The Gift of Fish by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2023

Very early on Christmas morning, my friend and I went swimming at a local beach. I was doing my favourite pastime of snorkeling and, once again, noticed how few fish there were for this time of the year. There was a fisherman standing at the water’s edge with his line in the water. This concerned me because this is a marine sanctuary and there were signs up saying fishing is prohibited. As I was debating about how to tell him that he shouldn’t be fishing here, he called out to me saying his line was caught and could I release it. My interior argument intensified: do I help the fisherman, or the fish? Where does my ethical choice lie, and why? In the end I was moved to help the fisherman who was a stranger to me. This decision  came down to the warm feelings that I have for my fellow human beings, even though I will fight rigorously for the health of the ocean.

 

I found the line, and released the hook and swam on. On returning to the shore and while my friend and I ate our Christmas breakfast, the fisherman came up and gave me two filleted fish. Again, my age old inner conflict was brought to the surface: I love eating seafood even though I am concerned for sea life. None of this is cut and dried for me. I delight in the smells and tastes of the ocean; I luxuriate in the deliciousness of it all even while earlier I might have  been immersed in thalassic waters, but I’m worried by the way the ocean is being denuded. On this day, this Christmas day, I couldn’t say no to the gift of fish, given that the fish were already dead and it was a gift after all and contradictorily, I like eating fish.

 

And so, the conundrum of being human, this human, who eats fish and other seafood even while I relish swimming among  marine life: how do I reconcile the contradictions? I don’t. I hold the two parts together in an uneasy holding pattern. Am I any different from other predators? Seems not. Should I be different? I don’t know.  I am deeply connected to the conundrum of my existence in its many manifestations. I know I do not do well on a strictly vegetarian diet (something about my seafaring  northern European genetic makeup) and I love the sea and all her inhabitants. I think of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of marine life and how she chose the sea over marrying a man she did not love and how she decides whether fisherman catch fish, or not, or whether fish eat us or not. She gives, but also takes away. She is fierce, when she needs to be, but loving and giving when she chooses it. In this way, she can be seen to explain something of the ineffable mysteries of connectedness with all living things.

 

If I have learned anything it is that my decisions have to come about by weighing up my choices. I have to make those choices on the basis of what is most beneficial for those involved as I see fit then, even while I can note that those choices are not clear cut, and not choices that are inflexible to other conditions. Deciding to free the fisherman’s line on Christmas day may not be the choice I make should the situation arise again. Next time it may be the marine sanctuary that is given the voice, my voice. The mystery of connectedness as I felt it that day was all about human warmth, but it need not be. Water, as a symbol, binds us all together with life all around us but it gives and takes away.

Time to Grieve by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

December 2022

 

 

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did a tremendous service and disservice in identifying what she saw as the stages of grief in her work with the dying. It’s unfortunate that people sometimes give themselves a hard time because they think the way they’re handling their experience is wrong in some way and this idea is sometime supported by helping professionals.  

 

Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist in the 1960s, identified in her book “On Death and Dying” what she saw as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. This stage theory suggests that one moves from each stage  in an orderly way, but in reality this isn’t the case. Nevertheless, let’s pretend this isn’t so and examine what she had to say about each stage.

 

Stage 1: Denial. Quite often we respond to sudden loss or change by pretending it isn’t happening. This serves a purpose in numbing our feelings and giving us time to process it. You can call it a defence mechanism, or just accept it as a natural way of dealing with loss.

 

And then you move from denial to Anger when your suppressed emotions start welling to the surface. In this anger, there is a lot of sadness, bitterness, or resentment,   hidden away under the projection of rage onto the situation, other people, or even inanimate objects.

 

Then, you move to Bargaining and you find yourself creating lots of “what if,” “if only,” statements.  These helps you postpone the sadness, confusion, or hurt. If you are religiously inclined you are likely to try and bargain with God to get relief from your feelings that are welling up: “I promise to be a loving daughter of God, if you will take away my pain” kind of thing.

Stage 4 describes Depression. Here there are profound feelings of despair and loss. You feel heavy, confused, foggy and really sad. You want to isolate yourself, and just feel the feelings as they dump upon you. This phase often feels like what people say about the nature of loss, that it is inevitable and that is something that must be taken care of, maybe through medication.  But, hang on, maybe there is more afoot here and maybe then is the time to talk about it all with a counsellor. 

 

And then, according to Kubler-Ross, you may enter Stage 5: Acceptance. Now this doesn’t mean you’ve moved beyond grief or loss, but have accepted it and have come to some understanding of what it means for you in your life. 

 

Now this stage theory of grief is  all very well, but, in my experience and the experiences of many other therapists, feelings of loss do not follow a clear cut pattern; rather we dip in and out of such feelings throughout life. One therapist I know who suffered tremendous personal loss when her twelve year old daughter died of a brain tumour thirty years ago, and who now works as a grief counsellor, suggests we consider another way of thinking about the process of grief. She sees the process of grieving not in a stage form but as an infinite loop where feelings of sadness arise and diminish in an accepting kind of way, and accordingly she  continues to celebrate the life of her child with each of the deceased birthdays and the day of her death.

 

I acknowledge the wisdom of this infinite loop model and utilize it with my clients. I might, for instance, recommend spending thirty minutes a day giving mindful space and time to feelings of loss and sadness, suggesting to my client that it’s actually ok to feel such feelings for the rest of their life, or not, however they feel. There is no time limit on feelings of loss, and such feelings are not negative, dark entities, but part of the richness of life itself. There are no rules here, and our experiences matter. By spending just thirty minutes a day also safeguards our experiences from overwhelming us into a contained and special place. We can make this time beautiful, with flowers and candles, or not, as we wish. It’s ok to feel sad, to grief.

 

Keeping the Balance by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

November 2022

 

 

I’ve been trying to practice samatva, the via media, the middle way, equanimity… call it what you will for several decades now. It is the equal consideration towards all sentient beings, the conscious awareness of the transience of reality, the not believing in and getting caught up in extremes. I came to this not from the teachings of the various religions, even though the idea of keeping the balance is implicit in all of them, but from my own life’s experiences.

 

Until my thirties, I was very much thrown around by the winds of extremes and I realized one day that, unless I found a middle path, the torment of extreme feelings would destroy me and so I began a daily practice of discernment and careful listening for what matters and what doesn’t, as well as choosing not to believe in the highs and lows of my emotions (neither elation nor depression). They, after all, are endlessly subject to change and are not a measure of reality itself. This practice of equanimity, I believe, contributes well to my skills as a psychotherapist. My interest is thus less on technique, more on my capacity for staying present with whatever arises interiorily and thus allowing me to be present with whatever the other person brings into the therapeutic relationship.

 

Being, and staying present with the other person necessitates being mindful of them as much as myself, with awareness that they have chosen to come because they are suffering in some way. My mindful presence creates a sense of safety for the client, giving them courage to address the issues that surround their feelings of anxiety, depression, or whatever.  Successful therapy changes the client’s relationship to his/her particular form of suffering freeing them to pursue a happier life.

 

So, what is mindfulness and how can we achieve equanimity? It’s interesting that despite the term ‘mindfulness’ being so integral to much modern psychotherapy, including the very popular cognitive behavioural therapy, and it is being taught in workshops and in counselling sessions all over the world, it is only now being effectively defined.

 

Mindfulness is being in the moment. It is a way of relating to all experience – positive, negative and neutral – such that our suffering is reduced and our sense of well-being increases. To be mindful is to wake up, to recognize what is happening in the present moment, and not coloured by old memories, traumatic reactions, dreams, etc.

 

When we are mindless, we rush from activity to activity, we drop things, break them, hurt ourselves; we fail to observe the subtle changes in our feelings, we eat and drink without awareness, and we are preoccupied with the past or the future and are not aware of what’s happening right now.

 

Being mindful is being aware of the present moment; it’s paying attention to the circumstances and issues of right now and it enables us to attend to what is required now. It allows us to step out of our conditioning and see things in a fresh vibrant way. All this mindful presence allows us to develop equanimity and thus to weather the storms of unconscious conditioned behaviour with a deep calm and clarity of mind. 

 

The process of the development of mindfulness enables us  to reduce vulnerability to stress and emotional distress and allows  us to keep a steady course throughout life.

 

Working towards mindfulness and thus achieving a balance is, as I’ve observed before, the aim of all religions. The via media, is a Christian idea; the samatva is Hindu; equanimity is implicit in Taoism and Buddhism; and it is central also to Islam, Bahai, and the Greek philosophies, but as a life long strategy for equitable living it makes a lot of sense. We are less inclined to enter arguments and wars and, very positively, we are more able to achieve a greater simplicity of being open and loving towards the world.

 

The Sufi twirling dervish achieves a simplicity and direct experience of the here and now at the core of their being despite turning round and round and round. This is my aim: a wonderful interior harmony.

 

 

 

Remembering and Releasing and Restoring by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

October 2022

 

I’m packing up and moving elsewhere. The elsewhere is my home city of Perth. Why? I’m increasingly missing the clarity of the turquoise Indian Ocean and my daily swims there and walks through seaweed and white sand; even the cacophony of sea gulls. I’m missing the landscape of my place, the smells of eucalypts, beach rosemary, pines, and sea salt. I’m missing the dryness of limestone and granite, and my easy access to academic libraries, the Fremantle arts scene and its orchestra that I used to play the cello in. I’m missing my community of old friends and mentors.

 

This is not to say I have lived an isolated life here, I haven’t. I have some dear friends in this part of the world too and I do go to concerts and exhibitions, and I do go down to the Pacific Ocean for swims as well as the university pool, but the floods, the rain, the humidity, the mould feel so strange to me, although it is now thirteen years since my arrival in Lismore.

 

So, it will be goodbye northern rivers, and hello Fremantle, where I’m planning to live. Hello lots of salt water play: snorkeling, diving, swimming, kayaking, dancing with dolphins under a clear bright sky.

 

I remember one time of kayaking around Penguin Island in Shoalwater Bay, near Rockingham and a couple of dolphins came up beside my little vessel and accompanied me from one shore to the next. Sheer magic. And another time, snorkeling with others in that general area and being met with three dolphins heads down feeding in the reeds below. I noticed the glowing faces of other snorkelers around me. We were in love.

 

And so I am sorting, throwing away, remembering and uncovering layers upon layers of stories: archaeological finds of my own history and that of my parents, for when I came here it was just a couple of years after my very old father died and I didn’t do much in the way of sorting, as I should’ve done then, but packed up stuff that I have never even glanced at. All this reminds me of a cartoon I once saw of an old man showing his son a garage packed with stuff, saying to him, “Remember, Bill, when I die, all this is yours.” Thanks Dad (not).

 

We accumulate stuff, material and just memories – all of which becomes a not always welcome part of our daily lives. Quite a lot of it, though, is unnecessary and sometimes detrimental to our well being.

 

Stuff decay and memories fade, for sure, but far too much lingers, loiters around for millennia. The world is drowning in it, the material and the ephemeral but mind grabbing dream world. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has much to say about this, ghosts and demons as well as very attractive angels. As much as the very lovely grabs us, so does the horrible and intoxicating nastiness of abuse and other poisons that damage the soul. So, the choices we make concerning them really matters. We can release, and we can help restore a good life for ourselves and others through an act of giving, but what we retain we need to have mindfully, with awareness. I believe my work in this place, and wherever I am, serves this purpose: of participating in the restoration of  equilibrium through awareness and shared connections. 

 

I will continue to offer my work online and face-to-face here and in Perth. Obviously I can’t be in two places at once, but those wanting counselling, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy and/or clinical supervision can contact me and we’ll do our work together online. Until I leave, I’ll also be available for face-to-face sessions.

 

This is probably not the final article, but I do wish to say here how grateful I am to have had a platform for exploring the processes and spaces between us in the therapeutic relationship in the richness of life in this fertile land, as well as meeting some pretty wonderful people. Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tabula rasa, it isn’t by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 September 2022

 

I’ve hired a painter to do the railings, eaves, front door frame, windowsills, and the like in colorbond classic cream. The door frame to the glorious red front door had been a Chinese green, but now I’m having to subdue my exuberance a little. The plan is to sell my house and move elsewhere, and so I’m following the painter’s advice: provide more of a blank slate, a tabula rasa, for potential buyers.

 

The whole notion of a tabula rasa goes against my grain, aesthetically as well as theoretically. Those who know me know I love colour and beige and grey just doesn’t do it. Classic cream, I’m discovering, as more surfaces are painted, is bringing a lovely sunshine to the place. The house has, after all, violet-blue posts and a deep red roof and a wall cladding of soft golden ochre. She won’t be losing her personality getting classic cream railings.

 

When I was a child my father would consult me as to what colours to paint the doors of the family house, or the family car, or anything else that needed colour. I loved light green (still do), and so we travelled around in a couple of light green cars over the years (my father clearly liked the colour too). For the exterior doors of the house that my architect father designed, I chose red for the front door, green for my room, yellow, blue and white for the other doors. It looked like a Miro painting.

 

My trip to China in 1998 saturated my colour passion even further. How incredible were those archways and porticos of temples in their reds, blues, yellows and greens, dappled in the autumn leaves of November. How very un-beige was that experience.

 

I’m not made for the idea of the blank slate, and I certainly know that the art of psychotherapy cannot operate from such a bland stance. A person comes for their first (middle and last and every session in between) filled with their uniqueness of life, their palette of intensity and lightness and darkness and different shades of being. And yet, some branches of psychotherapeutic thought persist with the idea that we are born as blank slates that fill with novel learned and perceived post-natal stuff.

 

We are already shaped physiologically and emotionally (and thus style and possibly contents of thoughts) by maternal stress levels, our mother’s consumption of alcohol and drugs, her experiences of economic and cultural pressures, and other environmental influences all contribute to how we are when we are born, and often, how we are throughout our life.

 

Too much alcohol consumption affects  pre-natal growth, such that offspring can be born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder causes brain damage and growth problems. The child also craves alcohol. The effects of FASD last throughout life. The problems change as the child grows up. Behaviour and mood problems such as alcohol and drug abuse, depression, psychosis and aggressive behaviour may develop in the teenage years. The problems vary from child to child, but defects are not reversible.  And then there’s Neonatal abstinence syndrome which is what happens when fetuses are exposed to drugs (opiates, mostly) in the womb before birth. Babies can then go through drug withdrawal after birth. Prenatal stress can increase the development of depression and anxiety in babies, that may persist throughout life.

 

On the positive side, newborn babies can remember melodies played to them while they were in the womb, according to some research. There’s also that rather mysterious thing of reincarnation: some children, it seems, are born with knowledges of other lives. Who really knows the veracity of these things, but, in some parts of the world, this is idea is built deeply into the psyche of the people.

 

There is no tabula rasa, we are all part of the rich abundance of human experience and that everything we engage in remains present in the broader field of lives. Same goes for houses. Whatever others make of my house, some of my presence remains. And that’s rather fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Snowdrop by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 August 2022

 

     One of my favourite plants is the snowdrop. It spends most of the year as nothing more than a small swollen bulb underneath the dark earth. Time moves on, day to night to day… seasons change from hot to cooler to cold, rains come and go and come again, and nothing much seems to happen around that patch of ground. Where did I plant the snowdrop bulb again?

 

     Life goes on, new decisions are arrived at, new choices made, old stuff is left behind, new plans initiated. Change is constantly with us: some we fear, some welcomed, some just thrust upon us and we are forced into making new choices.

 

     Why, when transformation is happening within us/ for us, do we try and hold it back, to contain it, to try and continue the same old, same old? Why, so often, are we just afraid of change?  Why do we attempt to hold back the inner juices of inevitable shift in our being?

 

     The little bulb lying silently underneath the dark earth follows its own apparent inchoate primordial process, doing its own thing: growing roots, and preparing an upward thrust through granules of soil out to the sky beyond; much of which we don’t see until little green leaves appear.

 

     Are we actually any different? Does change in our own life go unnoticed until we find ourselves seemingly suddenly facing unfamiliar new things? Is meeting the sky unfamiliar to the little bulbed one, or is this new stage already known in the fabric of the cells of its being, in its memory of existence itself?

 

     My feeling is that we, like the little plant, have a deep knowing of the nature of transformation and a deep reverence for it. The stuff of religious ideas is emergent from it. The Christ rising from the dead, the miracles of lamas who transmogrify into rainbows, the mysteries of manifestations are all implicit in our ordinary processes of change.

 

     What then, the fear? Much of our lives is spent in trying to hold still the unstoppable. Do we not have faith in natural processes? In the Tao of life?

 

     I like to watch the making of sand mandalas by Tibetan Buddhist monks. Utmost attention is put to each grain of sand rubbed down by vibrations to the patterns forming below. The mandalas are of heavenly architectural buildings representing the dimensions of ourselves. When the “buildings” are made, they are sung over, and then scraped up into a vase and walked down to a river or the sea to be scattered to the beyond. Each act is the letting go of any idea of holding to the unchanged, for all is change, all is flux.

 

     There is something very beautiful in change. The little plant, now growing strongly, forms buds and then, in the miracle of silence, exquisite white flowers come forth: white blossoms with spots of green and a faint perfume. It is a pretty flower, the snowdrop, but so are we as revelations of beings in the process of becoming.

 

     Let’s not be frightened of change. We cannot control every aspect of our lives, and neither is there any benefit in attempting to do so. We can simply acknowledge that the changes that we become aware of have been happening anyway outside our consciousness. It is implicit in the nature of being itself. We cannot control the essence of life because it pulses through us. We are like snowdrop bulbs making flowers in the making of new futures.

 

Being Careful What One Says in Therapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

July 2022

 

 

I’ve always thought a really good conferences paper would be to present an examination of what not to say in the psychotherapeutic session.  You can really ruin a perfectly good hour by careless talk, and other dodgy contributions. You need to be mindful of your responsibility to prepare the client to re-enter the ordinary world as well as nurture their ongoing healing beyond the hourly session. This means gently disengaging them from the thickness, as it were, of any emotionally charged material through conversation about everyday things. I might, thus, talk about how beautiful the sun feels after really cold, chilly days, or something like that.

 

The therapeutic hour has a rich density about it. It is bounded by a greeting at the beginning to a see you next session at the end. In between, though, there is a contained conversation that is therapeutic and driven by the therapeutic capacity to hold the space safely, with confidentiality. It is, as I’ve said, thick and rich, for it is quite unlike any other conversation any of us will have out in the rest of the world.

 

Erving Polster wrote a significant book that, in one flash several years ago, gave me an understanding of therapy that I really didn’t have before. His book, From the Radical Centre, The Heart of Gestalt Therapy (2000), had encaptulated, in one sentence something that I’d only intuited, but not articulated. He wrote, in so many words, that therapy is the space between a deep hypnotic trance and a light hypnotic trance and that the continuation of the therapeutic work needs to not only nurture what is learned in that rich space, but not damage it. This accelerated my understanding enormously and, as an offshoot, encouraged me to do a Diploma of Clinical Hypnotherapy on top of my existing Master of Counselling degree. It brought a mindfulness to the doing of therapy and thus a more careful consideration about the words (and actions) I use before, during and around the point of concluding a session. It also delivered greater thoughtfulness about what therapy actually is, something that I continue to mull on umpteen years later.

 

How we conduct ourselves as therapists really matters. In this article I am focussing on the words we speak, but our actions can damage this relationship.  Talking about oneself too much (a little is therapeutically useful), boundary violations (for example, sexual advances, unnecessary touching, and associated invasive speech), and just plain thoughtless chatter, all have the capacity to absolutely destroy the therapeutic relationship. Right conduct is essential for the containment of the therapeutic experience and a sense that what is learned in that session may be carried on beyond the hour to the rest of the client’s life.

 

So, what words might one sensibly not say?  Direct reference to a presenting problem right at the end of the session when in the process of saying goodbye is unhelpful: not least in bringing the client’s attention again to the thing that they are fighting against, making it seductively more attractive. We all know how thoughts about the thing we are trying to give up become like sirens singing to sailors: come hither and taste the forbidden potion. I remember doing periods of fasting and having difficulty because I was preoccupied with the idea of fasting. Abstinence became an obstacle rather than an absence.

 

“I guess you won’t want to smoke/drink/play the pokies, doubt yourself anymore,” puts to mind a focus on the thing that you don’t want your mind thinking about. The less one sys about the presenting problem the better right at the end of a session.

 

What needs to happen here is a gentle re-introduction to ordinary life, and so I talk about such things as  the weather, or suggest my client has a good cup of something enjoyable,  a hot fragrant bath, a wander around a garden, a visit with friends, or settle down with a good book. The absence of focus on the thing troubling them is the whole point. Healing happens at an unconscious level from the therapeutic work and beyond.

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

 

     It is timely to write about trauma. After all, we have experienced horrendous floods this year and fires three years prior and many people suffered directly and indirectly the effects of these. On social media many were saying that everybody affected have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It needs to be said right here, that this isn’t true. Not all who went through these experiences are affected in this way.

     Our responses to threat are primarily instinctive and biological, and secondarily psychological and cognitive. We go into fight, flight, and freeze mode, common to all mammals. First, we enter the arousal cycle. Our muscles tense, as we identify the source of possible danger. Then we enter the mobilization stage where  our bodies begin to produce adrenaline and cortisol, the two primary chemicals that energize us to fight or flee. In the third stage, we discharge this energy by completing the appropriate defensive actions (fighting or fleeing). The fourth and final stage happens when the nervous system, no longer aroused, returns to a state of equilibrium. If we are overwhelmed by the threat and are unable to fight or flee, we instinctively employ the third action plan, the "freezing response”. Here we are in a dissociative state where our minds seem to separate from our body, but we are still highly aroused, setting the stage for high anxiety which may continue for awhile.

     I note here that PTSD is identified as the ongoing experience of trauma lasting more than three months. Less than three months, and this trauma response is identified as Acute Stress Disorder (ASD).  Not all experiences of stressful events become disorders (a very important point here). 

 

     According to the DSM-IV (a bible of psychiatric diagnoses), for trauma disorder to be diagnosed, the person must experience at least one of five cluster symptoms: recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections, nightmares, flashbacks, intense psychological distress in response to memories or reminders of the trauma, and physiological arousal cued by memories or reminders of the trauma);  three or more of seven  symptoms of persistent avoidance (of memories or reminders of the trauma) and emotional numbing (dissociative or psychogenic amnesia for important parts of the trauma, loss of interest in important activities, feelings of detachment or estrangement from others, restricted range of affect, and a sense of a foreshortened future); and two or more symptoms of increased arousal (sleep difficulties, irritability or outbursts of anger, concentration difficulties, hypervigilance, and an exaggerated startle response).

 

     PTSD doesn’t necessarily occur after ASD and ASD doesn’t necessarily occur after a stress event. Why is this so?  Length of duration may be a consideration, as frequency could be also, but the data is inconclusive. The anxiety response is not the same across all potentially traumatic events. Some events, such as random rape, are transient, while domestic abuse is usually repeated. Hand to hand combat can be transient, but can be repeated many times. Floods and their ongoing destruction go on for a long time, but the time factor isn’t necessarily sufficient to bring on an ongoing trauma response. Other things are at work, and we still really don’t understand everything about this stress response. Some people are more resilient than others, some have better networks and can express their feelings more openly, perhaps.

 

     Several studies have found that low cortisol levels in the acute aftermath of the stressful event and an elevated resting heart rate shortly afterwards tend to result in a stronger and more sustained stress reaction, which is hypothesized to contribute to the development of PTSD. Also an extensive prior history of psychiatric problems and/or substance abuse may make  a person  particularly vulnerable to the development of PTSD. Prior traumatic history also contributes to the development of a stress disorder.

 

     So how we live our life now matters in terms of how we respond to stressful events. Now is the time to communicate and connect with others and learn to manage our issues without abusing alcohol and drugs. Working through our anxieties and concerns through counselling is really useful in preventing the development of the debilitating conditions of ASD and PTSD because they are not inevitable. Therapy for existing trauma really does matter.

 

 

 

 

 

Caring for Ourselves by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

May 2022

 

     Suddenly I discover that I've nearly missed the copy deadline for the May issue of the Nimbin Good Times newspaper. Suddenly I realize that the month of April is coming to an end. What a very strange time this has been.  I went to Perth for a fortnight's holiday and lots of lovely snorkeling in the Indian Ocean and actually missed my flight home, thinking my flight was scheduled for Saturday when it was meant to be Friday. I, for the first time in my life, had to rebook a flight. Yikes! I flew on Sunday night, and arrived on the Gold Coast on Monday morning and resumed working on Tuesday.

 

     I'd gone to Perth for a much needed break. It had been a whole year since my last one and, frankly, I was exhausted. The floods here in Lismore broke my heart. True, I was not directly affected, living and working as I do in the hills above the cbd, but some people lost their houses and their businesses and that affected me because of my caring of them.

 

     I heard the calling for counsellors, but I knew I was not in any fit state to offer my assistance beyond what I was already doing. I continued, after all, seeing my clients between the floods and afterwards. I just knew there wasn't more in the tank, as it were. In aircraft problems, we are told to attend to our own oxygen needs before attending to those people around us. We cannot help anybody if we are starved of oxygen. This is true for those of us in the helping professions. We cannot help others unless we are ourselves are ok. There is nothing intrinsically selfish here. We all matter.

 

     I remember seeing a well trained naturopath some years ago who didn't feel worthy enough to work in her field. She cared, as she said, too much for her potential clients and not enough for herself. I only did one session with her, which was all that was needed. We did a powerful Tibetan meditation called Tonglen together. This is a meditation for loving compassion towards others and self. The central message is that all of us matter, all of us. There is no one excluded in this act of compassion. Tonglen consists of breathing in universal love and breathing out this love for self and other.  I was delighted to find that this client went on to open a very successful clinical practice. She has since moved away from the district.

 

     We cannot work beyond our capacities. There is only just so much that we can offer others before our inner resources are exhausted. Kindness to self means we can continue to offer kindness to others. Now this doesn't mean too much self indulgence. We do need to balance our own needs with needs of others. We do need to be honest to self and others, and self reflective. If someone is not honest with us, we need to speak up, but in a manner that isn't designed to hurt them. We need, I think, to understand our own motivations in our communications with others. Again, the Tibetan meditation is useful here. We, individually, are within the human community. Our actions need to be clear and non-manipulative. We cannot force our help upon others, and neither should we force our agendas on others. Self knowledge is integral to self care, I'm suggesting. Such  knowledge is incremental throughout life. We learn about ourselves as we learn about others and each lesson learned is subject to change over time.

 

     The beauty of counselling and psychotherapy is that we come to know our strengths and our limits to the expression of these strengths and thereby find ways to nurture ourselves in environments that bring us joy and healing. I have a passion, as many people know, for swimming and snorkeling in the sea. My perfect holiday is doing just this. I forgot the date of my flight home because I was busy gliding through turquoise waters, but I'm here now, and ready to listen to anyone wanting to talk.  

 

 

Kintsugi by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD\

 

April 2022

 

 

Kintsugi, or Kintsukuroi, is an old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold or other metals so that the reconnected ceramic pieces celebrate the breaking, repairing and transformative process of becoming something even more beautiful. The name kintsugi means “golden joinery” and the healing in the gleams of gold, if I may put it this way, emphasizes the fractures instead of hiding them.

That which was broken has the possibility of becoming something beautiful, but only if we do not try to conceal our anguish. Our lives are continually changing, continually being broken and repaired. We tend to want to dump everything of our lives when dramatic changes are thrust upon us, which is understandable, but the saving of the pieces of our lives as well as the memories and the instances of delight of the vessels that contained us before the devastation help the rebuilding, the re-making of us.

As I’ve said. above, that which was broken has the capacity of becoming something beautiful, but only if we do not try to conceal our anguish. It is perfectly understandable that we want to press on and rebuild our lives as if nothing was broken. Try as we might, however, the pain remains until it is literally visited and transformed.

Compare the repair of broken pottery with invisible superglue, where the vessel looks sort of ok, but nevertheless retains at a hairline level evidence of a break, with the outright golden repair of metal in the joins between ceramic pieces. The first declares itself as a shadow of its former past, while the other says, effectively, “Here I am, I’ve experienced damage in my life, but now I am even more extraordinary than before. I am empowered by my experiences and I can participate in the lives of others, and myself, with deeper authenticity.”

This metaphor of healing has huge implications for us in the healing professions. Our knowing of our own pain  can become the tool of our empathic capacity to enter in the healing of others. If we do not acknowledge our own pain, our injury, but pretend to know everything there is about trauma and healing, we, paradoxically, cannot actually heal. A cognitive understanding of emotional injury really is no substitute for the participation in one’s own therapeutic healing. Get therapy, if you feel you need it.

Post-traumatic stress injury isn’t inevitable after dramatic and life-altering events, like the recent devastating floods in northern NSW and Queensland. After going through a traumatic event, it’s natural to experience some emotional repercussions. Anxiety, fearfulness, irritability, and numbness are all normal feelings that may arise in the wake of a trauma, but in most cases, these feelings will subside as time goes on.  I note here, that fear and stress are vital to a person’s safety as they trigger physiological “fight-or-flight” responses that help us be protected from harm.

For those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, these symptoms of anxiety, fearfulness, irritability, and numbness persist, and sometimes intensify over a two, or more, month period. A characteristic of PTSD are avoidant behaviours, such as an endeavour to avoid talking about the traumatic event, or to stay away from places or things that remind them of the incident, but this strategy backfires. It’s like trying to apply superglue to the broken pieces, in an endeavour to hide from feeling frazzled, while feeling even more anxious than before. Talking with someone in a safe, confidential environment is a useful step in the healing of the person.

In the therapeutic supportive conversation, insights into positives – like, for instance, ordinary people helping one another, people saving animals and animals saving us, even just a flower floating by, or noticing the subtle shifts in interests in special activities, like music, gardening, painting – can be part of the gold melding the broken bits into something new.

Kintsugi is a playful art, and art in the making of something new from the broken old. It is, literally, golden joinery, golden healing.

 

 

Remembering and Creating Memories by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

March 2022

 

     A friend of mine remembers when he was a little child, his mother talking about the croaking frog they were hearing that morning and then being taken outside to look at it. It was huge, gigantic, massive, the size of a small elephant.

 

     I remember a Zeppelin airship flying over our house, even though they ceased to fly decades before I was born and they didn’t fly in Australia at all.

 

     Someone I know has an apparent memory of having sex with his mother. Maybe this actually happened, or maybe it didn’t. Gathering the evidence around such a memory requires much more than relying on a memory reconstruction. It requires close examination of the behaviour of actual people and circumstances and possible situations. Again, maybe it happened, but maybe it didn’t. What is important here is knowing that memory is not to be relied upon as a complete and authentic record of past possible events.

 

     Memory is not a useful tool for determining actual history and so any technique for digging out possible memories can’t be relied upon as the sole means of determining truth – which is why I refuse to pretend to do any so called repressed memory work using hypnosis. I do not want to participate in the making of  false memories. It is significant that hypnosis came into disrepute over this very thing. Once upon a time hypnosis was used to “prove” the authenticity of an event and used in a court of law as evidence. This was until sufficient research had been done to discredit the supposed revelation of repressed memories through this method, unfortunately dragging down with it, the whole reputation of hypnosis as useful adjunct in psychotherapy. Very fortunately, hypnotherapy is returning to being recognized as useful in psychotherapy for other purposes, and not as an excavator of the past.

 

     We are creating memories all the time in an attempt to make sense of our life. Memories, as I’ve said already, are not necessarily a record of past situations. Sometimes they are a way to explain things that are poorly comprehended in the first place. A little child sees things, as all little beings do, from a small person’s perspective. They are little in a big world. Grasping at meaning from a perspective that is really limited requires piecing together bits of information from around them. Some of these bits of information could be things half heard and barely understood (like the story of the frog), things seen in books and on screen, some could come from other experiences, and so on. My apparent Zeppelin sighting I realize now came from a book on dirigibles and balloons that my father used to read to us melded into recurring dreams I had and reconstituted as an actual event. The situation of being little, of course, is actually true for all of us as we endeavour to negotiate the complexities of the vast world we live in. At least, though, we adults are generally better able to sort out what is probable and what isn’t – although maybe I’m too optimistic here, given the extraordinary rise in conspiracy theories.

 

     The less information we have, the less we have to test the authenticity of something and the more likely we are to incorporate the flimsily known into what we think we know, creating a world view replete with false memories. This is essentially the way cults operate: the known world is deliberately limited to a tight and restrictive community. Before long, the most vulnerable among the group start remembering abuses that may, or may not, have actually occurred and so cling to the group more and more.

 

     Everything needs to be tested. Nothing should be believed simply because someone has said if you remember it, that it happened. Maybe it did; maybe it didn’t. A memory can be changed, rethought, examined, played with, measured with the feeling status of things, but not relied upon to be necessarily a strict re-membering (re-putting together) of the past. Gather as much information you can and test your memory. In the end, though, maybe your reconstruction is real, but maybe it isn’t.

Opposition in Psychotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

February 2022

 

 

     Sometimes, not often, a person comes for therapy who is uninterested in allowing me to do my job. They have a fixed idea about what I should be doing. They tell me they don’t want to share their history; they just want me to “fix” what’s troubling them. I tell them that I can’t possibly know what to do from a description of their symptoms and nothing else; I need to have a fuller  sense of where they’ve come from and something of their current life, ideas, things that make them happy, as well as points of distress. Psychotherapy isn’t like prescribing a pill for a condition. Taking a careful and thorough history really matters.

 

     Psychotherapy is a collaborative enterprise. It isn’t me doing stuff to you; it is me listening and guiding you to another way of looking at the issues that are causing difficulties, and working with you so that life is easier for you.

 

     As I’ve said, sometimes, very rarely, a person comes for therapy but from the outset doesn’t want to tell me anything about themselves. I remember when I was learning my art, I had a client that when I said I’m interested in understanding her, she said, “I don’t want you to know anything about me.” What was I supposed to do with her, and why was she there?

 

     Another person reported irritation with me when asked about her past. She couldn’t see a purpose in my questions. For her, my investigation didn’t fulfill her objectives. I replied, they fulfilled mine. I was the one trying to understand  her. She may well have felt that her resistance to my inquiries was realistic, but really it wasn’t. There was more: she missed sessions and she was late paying my fee. I realized there was a mismatch at work and we needed to drop the whole thing. Not everyone can work together. It’s also probable that she wasn’t ready to actually do psychotherapy at all.  Everything has a season, as they say.

 

     It is important for therapy that a strong working alliance is developed and if the client resents the therapeutic strategy taken by the therapist, then no alliance can actually develop.

     Note here, that I prefer not to use the word ‘resistance’. The reason for this is that that term developed out of Freudian psychoanalysis where  power relations between therapist and client are intrinsic to that purpose of therapy. Psychological resistance is seen by psychoanalysts as a case of clients clinging to their disease at an unconscious level in defence against the parent-therapist (using the concept of transference as what is seen to go on between therapist and client). That idea, I think, is flawed and suggests the therapist always knows what is going on, and the client is always just oblivious. Therapy, as far as I and many others see it, is much more horizontal than that hierarchical model. We are two people working together, both relatively capable of choice making.

 

     Opposition in therapy may not be aimed at a disagreement concerning the therapeutic strategy adopted by the psychotherapist. Sometimes it arises from an opposition to specific techniques used in session, or non-compliance with agreed exercises (for instance, collecting dreams, keeping a journal, or some other homework) or a dislike of words or phrases used by the therapist, or resistant body language, or repeated non-attendance at planned sessions. Sometimes it manifests in other ways. A client might not want to talk about certain things and will change the subject repeatedly when those subjects come up. Sometimes their objections manifest in not paying the session fee, or delaying it for longer than is polite. All these need to be properly addressed by the therapist and client, and not left to insidiously rupture the therapeutic alliance. When they are effectively addressed by both psychotherapist and client, then two things can happen: a strengthening of the therapeutic relationship resulting in an intrinsic healing, or total rupture.  Sometimes total rupture is the only way, but that depends on the choices we make. It’s ideal that both parties agree to what happens next, as good communication is essential in an effective therapeutic transaction.