefulness so that they can choose what they want, as opposed to just doing what they’ve been doing out of habit and hating themselves for it. The capacity to choose what we enjoy best of all is what makes my job wonderful. I get to see people who have chosen a life they love, freed from addictive, self-perpetuating self-destructive behaviours.  If smoking continues to be what they choose to do, then so be it. But let it be a conscious choice and not just continuing a story about a story of themselves. 

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Talking together

Talking together      by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

Oct 2010

     The boat slid through satiny water to an infinite edge of sea to the breakers beyond. Overhead ospreys circled; whales glimpsed through laid back leapings and turtles mated far from shore. I wondered about the name “Whitsundays” (for this is where I and a colleague and friend was  last week) and I remembered:

     Whitsunday is the other name for the day of Pentecost (the 49^th day after Easter Sunday), the Christian feast when the Holy Spirit descended upon the people and gave them capacity to understand and speak many tongues, join in community, and celebrate the new church. Whitsunday, or White Sunday, is thus called,  for the white ceremonial robes of the celebrants of this feast - appropriate for the white beaches of these islands. Central to the idea of the feast is an ability of people to share things together, to talk and to have a sense of community.

      The Whitsundays are a scattering of approximately 150 handsome islands peeking through the sea between approximately 20° and 21° south latitude off the subtropical central Queensland coast. Captain James Cook found these islands in 1770 and named them ‘the Cumberland Islands’ and their passage, the  ‘Whitsunday’s Passage,’ because it was the feast of Pentecost when he sailed among them. The Aboriginal tribe, the Ngaro, however, knew and explored the richness of these islands for 8,000 years, paddling in boats made from saplings, bark and fern fronds. I imagine the Ngaro talked of many things.

 

       Though somewhat a culturally biased account of things, and I do this in deference to other cultural experiences, I am moved to write of the  elegance of this wondrous place as itself a Whitsunday experience: of a place where strangers come together, sharing their disparate experiences in the making contact with one another, and conflating this with what I experience in my clinical practice.

      It always strikes me as something of a miracle when people from diverse backgrounds can come together and get on so well. I often find myself really enjoying the presence of others so very different to me. Listening deeply, a tool of psychotherapy, isn’t just what makes contact possible, but it is part of it. Such listening situates the practitioner in a place of present-centredness as well as an exquisite awareness of  self in relation to the other person. The co-createdness of the relationship is also heeded and responded to, even played with. There is a dance-like quality to the sharing and with it, a sense of togetherness and  separateness; feeling states that are like the tense and loose states of a boat riding Whitsunday waves. 

      On the boat up north, my American psychotherapeutic friend and I encountered many people who showed a delight in talking of their lives to us. These were contacts with people we’ll probably never see again, and yet – in that short time – we came to know quite well. It felt to me that the islands were like a net thrown out, gathering people in  shared experience, yet each maintaining their unique perspective and eager to speak of this to us: a magic of commitment to conversation, a magic of community.

       I imagine that the first Christians felt their commitment to dialogue (listening, receiving, and sharing) as a palpable energy and as a means to generate and hold safe a sense of community. I feel my commitment to dialogue is likewise a means to create a safe therapeutic place where diversity of experience can be expressed without anxiety, held and released when the time is ripe; a place that is the relationship of selves who do not need to agree with each other in order to get on with the work of increasing awareness and discovering in themselves healthy freedom and new ways of being.

      People talking together are like the Whitsunday islands strung together like individual pearls in a necklace of great beauty, and like a necklace, the elements of communication are not glued, but linked by likeness and difference. So, let’s talk!

Copyright @2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

How I use dreams in therapy

How I use dreams in therapy  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. of Counselling, PhD, Dip Clin Hypnotherapy

May 2013 

     Are dreams just the random by-product of rapid eye movement sleep? Is their function to fulfil our wishes? Don’t they just reflect the ordinary mundane things of everyday life expressed in bizarre form? Aren’t dreams the royal road to the unconscious? Are they ways in which the subconscious mind communicates with us? Maybe they are a self-portrayal of the health of the organism through symbolic language, or a way the organism regulates itself through imagery, sensations, and memories? There are many ideas about dreams and the function of dreaming for sure, but how can dreams be useful in therapy? This is what I wish to explore here.

     Psychoanalysts, of which I am not one, look upon dreams as keys to unlocking the unconscious mind. They go about doing this by interpreting dreams, allocating meanings to symbols apparently depicted in the dreams. Everyday objects, people and situations that arise in dreams are viewed as having psychic significance. This is useful, to a degree, but it too readily leads to the idea that everything is a symbol of something else, other than the thing itself, as well as to the notion that the thing has a greater and more universal significance than it might to the individual dreamer. The proliferation of dictionaries of dreams attest to this notion. A simple door can, in this way, be imbued with meanings irrelevant to that dreamer: vagina, opening to the temple, door to the soul, the Great Mother, door to the unknown, etc, etc. Maybe, however, it is simply a door, and maybe the dreamer’s interest is not on the door, but what is inside or outside.  

     It is the dreamer’s dream and the meaning of the dream is theirs. Interestingly, C. G. Jung (1875-1961) said virtually the same thing. He wrote ‘Never apply any theory, but always ask the patient how he feels about his dream images.’ Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures. (1935), and yet more generalizations about the meaning of dreams have come about by those reading Jung than by those caught up with Freud. Freudian analysis is less popular these days than Jungian analysis, and more books are written about Jungian perspectives on dreams than Freudian ones.

     Dreams and dreaming are wonderful resources and I use them in my own psychotherapeutic practice quite a lot. I ask my clients to record their dreams and to bring them to sessions where we can use them in the work we do together. How, though? I am sometimes asked by new clients. This question, I admit, flummoxes me sometimes, because I use dreams in many ways, and some of them very subtle. I don’t interpret them, that’s the one true thing.  

     Sometimes when a client reads a dream aloud they respond with an “aha,” suddenly understanding their problem. Sometimes they’ll say, “I don’t know what all this means,” and so we’ll explore the scenario presented. I might ask how they felt in the dream, or how they feel now while reading the dream, and we’ll explore what memories arise from that feeling, memories that can elucidate the how, why, and what of the problem they’re seeing me about. I might explore the bodily sensations the person has as we explore the dream. These tell me, and them, a lot about the feeling quality of the message of the dream, a feeling quality that can be usefully worked with, in that, or later sessions. Sometimes an image stands out and gets repeated in various forms in a night of dreams, and so I’ll ask the client to address it as though the image was a person. Sometimes, using a technique developed by a therapist mentor of mine, I’ll ask the client a series of questions in written form to respond as a personified entity representing that image or object, thus giving them a perspective that would have been very elusive otherwise. This latter technique brings into awareness the very something that has been out of consciousness, for whatever reason (fear, rejection, denial, for instance). The images of dreams may be drawn or painted, written about, or even sung to. I might ask the client to write letters to the parts of a dream that seem to have a lot of unrealized power. Or we might role play some bits of a dream.  There are other techniques I might employ, but each is tailored to the uniqueness of the person with me. All the techniques are used to bring conscious awareness to their prevailing problem, for it is here the client can begin to choose options that were previously hidden. 

      A problem is not the problem, but the beginning place of new insights, new ways of being, and positive change in that person’s life. Working with dreams fills out the psychic landscape of old conundrums and new possibilities in a really creative way. Opening to creativity is one of the greatest benefits of working with dreams, which is wonderful not only for artists but for all of us wanting a greater abundance in our lives. I find it enormously fulfilling participating in this process as clients rediscover this resource and become increasingly self confident, happy and able to leave their previous difficulties behind.

Copyright @ 2013  Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Risk

Risk   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

May 2012 

     There was a medium-sized tree in Kings Park, Perth, in which my friends and I would play. This was a commodious cypress type of tree with thick layers of branches from the top right down to ground level. 

      We’d climb to the top and throw ourselves over, relaxing into a controlled fall as each branch would catch us and drop us to the next branch, and so on to the bottom. It was wonderful. 

I can still smell in my mind’s nostrils the resinous quality of branch and twig and the stickiness that remained on the hands long after we’d gone home.  My body also retains the sensation of the slow supported fall. It is an incredible feeling, this body memory and one that has become something a metaphor for me as I look upon the subject of risk.

      Risk is a chosen action where the outcome is unknown.  Dropping from the top branch of the tree was an act of faith each time, because though we could do the fall over and over, we never quite knew whether we’d catch the branches in a safe way every time. Maybe we’d drop straight to the ground, maybe we’d be all right. Who could really know? 

     Allowing ourselves to partake of risk, allowed us to know life exquisitely. The Brazilian mystical author, Paulo Coelho describes it this way, “You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.”

      Too often we tremble at the edge of existence, too scared to choose, too scared to do anything.  So we repeat the same tired old formulas over and over, even though the circumstances that gave rise to them years ago are no longer relevant.  I’m thinking of a man who I once saw who would not take a holiday from work even though he was completely worn out, to the degree that he was physically ill. Turned out that when he was a child his father had been injured in a war zone and was largely bedridden until death, and mother wasn’t coping. Sometimes she could help; sometimes she just took off. The only child, the boy felt he had to hold it all together. So set the pattern of never allowing himself rest – even long after that difficult childhood, even though his life situation was completely different. He now lived comfortably, with his own grown up family, and a business that employed lots of other people who could run it well without him always present. Yet he still could not let go of his anxiety, he never rested. His family were exasperated. He’d sent them on holiday regularly each year, but always stayed at home to look after the business. What if something happened when he was not there? It was ironical that he could take risks with his business, but not with this essential thing of allowing rest. It was killing him.

     As time goes on the old patterns of dealing with the world get encrusted like an old car battery that hasn’t been cleaned. Gunk just accumulates around the vital connections and we lose our wherewithal to act freshly and decisively. Just the thought of doing something new, to leap into the rich field of unknown possibilities feels constrained by a mounting list of imagined things that can go wrong. What if? 

     “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” Accompanying every act of life is the possibility of annihilation. The spectre of death is always present, a figure that brings all the more shimmer to life. 

      What if the leap ends in stars? Concussion, magic, entrance into an entranced state, paralysis, crippledom, surprise, wow!, feeling incredibly, vitally alive? What if the leap is beautifully supported all the way to the ground, like the cypress tree of my youth? Who knows! Life is risk. The very nature of life can hand out anything – and does.  Plunge into it.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Transitions

Transitions  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell,  M. of Counselling, PhD

Feb 2012 

     Now is the  time of new beginnings, a time of leaving behind the old and embracing what is as yet unfolding.  In this month’s article I want to talk about transitions, generally, and specifically career transitions.

     In Tibetan Buddhism there is a concept known as the bardo. Contrary to what is popularly thought the bardo does not just refer to the period between death and rebirth, but all transitional states. Life is in a constant state of bardo. The transitional states are well illustrated in the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead,  and I could speak of these, but suffice to say, they  are described as the clinging (or not) of the ego to past identifications. For example, before, you identified your self by your job as manager of a corporation, but now, you are retrenched you have to think again. You have to de-identify yourself according to your old job, and perhaps move to reconsider yourself not as a worker but as a person. The old identification to a job, and its loss, has brought heartache, yet still you have to work. How much better it would be to work at something that shares in the well spring of the uniqueness of yourself.

     The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), has a similar concept to the bardo. He speaks of thrownness: the movement between this moment and the next. Imagine a ball being thrown between two people: the ball leaving this moment and arriving at the next moment. The ball does not suddenly arrive at an always expected destination, but travels the distance between, influenced by perhaps a juddering wind or uneven air pressure. It arrives, but its course is not necessarily predictable.  Life is like that. Where we find ourselves may not always look possible from the launching pad of earlier life. We do have choices though.

     Many years ago I met in the street my old kindergarten teacher. I’d gone to the kindergarten attached to the University of Western Australia’s Psychology Department (which could well have influenced the shaping of my current career). This old kindie teacher was a developmental psychologist and was busily studying us as well as stimulating our growing minds and bodies. So I met this intriguing old lady in the street and she asked me what I was doing now. I was in the process of writing my PhD (on, by the way, philosophy of embodiment  in transitional  and reciprocal states). She said, “Interesting… Because I would not have guessed that’s what you would do.” I wished that I’d asked her what she thought I’d do, but didn’t.  She continued, “You know, I could usually predict what the boys would do in life, but I could never really guess what the girls would do.”  This little chance conversation sits there in the background of my mind and I wonder why it is so (or was)  that little girls grow up in more unpredictable ways than little boys. I wonder too, whether this trend has changed. I suspect it has. It is common now for everyone to have a variety of careers in the course of a life time.  The old ‘one job for life’ thing has passed away.

     So, just as much as it is true throughout the Western world, many of us in our community here in the Northern Rivers are transitioning from our old job to a new one, and possibly shifting into another profession entirely. It is said that most people have five careers in the course of their life. This means that the kudos associated with being in a single career strand is not as important these days and there is a shift from identifying yourself by the work you do to who you are and your other characteristics and sources of interest (sport, books,  the environment, entertainment, meditation practices, etc).  This is a very healthy trend as it means there is a potential for fewer numbers of people suffering devastating feelings of bereavement on losing an old job. Unfortunately the modern reality is that though we all may be working in a number of jobs across our life time, the loss of a single job carries with it a many layered guilt trip, embedded in much cultural baggage. All the “shoulds” (should have done this, should have done that) and ideas of pride and self-esteem and so on, come bubbling up like some horrible creature from the deep. I know this stuff well for in my own life, I’ve worked in several careers and felt the bereavement of losing jobs, the friends associated with them, and the particular geographies of the work environments. I’ve been a university and tafe teacher. I’ve been a researcher, editor and writer, and now am primarily a therapist as well as a career transitional coach: all crisscrossing over with no single linear pathway. What I have learned in the past 30+ years is to go with the flow; to not define myself by what work I do and to walk away from jobs that do not nurture me. The old Protestant work ethic, while beneficial in some ways, does not always serve the integrity of the organism at all well. For sure, some work requires just chipping away and getting through it, but here again is an opportunity to see yourself as a vibrant being in the world, and not merely a dull chipper.

     So what is the best way to think about moving on from the old job to the new? In the career transition coaching manifesto that I use as a separate, yet adjunct, part of my therapeutic practice, we need to identify clearly your existing skills, the particular interests you have, your personality type, what further education may be required and who could be contacted to give you a better understanding of the kind of work you are attracted to. 

     Like the ball thrown from this place …… to this, we can organize – to a degree – how the transition might look. We can prepare ourselves for the next stage, garner a greater awareness about what is needed to make the transition really work, and enjoy the process of it. Either that, or be buffeted around like a ping pong ball in the vicissitudes of disorganized life, all the while feeling incredible anxiety and pain. I encourage the new.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell


 

Finding order in chaos

Finding order in chaos by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

Feb 2011 

     Does anyone remember the child’s game of fiddlesticks? You held in your hand a collection of different coloured sticks (mine were plastic), let them go, and then chose one to lift out of the small piece of chaos each stick until all were removed from the pile. If I remember correctly, you chose all sticks of the same colour, until these were removed. There might also have been a component of the game where each colour was worth more or fewer points than the others. It was a game of skill.

     I have clients who come in to see me, overwhelmed with choices: where to go now, which course to take, how to quell an all embracing anxiety about the multiplicity of things.  They’d reached a point of stuckness; a sense that no choice is possible among the many choices. At the heart of this is a knowing that there many many possibilities, an excitement that beckons, but a tremendous anxiety usually concerning the “rightness” of a decision about to be made.

     Like a game of fiddlesticks you can fiddle around putting off making a decision, or you can deliberately pick up a stick and lever off each stick one at a time methodically, noting as you do, what is more important to you, and what can be cleared away without too much thought. It is usually no more complicated than this. A life is a long time (though, of course, how long, few actually know). In a life it is possible (and happens practically always) to take many “wrong” turns before you realize what it is that really matters to you and what it is that you decide to devote the rest of your time to.

     Anxiety in the face of making a decision is a peculiar admixture of emotions. There is a surge of excitement and a sense of confusion; there is sometimes gut pain, often sweating, a tingling, a rootlessness, a feeling that your heart has dropped to your feet, and an idea that you cannot make a move, because at the edge of it all is a sense that you are near annihilation. Anxiety in bits and pieces is quite normal and a part of life. It is when you feel anxious all the time and when it gets in the way of doing what needs to be done that maybe a call to a therapist is a good idea.

     Anxiety is the “fear and trembling” before a new encounter. It comes to the fore when we challenge our old self-world relationship and doing things in the same old way. Feeling anxious, though, when identified positively as an excitement rather than negatively as a disorder, has the wonderful power of changing how we are in the world, of allowing us to embrace life more fully.

     Artists know well anxiety and a sense of being in chaos. They choose to occupy the “anxious space” for although feelings of insecurity, over sensitivity, and abandonment come with the deal, as it were, they embrace the “divine madness” for the extraordinary charge that comes with creation. Creation, as the Old Testament book of Genesis in the Bible describes it, is a process of separating from chaos (‘the earth was without form and void’), night and day, darkness and light. This process, though, cannot be forced: it is necessary to listen to the movements within. This does not mean that you wait until the spirit moves you, but that you respond to the often inchoate “voices” within, and slowly or swiftly as is required create by a process of separation, this from that, that from this till what you have made excites you.

     Anxiety is embraced by artists and can be likewise an energetic source that others can draw upon in the course of daily life.

     If I take one course of action, will I have to abandon all the others?  Yes, but just for now.

     The art and skill of fiddlesticks is to attend fully to each stick as you lever it up and add it to your pile of possibilities beside you. In sorting through the chaos an art of life that excites you becomes clearer. Sometimes this is just plain and rather dull old work; sometimes your heart soars with elation. Choosing is a skill that can be learned and anxiety can be a useful tool in getting you started. 


Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

At the Edge

At the Edge  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

Dec 2011 

     When the tears of a lost relationship, or any significant loss at all, exposes the ancient edge of existence, the place of unanswerable questions, we know the edge of meaning/meaninglessness has been reached. It is like teetering on the last rock before the yawning black abyss. We look down and feel engulfed in the inexplicable. What is the meaning of life? Where do we go from here?
 

     I know this edge very well, and know when my clients are there too. This is the edge of existence as we know it; the familiar is no more.

     What now? We cannot go back, and going forward is stepping off the edge into the unknown. I cannot write, “unknown vastness” for I do not know its size, or if it even can be measured. It’s “possibility,” it’s “potential,” yes, but how, why, what?

     When the edge is known, and I suspect we have all experienced this at various times, we can certainly draw back, grab a beer, turn up the radio, or follow each excruciating filament of our own fear to apprehend the nature of our own despair and see what possibilities arise.  This is a scary place. Is this apprehension a stepping off into space? Yes, I believe it is. 

     Some people have faith, some have trust, some have other philosophical beliefs or religious stories about this walking into abyss. For myself, this is the time not to take refuge in ideas, nor engage in fabricating happy endings before the work is actually done.  It is too easy to imagine the fulfilment of a hero’s journey, but such imaginings have a hollow ring, like when you tap a plastic version of a grail cup. The actual work must take place, and I value working with people as they begin or continue that profound work.

     The trouble with our over enriched cultural environs is that we know much about happy endings, and heroic journeys, and mythical places, but don’t well know the hard work that is required for even for the stories to exist.  It is ultimately ineffective to half-heartedly do a bit of this abyss apprehension work, keeping in mind all the while a vision of finding the grail. No, the work is in facing full on the gaping horrifying mouth of the abyss: going in there, terror-filled, and not knowing what next. Grail quests are mere stories; the unknowing is real.

     I have seen among my clients those who have short circuited the actual work. A tell-tale sign  is a tendency to verbalize a fantasy place, or to draw a happy fantasy situation where opposites are miraculously cojoined – all the while demonstrating an out-of-sortness with their immediate experience of being here, now and in relationship with me. The journey, or dark night  of the soul, or leaping the abyss cannot be fabricated.

     The risk, as I write this, is that the language and imagery of the Grail quest and that of St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul,” or even the “abyss” will be substituted for what actual encounters of the edge a person has. This is an existential place essential unique for each person who finds themselves there, when the familiar veils of  life are wrenched down.

     The fear of falling is great and it is natural to want to cling to anything, anybody, any activity that is around, and yet, such are distractions to the work of apprehension.  St John of the Cross, Spanish mystic and monk of the 16^th century, writes of detaching oneself from the things of the world, but he also writes that doing this aligns oneself closer to God. I suggest, instead, to take the  psychic plunge (not physically) without religious or ideological support and enter into unknowing; experience that and see what happens for you. There is potential, possibility, excitement, discovery, a new way of being (or not at all); there is the unknown.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Two Sleeps

Two Sleeps   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

April 2012 

     I have always woken up at 3am, potted around, read, wrote, even watered the garden, and then returned to bed for my second sleep. For many years I thought this was abnormal and worried about it, and even consulted doctors about it, until I realized that this was, what I thought, my sleeping pattern and all I needed to do was simply enjoy it. Research has come to light and now I discover that segmented sleep was the usual practice for everyone until the mid-19^th century. 

      During the 19^th century, when medical and psychiatric concerns started to dominate ordinary thinking, a so-called condition was signposted: sleep maintenance insomnia! Suddenly the age old practice of two sleeps was viewed as a disorder and the idea that humans ought to stay asleep for eight solid hours was established.  If we couldn’t achieve eight hours of sleeping in bed we were made to feel anxious and depressed or just plain neurotic. How good it is to realize that segmented sleep is how we humans have enjoyed sleep since time immemorial.

     Some very interesting sleep research was done in the early 1990s  by a psychiatrist by the name of Thomas Wehr, research that was not actively accepted by doctors and the general population, until now. Wehr conducted an experiment whereby human subjects were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. Though the subjects took awhile to settle into some kind of sleeping routine, a distinct pattern was noted to emerge whereby they slept for four hours, woke up for one or two hours, and then slept again for four hours. Interesting, eh.

     In 2001, Roger Ekirch, an historian, published a paper drawn from 16 years of research that noted an abundance of evidence that humans used to have two sleeps in the course of a night. Drawing on diary entries,  court records, medical books and literature, Ekirch traced the evidence through over 500 references from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern Nigerian tribes. 

      What did people do between the first sleep and the second? Letters were written, sex was had (it being advised that this period was more healthful for the purpose of love making than going to bed tired after a hard day’s work and trying to perform then), tea was prepared and drunk, prayers were said; people even went visiting and attended concerts. There is an elegance in this idea. I like it. My nightly wakings are solitary affairs.

      This re-emergence of an interest in the two sleeps (and it was mentioned recently in a comedy show on television) comes at a time when the fifth edition of the manual of psychiatric disorder known as the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is about to come out. This manual is used in the diagnosis of people with psychological and psychosocial disorders. A considerable amount of disquiet is being expressed by psychologists, particularly, and some psychiatrists at the number of so-called conditions that have been invented/identified, compared to the earlier fourth edition. I find this rather interesting, particularly as such things as realizing what a normal sleep pattern looks like as opposed to identifying an abnormality is also being elaborated in the mental health community. What other normal patterns have now “achieved” the status of abnormality, just by the process of someone’s determination that it be so? And what so called abnormality may, further down the track, be once more recognized as merely part of the continuum of normal human existence?

      Certainly the DSM is a valuable book and certainly severe and debilitating psychological and psychosocial disorders exist (they are not all figments of a collection of experts’ minds), but caution needs to be brought to bear in the diagnosis of disorder.  It would be also really useful if  normal variation of  human experience was highlighted by the general community as normal and not issues for further anxiety and angst.  Much human experience has been commodified, as is seen in the rise in use of medications and medical diagnoses. What is not recognized enough, is the value of conversation and sharing of human experience with a trained listener (this is part of my job), someone who does not turn what is said into yet another label, another diagnosis. Such a therapeutic conversation offers respite and challenge for reclaiming what is usual for each of us, but what we have come to feel is not normal and cause for denial, depression or anxiety.

     Sleep is a respite, and between the two sleeps of a night we have more healing time, a time to delight in silence, shared or alone. I quite like the idea of going to see a friend and drinking tea at 3 am in the morning, but perhaps society isn’t ready for that, yet.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Continuing to Heal

Continuing to Heal by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

July 2012 

     In the bad old days, it was thought the brain grew during childhood, stopped changing in any way, then began a process of decaying, declining, and dementia-fying. In those days the brain was viewed as a bit of  beautiful meat, essentially, and incapable of forming new neural pathways. The current sport of brain gym exercises was not thought useful, even relevant. You were born with an x amount of intelligence and you could be educated, but you couldn’t change your destiny – so it was thought. If you got schizophrenia, you got something that damaged your brain and a damaged brain is what you had. If you had obsessive compulsive disorder, you had ocd. That was it. If you got post traumatic stress disorder, you could be treated with medication, but that was it. Counselling, the talking cure, was thought not to be effective in the treatment of these conditions, except for offering care and support.

     That old model of an inflexible brain has gone by the wayside. We are now seeing the brain as a plastic organ (plastic in the sense of  fluid,  flexible and changeable, not the plastic of tuppeware!) where grey  matter may shrink or thicken and neural connections are forged, refined or weakened and severed in response to new encounters or habits repeated or activities not practiced. This is a physical process that is expressed physically, functionally, and chemically throughout life.

      Brain or neuro-plasticity, as a way of viewing the brain, excitingly and finally takes account of the whole human being in body, experience, and psychological state, for functionality is seen as not only being a result of brain process but a contributer to brain physiology and its processes, as a reciprocal process.  Each time we learn a new skill, like playing an instrument, or crocheting, or plastering, or enhancing pre-existing skills, like writing, or cooking, or singing, we forge new neural pathways in our brain which changes how we do things and how we experience them, sensorially and in our thoughts, in other aspects of our lives. It is in this two-way process that effective treatments are being found for the supposed intractable conditions described above, and for slowing the rate of dementia. Individuals exercising their brain through puzzles and learning new skills is also extremely valuable. Treatments are now utilizing many of the techniques developed and found useful by psychotherapists and counselors. Techniques we developed from an interest in the interface between lived experience and story telling, as well as more hard-core symptom control.

     Acute trauma counsellors, for instance, often use the method of asking the distressed person to tell and retell, in detail, what happened to them, while sitting warmly and comfortably and supported by the counsellor.  Likewise, when the acute trauma continues to be experienced years after the first event becomes chronic (when the neural pathways in the parts of the brain iteratively repeat the course taken before), the therapist  uses the same method with their client. We ask the client to tell and retell in as much detail as possible what happened to them and what feelings arise in them as they give account of  the original traumatic event. In the process of telling the story (I use this word advisedly for I do not wish to imply a fictional account at all; this is real stuff), and retelling it, an interesting capacity arises: a sense of being a witness to the experience, which – over time – lessens its effects on the psyche and felt experience.

     It is interesting that neuroscientists have recently found that getting a person with post-traumatic stress disorder to write down and retell over and over, the traumatic event, in minute detail, and increasing, in this mindfulness exercise, what they call the impartial spectator effect (the witness) changes brain physiology.  The use of magnetic resonance imaging show a shift from neural pathways used over and over (the post-traumatic stress disorder brain) to vital new activity in the person’s brain. The shift to a capacity to look impartially upon a previous torment frees us physically, emotionally, chemically, and psychologically to experience life entirely differently. All thanks to a plastic brain.

     Healing, real healing from a psychological wound is possible  - at a deeply, neurophysiological level, at a functional level, and at the heart of lived experience.  Little, it appears, is fixed. Fluidity of being, a creativity of being, and an awareness of being, integrally intermingle in the healing that continues.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Love and Differentiated Intimacy

Love and Differentiated Intimacy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. of Counselling, PhD
April 2013 

     I’ve been thinking quite a bit about couple relationships recently. Why do some work really well, and why do some fail miserably? I know only a handful of couples which continue to flourish. Others are couples no longer, but single people reeling from lots of pain, anguish, fear, and disharmony. What’s going on here?

Is it magic, or is there something else at work?

     I’ve written previously about intimacy as a fundamental drive borne in all animals and present from birth. Now I want to take my thinking to another level. I want to explore it in terms of something beyond closeness where two people remain separate but somehow together, thus the title of this article.

     Intimacy, I need to be clear about, is not about sex, though sex may and may not be part of it. 

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

     When we fall in love we mostly do it blindly and we tend to fall for something in the other person that is familiar to us. Now, whether this familiarity is the basis of what we may call falling for a soul mate (someone who apparently speaks to our inner core), or responding to a projection of some part of ourselves onto the other person, is a matter of interpretation, though the modus operandi is frequently the same.

     When two people are in blind love they do not see each other clearly. Each projects an image (just as movies are projected) constructed in their own minds that conceals the real face of the person they’re looking at. Of course, each person’s hormones are working overtime as well, so there is a lot of desire mixed in there with unowned expectations, needs and judgements. The other person suddenly seems to have all those admirable qualities that oneself probably has too. You may discover later that the other person really doesn’t have those admired qualities at all. In one relationship I had years ago I discovered this for myself. He was a talker, and I’d assumed a listener as well. It took awhile to realize that I’d assumed he was a listener, because I was listener. He, on the other hand, just talked.

Blind love is a theatre of projections and here what is required is to bring conscious awareness and an attitude of differentiation to the relationship, for then, only then, can true intimacy be achieved. 

     For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13, verse 12)

     We need to see clearly, cleanly, the other person; to know, even as I am known; to love, even as I am loved. For it is loving cleanly and clearly in a reciprocal way that intimacy is truly differentiated: no longer a work of projection, in a glass darkly, but fact to face.

     There seem to be very few partnerships, marriages, and other relationships that truly fulfill both people equally. What seems to happen, more often than not, is a one-sidedness where one person is fused in an emotional symbiosis with the other person, or where one person seeks another to help them heal their childhood wounds, or where one person is there to protect the other from the complexities of life.

     In fusion, that undifferentiated dissolving of self into another, one person is effectively left outside the relationship, where the other has lost her/himself. One person is needy and clingy, and the other one provides. There is no equality here. Yes, our society promotes such unbalanced relationships with the idea that the man provides and the woman, if she is a true and ideal woman (whatever that means), gives up herself and submits. Society is less supportive of this idea when it is taken to extremes and becomes just plain even kinky, where power is handed entirely to the man, and taken entirely from the woman. [Though I’m speaking of couples as male-female relationships, I include same-gender coupling here.]

      True differentiated intimacy is not for the faint hearted. It is a growth path where conflict is neither avoided nor becomes a platform for a power struggle,  but worked on realistically. The goal is aliveness, spark, and passion borne from a mutual commitment to self and the other person. It is part of a spiritual process and an owning of each person’s self worth.

To own your self worth, and not to project it elsewhere, is the key. Appreciating self worth is not egotistical, it is putting judgments and values about others back where they arise, within oneself. Ask yourself, Does what you see in others really belong to you? Is your vision clear, or clouded by what you want to see? Knowing your own self worth then allows you to see the other person more clearly, and if, all being well, love the other deeply and appreciate them more really.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell