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….