Creating

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

The page is blank and I’m wondering how to begin. I’ve been walking around for days thinking about what to write, and then it dawned on me this is the very thing that needed to be said: that the page is blank and I know that the doing of the thing is literally the doing of it. Staring at the page and hoping that something gets written is useless. And so I write this.

Wondering what and how to say it is a common as muck problem for all people who engage in creative acts. There is always a blank page, or canvas, or raw materials.  The tools of the artist-writer, of brush, palette knife, pencil, pen,  pastels, paint, chisel, keyboard can be in tip-top shape (and they are intrinsically lovely, I think), but they’re useless until a mark is made.

We had a game as children where one of us made a mark on a piece of paper and then another of us had to draw something that the mark evoked, and then the next person had to draw something that the mark and the other person’s drawing evoked in them, and so, very soon the whole paper was a mass of drawings. The complete effect was beautiful. It is in the doing that a thing is made.

The creative act depends a lot on being alive and open to possibilities, which is the meaning of receptivity. To hold oneself alive to whatever comes along is not waiting for something random to grab one’s attention; it’s  surrounding oneself with various materials, people, ideas and contexts that nurture and stimulate interaction and a desire to participate in a seed of an idea. Receptivity doesn’t depend on a time frame, but permits access to a creation at any and all points of our engagement. 

This last statement is a crucial one, as it implies that any beginning is a useful one. Any mark on the page is the start of a creation. 

Of course, this is not to say that there are not other factors that get in the way of creating something. The stories we’ve been told about ourselves, the difficulties that we’ve had growing up, the traumas we’ve experienced, and so on have a huge bearing on the making of something new (all of which may be successfully addressed in counselling and hypnotherapy).  I’ve known this rather well in my own life, but over the last month have experienced these apparent barriers more keenly. 

Nearly a month ago I began a 30-day challenge to write for 10 minutes a day and post it on an internet site designed just for this: to get writers writing.  Just doing the thing has thrown up a barrage of resistances. Many days have passed when I’ve left the writing till nearly midnight, but then when actually  writing it hasn’t been hard. So, what is all that about? Why the dragging of feet?

Writing has quite a history for me. I started out a terrible writer in all ways.  My handwriting was practically unreadable and because even I couldn’t read it, my written expression was garbled.  I had been taught to write with my right hand, but I was (am) left-handed, so I actually couldn’t control my pen for a very long time.  It was embarrassing and I didn’t want to do anything with a pen. That changed when I was sixteen and starting to prepare for my matriculation exams in order to get into university. Until then I really was un-grabbed (if that’s a word) by the essay questions given to us.  Here,  suddenly was a question that set me on fire. It was an English Literature question on the poetic uses of language in everyday life. I wrote and wrote and wrote all night and submitted it the next day. My teacher was surprised, for until that point, I was a mediocre student. She gave me a distinction, but said she wanted to tutor me and teach me to handwrite again. So began intensive training both in handwriting and essay construction, a learning process that continues today.

The greater control of my right hand paralleled the greater control of composition and a greater ease of expression. I’m extremely grateful for this help I received. It changed everything. I was finally free to pursue the learning I wanted. That’s my story.  I realize there are many other accounts of difficulties that get in the way of present day creativity.

Resistance to creativity can be broken through  simply by making a mark on the paper and elaborating on it.  Combining this with such tools as journaling and counseling eases up the creator’s block. It’s powerful stuff, just this doing business.

Transformative Power of Rage

Transformative Power of Rage   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

That someone is very attractive – too attractive. We want to get close to him or her, but….  they are kind of dangerous: really handsome, beautiful even, but too hot to handle. They are the life of the party, popping pills, drinking straight from bottles. Spirits of the party. We want to get close, really close, but… it’s like moving in with a handsome sleek lion. Are we nuts?

Somehow or other, we wake up the next day in bed with this gorgeous stranger,  and then the next morning, and next thing you know, we are a couple. It is outrageous, this connection we have. He, or she (this is not a gender specific story), is too wild; his devil-may-care attitude flings us this way and that. It’s like being taunted by a tornado. Thrilling, for sure, and addictive. Yes, he uses too many drugs, some legal (he doctor shops), some illegal (he shops with the guy across the street), and smokes and drinks. He’ll settle down, we think, once the relationship becomes more stable.  We clean up the vomit on the bedroom floor, silently throw out the bottles with the empty packets of pills, we wash his clothes and the sheets and spray room fresheners around; we are good partners, never complaining, and to all intents and purposes, we are no different from everybody else. The fact that we are angry, so incredibly angry doesn’t come into it.

Time goes by and we’ve heard the story before, quite a few times now.  (S)He’ll change; it’ll never happen again; he’s on the straight and narrow and he loves us. Life seems good, maybe. His sleek gorgeous looks are fading. There’s a bit of a paunch and a stray blood vessel appearing on his nose. He is quite attractive, still, in a sort of moth-eaten old leonine way. We say so, he goes out to celebrate and we don’t see him all day. We use this time to angrily clean the house, attend to the business of finding him a job and we secure an interview for him, because he lost the last one through turning up to work drunk. We wait, and wait, feeling like we are about to implode.  He turns up the day after tomorrow, though it is a Tuesday and he has an interview at 10am. He is incoherent, dirty and still very very drunk. There is no way he can attend, so we ring the workplace and say he has come down with the flu.

Some label our place in this relational pattern as codependent. This is a term that doesn’t quite sit well for me, and some others. Essentially codependency is enabling the other person to maintain an addictive life-style.  I don’t like the term because it ignores too much, and it pathologizes what is actually a complicated process.

One of the early theorists on this subject, Robert Subby said in the 1980s, that codependency is “an emotional, psychological and behavioural condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules – rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems.”  This “set of oppressive rules” are cultural and family scripts, such as “you are a wife now, your role is to look after your man without complaint”. Other factors may be at work as well, such as, guilt, a desire to be loved and supported (and supporting the partner is a way to achieve that, so the thinking goes), a desire to have the relationship our parents didn’t have, a hope for comfort that somehow never eventuates.

The term codependency has many descriptions. Some have seen it as the denial or repression of the real self, forgetting that the self is not  a thing, but a process, and is always relational to the social and economic realities of our lives.  Some have described codependency as a self esteem issue. It may well be this at one level, but more critically, it is a sense of being locked into a relationship that seemed to have so much promise, but has become endlessly unfulfilling. The primary issue in this relationship is that is less an individual problem than something that is occurring between two (or more) people.

There is nothing wrong, nor pathological, with wanting a loving relationship. It is a basic and necessary human need.  The problem, as I see it, lies with the belief that it is good to forgive another person’s appalling behaviour, always. But it isn’t, particularly when it impacts on one’s own emotional stability, and that of other family members, especially children. It isn’t good to subsume our own needs endlessly for those of an abusive other. It may be nice to visit the lion in his den, but it isn’t a safe place to bring up children, nor a place for ordinary everyday happiness.

Be angry. Rage. Be the rage. This is the point, the fulcrum, that seems to be overlooked in codependency literature. Here, in the rage, is where transformation can take place. Here, in the trembling of anger, is where therapy is most effective and life takes a new course. Here in the rage is a relationship with the self and thus it is the point where the relationship with the other person can be broken, or healed, which ever we choose. There is nothing calm about rage, but it is a gift of incredible energy that can shift everything stuck and voiceless. Finding its direction, though, is the skill to be learned and it is a skill to shape the rest of our lives.