The Resonant Voice

 The Resonant Voice by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons), M. Couns., PhD.

     Some years ago over in Perth I attended a four day voice workshop where we explored many of the possibilities of voice: we sang in groups, in duos, alone, in large enclosed and open spaces, stainless steel cupboards,  narrow hallways, against wooden fences and brick walls, all the while experimenting with depth, pitch, resonance, and tone. It changed my life. It also brought a consciousness that I don’t think I had previously regarding the relationship between health and voice.  Since then I listen more to the quality of a person’s voice, including my own. I notice, for instance, that when I am being insincere, my voice pitch is higher and more hollow sounding. When I am concerned, my voice drops sometimes to a barely audible whisper, and down a couple of tones. There is nothing unique about this observation except that most of the time this kind of awareness is mostly unconscious. What I’m noticing more and more is that I’m noticing it more and more. I am interested in it and am starting to make a study of it, in order to enhance my counselling practice and possibly contribute further to the literature.

     I remember a fellow attendee at the workshop  whose voice was distinctly flat and one-dimensional.  It sounded as though she was deaf, in a way.  She wasn’t actually physiologically deaf, as she told us, but, effectively functionally deaf.   She was clinically depressed. Her whole demeanour was heavy, insular, passive, and lacking in reciprocity. In essence we didn’t get a sense of give and take with her, nor she with us.

     She and I partnered a few times, and it seemed she couldn’t hear me sing, nor could she tune her voice to my voice. What was more strange, she couldn’t, somehow, hear herself.  The quality of her voice was flat and colourless, and lacked resonance. It was like a dead thing; a clunk, not a ring.

     Over the course of the four days, it was apparent that her ears were opening. She was starting to sing in tune and as this was happening, her whole posture changed as well as a liveliness coming to her step. Her face started lightening and becoming mobile.  It seemed also that her skin was clearing. Before she had a sort of bluish-grey dull complexion; but now, breath and blood was clearing it away.  

     There was a profound change in the way she sang with us. Her voice increasingly became responsive to us, and stronger. From being flat as well as lifeless, her voice was entraining itself to be in tune with us.  The transformation was extraordinary and a revelation to me.

     This woman became a model for me of the possibilities of voice training, or just regular singing for the fun of it, as a therapeutic tool.  In my counselling practice, I’ll sometimes recommend particular clients join a choir, have singing lessons, or just make a regular practice of singing around the home, or even on the way to work to music on the radio. Those that have are becoming less distant from their engagement with other people and themselves; a revelation that they notice very quickly.

     In singing,  it is as though our  ears are opened up and a playfulness of encounter begins to happen. Importantly also, with the reciprocity of encounter comes a fearlessness and assertiveness and an ability to choose which behaviours of others should be agreed to, and which rejected.

     To use the voice consciously is the beginning, as  Alfred Tomatis (1920-2001), an ear, nose and throat physician, psychologist and educator  has said, of hearing oneself, and thus, hearing others.  It is the beginning of actively being in the world as a participator, and not just an observer.

Deepening Perceptions

 Deepening Perceptions  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     In recent times I’ve found myself embedded in stories of unusual perception and sensitivity. I re-watched Tous les Matins du Monde  (All the Mornings of the World),  directed by Alain Corneau, 1991,  on the life of a 17^th century viol da gamba player, Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, who, on the death of his beloved wife retreats from his daughters and fine house to a hut in the garden to practice his instrument seventeen hours a day. His musicality increases to the level that he is sought out for his extraordinary skill by a brazen young man who wants to learn everything from him, but the master says, “No, you have skill but no musicality.” Time passes, with tragedies, and the man returns after a life of glitter and fame and requests his first lesson. The old master asks him what music is; is it this, is it that? What music is, says Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, is that which wakens the dead, and thus the lesson begins.

     This is a film, for me, of the extraordinary translucence of music, that strips away the extraneous useless matters of gestures and habituations of daily life, to the raw essence of being.  It is here, at least for me, where deepening perceptions begin.

     A few days after watching All the Mornings of the World,  I  saw Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, directed by Tom Tykwer, 2006. Here is a story of a fictional Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an eighteenth century man born with an extraordinarily heightened sense of smell (hyperosmia) who is obsessed with capturing the essential scent of young women, along with perfumes of flowers and fruits. He experiments with scent capturing techniques by murdering women and trying to urge off their pheromones into an unguent. Pheromones are those chemicals exuded by the body that affect the behaviour and physiology of other animals, including us.

     And then I’m reading Like Water for Chocolate, A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, by Laura Esquivel (1989). This about a woman who, forbidden to marry her lover, sheds tears that enter the meringue for the cake she makes for her sister’s wedding to her own lover that alters the perceptions of all those that ate it. From then, everything she cooks transforms its partakers.

    And then there is my work with clients. Much is about expanding perceptual awareness so that stuck patterns of living are freed up.

      It is very easy to get stuck. Taking up smoking or drinking or endless computer game playing or any other nerve calming activities  in times of stress makes sense. What doesn’t make a lot of sense is when these activities start to rule us. This is when tapping, once again, into doing things that naturally lead to expanded perceptual experiences can free us up, free us from the mouse-wheel of the same old, same old. The freeing up and the deepening of perceptual knowing in one individual has the capacity to change how we relate to other people and how they relate to us.

     Making music, perfume making (I’m not advocating murder!), and cooking, are activities that can help expand perceptual awareness and enjoyment and change lives. There is dance, running, swimming, painting, gardening, and so on, as well. All are active and require embodied engagement, and not just sitting back and entering fantasy realms. The point, though, is that just doing these activities  may be not enough to release a fixed mind-set that leads to harmful and habitual practices, we still have to know how to let go of them (even after we have stopped puffing), we still have to learn mindfulness  techniques that deepen perceptual awareness, so that the symptoms don’t return. This is where counselling and clinical hypnotherapy are  most valuable, but meditation or anything else that focuses on mindful participation helps. The talking cure of therapy is a very valuable one, though, for takes the exercise into an interpersonal realm and that helps release us from the things that bind us, releasing us into a fuller participation in the world.

Nothing is the Same

Nothing is the Same by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I recently went West back to my home town to look at wildflowers and catch up with friends. It’s a funny thing to try to do really, for going  back can never be achieved. One might return to a place, but the place, like everything shaped by the flux and flow of time and change, is not the same place.

     This was particularly poignant for me in two ways: some old friendships, it became clear, just don’t work anymore and the characteristics that I was once attracted to, are now just irritating. Some old friendships, on the other hand, remain buoyant and are a sheer pleasure to share in. These ones have moved with the times and we have grown to another level together.

     The other way was discovered in walking around the streets of my childhood and youth. The last time I visited, this place was all spick and span with new buildings and pavements and an atmosphere of get up and go. This time, I had a sense of a decaying ghetto. The block of units  now occupying the land on which my father designed and built our house now looked run down (and all in a remarkably short time). All the buildings in the street looked tired. The buildings that used to be an eclectic mix of Federation, Californian, and modernist designs, held together by loquat trees and rambling vines, are now boring units interspersed with sad houses with weeds of wood sorrel and daisies, gone to wrack and ruin. It seems the dreams of developers have somehow missed the mark, or else the population is transient and not the sturdy suburban stalwarts of old.

     Heraclitus (535- 475 BC)  said, “You cannot step into the same bit of river twice.” The water is different, the sand has changed and rocks worn down, the flush of new growth has grown old, and the old has grown new and interesting slimes and young fungi; there is nothing the same with this river that is life.

     I inevitably wonder whenever I go back to the landscape of my youth whether I should return there to live.  Every time, though, I cannot see why. I have made my home and my clinical practice in the northern rivers and I like it here. There are almost far too many memories back in the West for me to see the landscape afresh without its archaeological digs of personal history, and I rather  like only visiting those memories when I wish. Yes, I know, it seems I am contradicting myself here. I recognize that all is change, and that I cannot return to a time before the present, but that place is redolent with memories and it is my mind that try to hold the place in place.

    I’m not any different from anybody else here.  We all do it, but however much we try to keep our place safe from change, it doesn’t work. The mutability of living is just like water: impossible to keep in an unchanged form, forever.

     It interests me that a symptom of depression and obsessive compulsive disorder is the iteration, the doing or thinking of the same thing over and  over in a stuck way.  Seeking to find sanctuary in the repeated now doesn’t work. There is no peace here; iteration is just irritation and a place of anxiety. How nice it is to let go into flow, to not hold back nor try to hold still a pattern that, perhaps, used to be useful in times of stress. How good it feels not to have to regurgitate those old things that do not improve with time.

     The substance of  moving from this moment to the next to the next to the next is the substance of  the blood, flesh, bone and breath of life. Nothing is the same. All is change and I rather like it.

Playing and Working at Coming Clean

Playing and Working at Coming Clean  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

In this article I write about working at coming clean as part of a life’s individuation process.  It comes in two parts: The first written around 2pm and the second part, composed at 8pm. My reason is that the first expresses an exuberance untempered by useful critique and the latter with its bit of  reality check. Neither exuberance nor reality check are any better than the other, for both get change going and maintaining it.

2pm  

     I have taken up the cello again after a six year break. I’m revisiting the music I knew so well for the decades of music making and it is exhilarating.

      The cello sings my soul and I love it dearly and deeply.  I hear the music in my dreams, I hear it on the wind, I hear it among trees, in the ocean, on the streets, I hear it even in engines. 

     I was sixteen when I first sat down with a cello. It was exquisite. I’d played the violin for six years and, while quite nice, it didn’t fill me with joy. I asked my father if I could learn to play this instrument and he, dear man, found a cello and a teacher and so it began, this love affair of mine.

     Hearing and playing the music that sets one alight  is part of a celebration of integration of being who I am. Many people can identify with that, I know. Runners, cyclists, dancers, shelf stackers, writers,  even hypnotherapists and their clients, all know “the zone”. This flow is the state of relaxed focus that energizes us and it is something that has the power to change us fundamentally as we let go of old restrictive mind games.

8pm

     I drove to my cello lesson today in a town an hour from home, met my new teacher, took my beloved instrument from its case, tuned it up, and started playing. I played like a person only half awake, only partly conscious: old bad habits and weak hands  mingled  with passion, as well as a sneaky awareness that for a long time I was not using all of my brain. There was a passage I could not get right and I was mortified that I couldn’t do it. I felt such a fool. My teacher pointed out what I was not doing right and how I could make it better, and he wouldn’t let up. I had to do it.  I took over from his insistence and made myself do it.  I had become aware of my own muddied confusion and wanted clarity.

     This has given me an acute awareness of what my clients feel as they begin the process of detaching from old, damaging patterns and habits in their lives. First there may be an exuberance for the new work, but then the realization that strategies are needed to maintain and extend new insights. Both exuberance and plain old work are part of the transformative process of individuation. Individuation, as

the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) described it, is the bringing and integrating into consciousness the personal and collective unconscious. It is integral to the development of a sense of selfhood. It is also a process that continues throughout life.

     Music making is a wonderful metaphor for this individuation process. There is passion and desire for making music, for hearing it from the mountain tops, in the wind, and under the sea (I sometimes sing trumpet voluntaries while snorkelling),  and then there is the work: the adherence to making the making of music as clear as can be. It is as much a discipline as a passion. We want to live cleanly because we want to be understood, heard for who we are, and we want to speak clearly our truth without muddied confusion, and we seek uncluttered being. Both making music and therapy are neat ways of learning to do that, because the disciplined flow takes us there, without losing the passion. The soul sings.

Not at all like Topsy

 August 2016

Not at all like Topsy   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     There are three stories I want to tell.

     The first has to do with Topsy, a rag doll I was given when I was born. This doll was beautifully made out of brown felt cloth and had a sweet face sewn on her curly haired head. Her limbs were long and floppy and her body sturdy and girlish. She wore a red dress. I grew to love her.

     Each birthday my mother and I would go into town to buy Topsy a new face, as the old was well worn with all the kissing she received.

     Topsy and I grew up together, though her change was structural. Eventually

her stuffing came out and the cloth that was her skin became threadbare.

     Topsy, unlike her namesake in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by  the nineteenth century American author Harriet Beecher Stowe,   wasn’t just born, didn’t just grow’d, she came with a history, a maker (the lady upstairs in the block of flats we called home), the cloth maker, the face maker, the dress maker (my mother),  my history, my family, the context of middle class life in the fifties, in Western Australia, and so much more.

     The second story is about the period when I’d returned to university to do my Master of Counselling degree and was studying family and couples counselling. As part of our assessment we had to write a family history identifying specific characteristics typical to our family.  Until that point, I had a rather general curiosity about genealogy, but nothing more than that. I was amazed to find in my research definite patterns of behaviour on both sides of my family of origin. I discovered, for instance, that practically each generation on both my father’s and mother’s side had at least two, sometimes more, spouses and that there were split-level families dating back nearly two hundred years. Both sides of the  family were also adventurers, some travelled across the globe to escape conflicts of war and ideology.

     The third story describes what insight was brought to me while researching and writing my doctoral dissertation. I’d stumbled upon a book on Taoism, and was particularly taken by its Acknowledgements section; usually a place where the writer thanks their husband or wife, or colleagues. The author of this book, instead, thanked the trees and fungi, the sky, the birds, the pet dog, family, shopkeepers, library staff, colleagues and friends: all of which ameliorated the making of this book on the Tao of being in the world, which is a natural order of life. I was moved to write a similar Tao of acknowledgements and include in it not only my immediate milieu, but my academic influences: those thinkers who shaped my work and sense of self.

     All three stories are accounts of  realizing interrelationships. I’m moved to tell them because of a certain frustration I have concerning quite a lot of psychotherapeutic modalities that ignore the context of a person to concentrate on only individual and isolated behaviour,  as for instance, a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy, or relationships as if they are merely apparent fantasies and disembodied ideas. I’m thinking here of traditional psychoanalysis and Jungian analysis. A lot of solution focussed therapies also ignore the living system  that is being in the world. An awareness of the individual is important, but without a sense of the richness, or paucity, of experiencing others, we leave too much out in our therapeutic approach to the healing of clients.

     We didn’t just grow’d, and our behaviour cannot be extracted from what else is going on. Our family of origin and  our environment make us who we are.  We live in a Tao of relationship, and this is ground that therapy, I believe, needs to work within.

Feeling Secure; Adventuring Out

Feeling Secure; Adventuring Out   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD.

     When I was a little child I got fed up with being in my family and thought I’d run away. I scooped up a few essentials and scampered off down the road, without saying goodbye. The further away from the house I got, the less sure about my decision I became, until I got to the point of thinking, “Now what? Where do I go?” After all, where can a kid go, really? So I went back. Nobody knew that I’d left and nobody questioned me when I returned home; such was the nature of life as a  kid in a safe neighbourhood in the 50s. Whatever my own somewhat ambivalent difficulties with my mother were, I still felt safe at home in the family house with her, my brother and father.

     Security is a primary human need and so it is that in order to feel secure we form attachments to one another. From this place of security,  we find safety and freedom to explore the regions beyond this point.

    Attachment is that psychological connectedness that occurs between humans and lasts for a lengthy period of time. The level of this connectedness generally waxes and wanes and waxes, in a continuous circle of renewal and disintegration and renewal again. It is a thick space, with a richness that holds and releases and welcomes again. This looping is what a group of family therapists around the world call, “the circle of security”.  The circle of security allows a child, and later grown up, to venture out and explore the world, and return knowing they will be received by those that care for them with trust, respect, and in an attitude of freely given love.

     I meet a large range of people in my clinical practice and many of them are explorers of the greater world. Some, though, are very fearful of change, of different environments, and of people. Even coming to see me is felt to be a big risk. A very small number have never left this country town I now call home, and which I moved to seven years ago. This always sort of surprises me. I am a traveler from a family of travelers and enjoy going where I have never been before. I do, however, like to feel some sense of security wherever I am, and with this security comes a sense of being home wherever I am.

     Feeling safe is a key for all people. As infants, we reach out to our caregiver (usually our mother, but not always) and other close people and it is their level of sensitivity and responsivity that helps us develop a secure sense within ourselves. It is also in this space that empathy is born. Empathy is like going out to meet another person and walking with them awhile, without ever changing places with them.

     Part of the being present with another and sensitively receiving them is the sharing of eye contact.  Indeed the sharing of eye contact is one of the identifiers of healthy human development and more generally, a balanced psychology.  

     Not all can participate in such a sharing. People on the autism disorder spectrum are some who cannot hold such contact; others are avoidant because of certain learned behaviors dating back to infancy. Current research and therapies are finding ways to shift this pattern to a more fulsome contact. Such therapies introduce the person to incremental exposure to shared eye contact and the results are coming through that indicate there is an improvement in interpersonal relationships and a greater capacity for empathy. This work is exciting as it shows that the human brain is flexible and conditions that we previously thought could not be changed have some capacity for quite fundamental shifts. Furthermore, this work is suggesting that the principle of feeling secure and adventuring out isn’t just what happened in infancy shaping how we are the world, but is in continual negotiation throughout life. This is why psychotherapy works and this is why I work in the field. What we were once isn’t necessarily what we are now. We can and do change.

Selfies: Real Self or False?

Selfies: Real  Self or False?    by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     As my friends are probably well aware, I don’t like having my photograph taken. I never have. The few photographs of me as a child show an awkward child hiding behind my mother’s cotton dresses, or twisted around behind a fence, or something. I never liked being the object of “the gaze”, as literary theorists put it. So you don’t often see me smiling into the lens; you see something serious, which isn’t the whole truth of me. I can be silly, funny, and lightsome.

     Someone once did a study on who most smiles into the camera and psychotherapists and photographers are least likely to. We can conjecture here, as I have done on several occasions, that photographers and therapists prefer to do the looking and not be seen to be observing. We earn our living watching and listening intently and working with others to find a more comfortable place within themselves and in their relationships. A good photo provides a sort of anchor to experience and a good therapeutic session brings a greater ease into life.

     You wont find me taking selfies. This phenomenon that is extensively exhibited on social media is alien to me. My facebook page has a picture of a seal, at the moment. At other times, you’ll find the tiger, named Richard Parker, from the movie, The Life of Pi, or some raven, a whale, or something or other. For me to put up an actual picture of me doesn’t make me feel awkward, so much as just bored senseless. Now this is not to say that I am contemptuous of those who post pictures of themselves, I am merely saying that I am uncomfortable posting pictures of myself on social media.  My self-ness isn’t connected, in my mind, to pictures of myself.

     It’s an intriguing thing, the picture of oneself. Such artefacts reverse the image, so that a photo isn’t an actual representation of oneself, yet many of us identify with the picture, believing that the moment captured digitally is us. I read a lot of forums online, interested as I am, in the questions people ask about ordinary life, love, and meaning, and have noticed an exponential rise in recent times in questions along the lines of “am I pretty/handsome, will the boys/girls like me” accompanying selfies. It seems that these questioners identify very much with  their representation of themselves, that their sense of selfhood is actually contained in the photograph. I get the sense that such a belief in the image hides selves who are extremely lonely, full of doubt, and suicidal. The endless taking of the selfie, ironically, endeavours to connect the self to a presence among people, and yet it often fails to do so.

     I am interested in presence and immersion in environments. Perversely, possibly, I actively seek the rawness of encounter, and thus I enjoy diving to the bottom of the sea, or slipping over icy pavements, or plunging head first into wild places and thus I hardly ever actually photograph anything.

     I do admire beautiful pictures taken by others. Photography is a wonderful medium and often, but not always, very creative. As a representation of reality, though, it isn’t particularly. Whatever is depicted is still only a two-dimensional thing; the presentation of depth and light and shadow are merely tricks of the eye. The presence of a person is manifestly and magnificently greater than the image on an iphone, newspaper, or whatever we hold in our hand. Presence is the richness of contradiction, of concordance, of playfulness, of tears, of heartfelt meeting, of serious words, of changing visage, of the generosity of story and experience, of low points and exhilaration, of anxiety, doubts, and despair; it is being in a way that mishmashes together layers of interconnecting falsehoods and realities.  To be a presence is all these things. The photograph takes one piece and calls it everything.

     This one piece, though, has its place. It is a beginning of an exploration to the real self; any piece of self (real or false) is this. This will be part of the theme of an upcoming workshop.

     In August  (20^th – 21^st),  Indivar  from Perth will be returning to this region to run a non-residential weekend workshop, titled “From the False to the Real” which I will help facilitate.  Please email or phone me for details (dr_mccardell@yahoo.com, mobile 0429 199 021).

     Indivar (Jim Coventry) has over 50 years experience as a clinical psychologist and group leader. He is a gentle, incisive, insightful, creative, and very funny man and workshop participants often come away feeling that deep and complex issues have been addressed and selves spoken to at a deep hearts level. I’ve looked at the faces of the people and seen profound shifts and a new ease of being.  This is the kind of shift I observe with my own clients and it’s very heartening.  It’s a privilege to be present in the presence of fellow discoverers who are serious about living their lives with conscious awareness and delight in new understanding.

Being for Oneself; Being for Others

Being for Oneself; Being for Others by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I’m interested in the problem of those who live with the consequences of feeling they have to fulfil the needs of others because of parental expectation. I’ve listened to the accounts of clients who’ve expressed a certain resentment for this in their own lives, or know someone who has been very damaged by such expectations. I’ve also been reminded of rather extreme forms of this vicariousness in literature.

     In order to have a sense of being your own person, you need to have an independence of thought, feeling and action.  Being your own person is having a sense of authenticity, a willingness to stand your ground, self confidence, and a willingness to experiment with new ways of doing things, tasting new things, going where you’ve never been before, and playing with wonder.

     You need an independence that isn’t heavily dependent on other people’s direction. Obviously, when we are born we are dependent on the physical, emotional and communicative support, nurturance,  and, hopefully, love of our caregivers. We need an education into the cultural ideas and practices of our community and the development of knowledge and the associated skills, as well as knowing the boundaries of self and others. These are necessary.  Conformity, to a degree, is helpful, but when this dominates, then a sense of self is compromised, so a balance between independence and mutuality is really useful.

     It’s interesting that when people are brought up to be heavily dependent on others, they often have a feeling of being out of control, confused, clingy, devalued and easily manipulated. One of the most common emotions for these people is  anger, depression and psychic collapse. Many find themselves in the mental health system, being moved from psychiatrist to psychiatrist and medication to medication. Where is happiness in this; where is a sense of self?

     Parents who bring up children to be so needy tend to  have  children because they themselves haven’t known much love and nurturance, for reasons as complex as war, abuse, abandonment, or lack of consistent parenting of their own. They have the children to “fill a hole” in themselves. Their experienced absence of love gets transferred to the unborn child and the child is taught that independence is bad and wrong, but these children feel the inner turbulence, as described above. 

     If the mapped life, the vicarious life of the parent, is adopted (and many children find it practically impossible to resist), their accomplishments are not sensed as their own, and underneath it all, they can believe that the lie that they are living will soon be discovered and they will be exposed as the fraud they feel themselves to be. The doctor, the lawyer, the actor, the musician, the football player, the academic (I met many when I was at university) can all feel these feeling of inauthenticity, because they trained in these professions to fulfil the dreams of parents.

     The need to have a child to fill “the gap” can take certain parents to extreme places. I’m not talking about adoption here, but biotechnological means whereby natural processes are bypassed.  Now I’m not saying this is wrong in itself, but I am keen to ask some difficult questions, like, for instance, what level of sensed independence will the much longed for child have? Will their sense of self be skewed to being dependent on the existence of the other person? Will they know their separateness? It does, naturally, depend on how the child is brought up and the values translated to them.  Let me be clear here, I’m not saying wanting a child by whatever means is always a consequence of a parent not feeling loved; I am merely wondering about the child who came into the world to fulfil someone else’s perceived need.

     We live in strange times. Biotechnological intervention in the design of children is reaching bizarre levels. In the late 1990s the first child was conceived for the purpose of harvesting cells in order to save the life of his sibling. There have been several other cases of this “saviour sibling” phenomenon. A novel has been written (“My Sister’s Keeper,” by Jodi Picoult)  and a movie made of this semi-fictional account of such a situation.

     The “saviour sibling” is a child conceived in order to  provide an organ or cell transplant to a sibling who is affected with a fatal disease, such as cancer or a fatal form of  anaemia. So, in other words, the ne healthy human being is there for the benefit of their brother or sister, and is supposed to willingly undergo medical procedures and surgeries, whether they like it or not. This is an ethical mine field that is still poorly understood.    

     I’ve been reading as much of the literature I can get my hands on, including the accounts of the donor’s themselves. Many papers quote a single account of an interview with a child, who when asked what they thought about being alive just because their sibling needed saving, said, they were glad to help. Another account is less forgiving:  this saviour sibling “donated” (not voluntarily) spinal material to his brother who later died. Their parents disowned the “saviour” and he grew up without the love of parents.

     So how to love a child for themselves, without them being there to fulfil our own expectations? I guess much of this comes down to allowing, and playing with, our own desires and ambitions to manifest in our own lives the things we haven’t yet fulfilled, and to not attempt to transplant those desires into the lives of others. It becomes a question of owning what belongs to us and what doesn’t.  Counselling has a huge part to play in the articulation and realization of our own ambitions. In the end, we are responsible for our own lives and for creating the space for other lives to be lived well.

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Clearing a Room of Ghosts

 April 2016

Clearing a Room of Ghosts     by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons),  M. Couns., PhD.

     It’s a funny thing reading other people’s letters, particularly when these letters are those between one’s own father and his lover and cover a period of over thirty years.  It’s unnerving to discover that they make no mention, at all, of me, and my life and only speak of their tumultuous love, regrets, and enduring passion. They only speak of wanting to be together, and his resisting divorcing my mother, and her divorcing her husband, and on and on. The drama is between lovers and a room full of ghosts.

     My own life during that time was eventful, as most are, between the ages of 16 and beyond. I graduated from school, and the various degrees of university; I travelled to Europe a few times, I studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, I returned, I married and divorced (and all the related catastrophes), I found and lost God, I got on various committees, got jobs, moved on, and on. All these events are not found in the letters I’ve been reading. It is as though I’ve occupied space in another universe to this lettered one of my father. And yet I knew him too, and he was beautifully generous to me and I loved him.

     These letters are amongst various other bits and pieces I’m only now looking at. My father died in 2007, at the great age of nearly 101. This stuff is ancient history. The lover is probably dead. It is all past.

    In amongst the letters is a very evocative little fairy tale written by my father in 1972. It’s a story about two lovers. She who married and had children, but hadn’t really found love, and he who longed for the “perfect” woman and had not yet discovered “even the shadow of one” and they met “almost by accident” and it was like “two stars melting into one”.  Quote, unquote. For the likes of me, a psychotherapist, the tale is interesting. It bespeaks of a mind stuff (even a mind field) populated by notions of “perfect women”, as if there were such ephemeral beings. This tale is placed together in this collection of letters, of hers, and copies of my father’s letters to her (for that was the kind of man he was: he wrote out, without carbon paper [those days had no photocopiers], copies of every letter he wrote this lover of his). Why he kept all these letters, I don’t know. Perhaps he thought he would defy death and live forever, perhaps he didn’t know what to do with them,  or maybe he actually did want me to read them. I shall never know his intent. His fairy tale fantasy does make mention of his hope that other generations will know the kind of love of which he experienced.

    Mmm. This is all very well, and I am glad to have read these letters, but my actual  impression of them though is not that it is a saga of true and perfect love, but years and years and years and years of one person trying to say to the other, “Hey, I’m just an ordinary person, and not the personification of “the perfect woman”. Hey, I shop, I eat, I get sick, I travel, I have problems with my kids, I drink – probably far too much, I smoke – yeah I know that’s really bad, I care for my aged mother, I go to parties, I don’t get invited to some parties – because of our illicit relationship,  etc, etc.” And the other person says, “I’ve never loved another as I love you. You are the, my, perfect woman.”

     This is the crux of the matter. Here is a love story that is probably all about projections and a room of ghosts, with very occasional brushing against the ordinary world.

     You see, I heard it all from the next room, the arguments, the crying and all that between my parents, even the words, “Don’t tell Liz.” I was a teenager then and I did not know, nor could find my voice for many years after this in how to say, “I do know, and do not like it.” 

     In the warped wisdom of my parents at the time when I was sixteen and when the great love affair of thirty years and more between the woman who was not my mother and my father had just begun, they thought it a good idea to send me to a psychologist. I’m very, very glad they did, for seeing the psych gave me my eventual freedom from the ghosts in the room.

     From that time forth I have been seeking authenticity: how to be real, clear and direct, all my life. It is likely that this is what drives me to do the work I do with my clients. I like the clarity that being real brings, and I like the freedom that is made manifest.  It is like the opening of the doors, the letting in of the light and air and the multiple choices that reveal themselves.  It is the clearing, and it is wonderful.

Anxiety

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

    I’ve just realized this is the last Wednesday of the month, the deadline date for contributing articles to the Nimbin Good Times. To say I’m a bit stressed and anxious, is an understatement. I’ve contributed to this fine paper every month since March 2009 and really don’t want to miss an issue, if at all possible.

     Anxiety is my topic, appropriately. What a better way of working than working with material currently experienced.

     At the moment I am participating in an online international conference on the use of hypnosis in the treatment of anxiety. The tools we are adding to our repertoire are extremely useful and are available to any client wishing to work with me. So the matter of anxiety is close to me at other levels too.

     Anxiety has a structure that is pretty well universal. There is an internal voice that repeats messages of fear, danger, maybe lack of ability, that manifest alongside the mental reiterations, a physical component of tightness in the chest, perhaps some breathlessness, palpitations, dry mouth, and the like. The internal voice is quite high pitched, strained, and rapid. The message is not really rational and it repeats itself.

     Anxiety distorts and intensifies normal interaction in the world and with other people, so that our whole selves can feel overwhelmed with emotion and a sense of being out of control. The art then is to change those perceptions.

     For me, at the moment, my stress at needing to get this article written is being accompanied by fear of losing income. Ridiculous, isn’t it. These articles are one of my sources of income, so I have to write them (or at least so I think). At the forefront of my inner chatter are the words, “hurry, hurry, hurry”. There is, though, another voice that is taking the micky out of this and the “hurry, hurry, hurry” is acquiring a sort of sing song chant, “hari rama, rama rama, hari krisna, hari krisna” – and thus the tension is lessened. And here is a key to losing anxious feelings.

     It is impossible to maintain anxiety when other processes are introduced. There is a technique where the therapist suggests  the client writes down the words of stress in very small script. Then the client reads what she/he has written in a normal voice, and then re-reads the script in a very slow, bored voice. Such a technique changes the non-verbal qualities of the inner talk, and even changes how the body feels as the exercise is carried out.

     Neurological research is showing how this is possible. Changing a person’s experience of inner talk actually changes how the body-mind operates. Inner talk is iterative, that is, it has a quality of rumination, where stuff is thought of repeatedly. In terms of neural activity in the brain, the same pathways become entrenched and sometimes pretty difficult to get out of.  Worry that occupies us, occupies us more and more, unless we can break the looping that occurs. Breaking the pattern, as for instance, taking the micky out of the inner story (my “hurry” changed to “hari rama”), or slowing the words of worry down, or singing the story, or speaking the words in an ordinary  voice, have the power to actually disempower the rumination and the looping and thus forge new neural pathways. Breaking the pattern changes the body’s response to what used to be plain old anxiety and increases a relaxed state. The tightness goes, leaving a softness and a sense of being more fluid and easy.

     Other techniques are useful too. One technique  is remembering the tools we used to use to relax ourselves and learning to incorporate these tools when feeling stressed. For me, writing has this power. As I write this article, I feel more settled. Swimming is another means for me.

     A year or two ago, I had a client with a particular form of anxiety. I wont say what it was about, but I discovered she had a great love of running, down by the sea. In the hypnosis sessions, I “ran” with her in the wind, for in invoking such a scenario, she was able to enter into a deeply relaxed and yet aware state (which is what hypnosis is anyway); a state she was able to evoke whenever she needed to. The inner iterative voice lost its power and her whole demeanour changed in an enduring way. From week one to week three, her face was no longer pinched, her breathing was easy, and her skin glowed.  Along with these changes was a shift in how she worked with the people in her world and how she saw herself. She lost her belief that she was a weak/bad/anxious person. She become confident and looked it. Really fundamental changes occurred.

     Anxiety has a lot of energy connected to it. Unlocking that energy in a creative and helpful way can release and relieve a person very deeply so that they can live more fully and more easily in the world.

Not set in stone

Not set in stone by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     When I was an academic at the Perth  university I studied and worked at all those years ago, I came across a lot of people convinced they were imposters and that they would soon be exposed and kicked out. I didn’t really experience this myself, and felt this time of my life as being wonderful fun. This may be because I’d spent ten years or so prior to this working as a researcher and editor of the writings of academics and ordinary people alike and knew that I didn’t need to set myself up as an expert, for I had certain skills and certain failings as well, but I was always willing to learn and expand my expertise. This is the key, I think. If I had thought of my knowledge and position as static and immutable, I’d be terrified if it was questioned, for then my view of myself would come tumbling down.

     I am not fearful of what life throws at me. I don’t identify myself with status or label, or whatever tag might be attached to me. This is not to say I am free from inner stories that  come to bite me. This is the human condition, I think. What has become different, as far as I’m concerned, is that I go for the thing that might otherwise inhibit me from acting, something that allows me to roll rather than get stuck. I wasn’t always like this. I was in fact a very fearful child.

     This not getting stuck in ideas about myself is useful in many aspects of life. In an article I read recently, the non-identification of  oneself in a negative status allows for fast healing, particularly in terms of relationship breakdowns. Those people who self talk with “I’m no good at relationships”, or “I always choose the wrong guy/woman” take much longer to recover.  By not identifying oneself as the inevitable cause of the breakdown of a relationship we’re free to say, simply, “this relationship was not right for me,“ and move on.  This is sometimes easier said than done, and sometimes counselling is useful in freeing ourselves from the negative self talk.

     Nothing really is set in stone as far as life is concerned. Memories of past times are wrapped in the paper of many layers of personal history and these can inhibit us moving forward. Sometimes what we tell ourselves about who we think we are gets in the way of doing what we really want. I nearly had this experience recently.

     I went to Perth during my recent summer holidays and was taken on a couple of trips to my favourite place, Rottnest Island, a place  dense with history, my own included in with prisoners of war and, before that, aboriginal incarceration. There are parts of the island that I have known intensely at significant points in my life from infancy onwards; parts that evoke a complex mix of delight, poignant anxiety, and  pangs of longing. The beach rosemary is so intensely beautiful that each time I go, I break a little piece and conceal it in my clothing to take home: rosemary for remembrance of sunny days at the beach.

    On one of the trips, I travelled on a friend’s boat. We snorkelled and frolicked off Green Island, a small rocky stack off the south side of the island, and a couple of the men donned their diving gear and went crayfishing. I remarked that I would love to dive, if I could. So after their return I was kitted out with weights, buoyancy control device, cylinder, fins and mask. It felt so incredibly heavy, heavier than I’d remembered it seven years ago when I used to dive quite often. I thought, I can’t do this and my mind was thus ablaze with  conflict: to dive or not. Thousands of reasons why not to dive, the thousands of images of myself as “the fearless one” came and went along with “I’m just a little middle aged weak lady,” blah blah blah, images of dying, of living, of disappearing into the deep deep blue,  arose and fell, and so on and so on.. I contemplated flipping myself over the side of the boat, but had images of knocking myself out doing it, so in a near trance I edged my way to the jumping platform, sat down and let go into the water. There was a sort of inevitability in all this and I merely dropped to the sea floor breathing as naturally as a fish.

     Diving always throws up my inner talk, and throws out beliefs I have about myself , but  in the end, I just have to get on and do it. No escape. Once you’re in the water, that’s it. The weights drag you under, and though you can inflate your vest it is so uncomfortable the underwater beckons, and that is so lovely.

     There is no escape in anything one chooses to do, really. Doing psychotherapy (like doing teaching) as opposed to being a psychotherapist (or being a teacher), there are no “outs”, unless of course one actually wants to be completely useless. Doing psychotherapy means being there, thinking, making metaphor, analogy, and being present with the other person where they are and challenging that when appropriate. This is not the time to set in stone anything. Not a time for having an immutable belief about oneself, nor thoughts  that one is brilliant or bad, or insipid. All is changing all the time, just like being in water.  Nothing is set in stone.  Living is being, and not being a thing.

Prose Poems

I thought I'd add this link to some of my published prose poems in Episteme journal.

http://www.episteme.net.in/index.php?option=com_phocadownload&view=category&id=105:prose-poems&Itemid=625

Falling from the Cloud

January 2016

Falling from the Cloud by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I’ve been wandering around for a couple of days thinking about what to write for this article, trying to focus the mind, but having difficulty. It’s between Christmas and New Year and I’m caught up in the bardo space of neither this nor that, which many of us feel at this time of the year. Some businesses are open, most are shut, the streets are quiet in the most part, and the place has a dreamlike quality. Topics rise up in my mind: guilt, shame, community, getting stuck and unstuck, and moving on and I’m moved to consider them in the writing, but a fall from the cloud  of community is the one that captures me.

In computer speak, the Cloud is a public WiFi provider that allows for the sharing of data and information for the benefit of streamlining resources and creating community coherence. Without public WiFi, the internet connects us anyway, however much we seek it. Within the internet are deeper, darker depths where few choose to wander.

In meteorological terms, the cloud is a visible mass of liquid or frozen droplets of water and various chemicals that gathers together to form types of communities of droplets.  Some droplet communities are very dense and some less so.

Issues can be cloudy, in that they are not transparent. Moods can be cloudy, where suspicion and worry lurk. There are clouds before a storm, and hunters of storms observe the clouds. I watch them: the clouds of meteorology, moods, and thoughts.  Being a cloud watcher all my life, I like the meditation practice, adopted by some hypnotherapists, including me, of thinking of thoughts and feelings like clouds, and watching them gather in cloud form and disappear.

Community has cloud-like characteristics. Community is a social unit of any size that is connected by durable relations, with rules, said and hidden, that work towards keeping the unit going.

I like to watch clouds. I gaze at them, endlessly, from my back veranda, watching them form and dissolve and form and dissolve. I saw a red dragon once. There it was, this red glowing dragon seen through clearly defined luminous clouds. He raced across the sky, and was gone.

I like the

Community is highly complex and can be studied by anybody and from a range of disciplines: ecology, anthropology, social science, information technologies, organizational perspectives, philosophy and psychology, for instance. I am, though, most interested, given my profession and inclination, to want to consider it from the perspective of the individual person.

shame and guilt and wondering about the given wisdom that guilt, as the feeling of having failed in some obligation and shame, as the painful sense of distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior, are individual phenomena. I question this, because underlying these senses are two things: an implicit belief in the rightness of something and a sense that we will be judged by other people in our community for feeling the things we do, even though it usually doesn’t ever come to that, as we keep our guilt and shame secret.  But keeping such things secret doesn’t mean they do not arise inter-relationally, even though they are rarely articulated. Being an inter-relational phenomenon also doesn’t necessarily imply an actual condemnation of one’s behavior, just a disturbing feeling that such a thing has, or is about to, happen.

     I’ve been mulling about certain intangible codes of behaviour that are apparently present among groups of women, for instance. I’m thinking of the “code of silence” that seems to operate, whereby some things are never spoken of, and when they are, individuals are singled out and expelled from the group. This dynamic shames and blames girls in the school yard and mature women in the workplace, and among friends.  It’s a code that is learned very early on and forms what sociologists call, “the hidden curriculum”.

     I, like a few, never learned this particular code and it gets me into a lot a trouble every now and again. I wasn’t present when that bit of learning took place. I was at home in bed with yet another childhood illness. And so I get into trouble by inbeing blunt and declaring things, things that seem to me as clear as day, when the code has it I be silent. When I break the silence, I do not feel ashamed nor guilty, even though someone says explicitly that I should (and say I’m sorry), for I see the dynamic pretty clearly. I’ve lost friends this way, and that is sad. It does, however, give me an insight into how groups work, and do not work.

     The inter-relational is difficult to pin down and codes of behaviour are rarely ever actually articulated. Much goes by at a sort ethereal level. Things are vaguely felt, except when things are said that are said against the code that inheres the group. It’s against this cloudy backdrop that the problems of guilt and shame are manifest.

     Much psychological literature identify guilt and shame as individually felt things. Guilt and shame certainly feel like they are individual. I may not know the code of silence, but I know other codes. I know how it feels to fall upon the guilt-edged sword of shame. It hurts in a nagging, dull sort of way. But, you know, how is it possible to have a sense of a conscience outside a code of practice lived by the rest of one’s community? A conscience arises in relation to beliefs and ideas about community for the benefit of community. Having a sense of right and wrong are relational, indeed, inter-relational within community, and, as such, are endlessly negotiated.

Martin Buber, the existential philosopher in his book, On Psychology and Psychotherapy, beautifully identifies the point at which an action of conscience is felt as being apparently objective truth. It is a point that we tend to attribute possible reactions to our personal stuff as a condemnation by the group, even when what we’re experiencing is an introjected idea of the mores of the group. To introject is to take what is outside into ourselves. The introjected idea can be very flawed. I think a code of silence is one of those: when not speaking up is lauded over saying what needs to be said for the safety of others. Sometimes the introjected idea has come via sources that should not be trusted. Examples of an untrustworthy source of ideas is the belief that plane travel is dangerous, or you should never step into the ocean because sharks will get you, or New York is a dangerous town, or all men are beasts, or women are all gold diggers, or whatever. Such are beliefs that interfere with good choices….