Giving is taking and taking is giving by Dr Elizabeth McCardell

 

 October 2021

     I very much like the Tibetan meditation of tonglen, which is literally, "giving and taking" or "sending and receiving". It beautifully sums up a gift where the act of giving is the same as the act of receiving, and the act of receiving is the same as the act of giving. There is no difference. Nothing is left out.

      There is nothing worse than those who see the giving of gifts as something obligatory, or those who can’t receive a love-filled gift. I’ve certainly known people like these. I have memories of standing around at Christmas parties where gifts were presented and immediately set aside by certain people. And also those who complain about having to buy gifts for others, seeing the whole process as something somewhat tiresome. In contrast, there are those who take absolute delight in making gifts and giving something chosen because they are delighted by it, as well as delighting in the very process of giving. In the case of the latter, the very act of giving is felt as continuous with receiving so that giving and receiving are the same process, the same transaction of love.

      It got me thinking about how not having a freely given gift received with an open heart feels on an ongoing basis and the idea of suffering moral injury came to mind. A bit extreme, maybe. I note here that moral injury refers to an injury to a person’s moral conscience and values resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression, which produces a profound sense of emotional guilt and shame and sometimes also a sense of betrayal and anger. Not receiving a gift freely given and not giving a gift in a spirit of love somehow gets felt like betrayal. Perhaps I’m conflating too much here, but maybe I’m not. I suspect that this all relates to attachment theory. Attachment theory is a theory about the evolutionary, ethological (where our behaviour is part of our biology) and psychological relationships between people. Such a theory holds that without a good relationship with caregivers, the infant has difficulty growing up as a social being. Give and receiving is integral to the healthy development of a human being. If there is just giving grudgingly and taking, without much interest in the other person, the process of reception is broken and there is little compassionate connection between people. For a little child, this feels like abandonment.

     A child can be given hundreds of presents (presented with stuff, but not given with love), but with little interest in what that child actually wants. The child is treated like a stranger, some generic creature disconnected to anybody. How desperately sad this is. His self worth isn’t recognized by those important others and, quite likely, will come to not be recognized by himself in time. There are grave consequences to this. A person can go through life feeling like he cannot achieve much; like all he can hope for is to function, but not enjoy very much of life.

      I am reminded of a client I had several years ago. She was a fully trained healer,  but didn’t feel she was good enough to work in her field, even though her teachers said her work was very good.  In other words, there was a discrepancy between how she perceived herself and how others perceived her. My aim was to allow her to experience herself in the act of giving through her work as the same as how others experienced her work on themselves. Giving is receiving and receiving is giving in that time of connection and this integral to good healing practices.

      I taught her the principles of tonglen, where her inbreath was breathing in the light of compassion (a visualization exercise), and her outbreath was breathing this compassion to self and others, so that the breath itself gathered herself and others into a single act of giving and receiving. In time, such a practice becomes second nature where self worth is experienced as compassion to self and others. My client, by the way, went on to open her practice and worked successfully in her chosen profession.

             

 

Chiron, Wounded Healer

January 2018

Chiron, Wounded Healer by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

     Once upon a mythic time, a long time ago, a little immortal centaur with a horse’s head and a male human body was born. His mother was the nymph Philyra and his father Kronos (the half brother of Zeus). His mother took one look at the infant and rejected him. This little boy, named Chiron, was taken and cared for and educated by Apollo and Artemis and he grew up wise and with psychic vision. When he was much older, he was wounded by an arrow dipped in the poison of a hydra fired by Herakles. This wound would not heal and gave him tremendous and inescapable pain. With such came deep compassion for others and healing powers, as well as an exquisite capacity to teach. His pain was so excruciating that Zeus took away his immortality and made him a star in the constellation Sagittarius or Centaurus.

     Chiron is known as the wounded healer. I write of him because he experienced rejection and injury and yet became is a fine model for healers. Many of us in the healing professions know full well that our own experience of pain gives us the ability to sit, in focused awareness, with the troubles of others and begin a collaborative process of healing.

     We are relational beings that contribute to how we negotiate the greater world and understand ourselves.  How we do this originates in our very first relationships and continues throughout life. What was writ in early childhood, though, does not make us who we are now, unless all we have known is the same kind of thing. Depending on the other later experiences and whether those undo the damage of early infant rejection (as with Chiron), we can generally move on and find some happiness elsewhere.  Sometimes however, the old relational patterns are replicated over and over and psychotherapy then becomes a very useful tool in breaking this iterative pattern.

     It shouldn’t be thought that iterative patterns of internalized belief systems are all negative. In fact, the person with such patterns have learned capacities for dealing with issues that show rather amazing strengths, albeit often out of proportion to the situations at hand. The human organism knows its vulnerabilities and seeks to protect them. It’s when such protective mechanisms prevent interactions that are nourishing. All of us have unspoken self-protective strategies that guide our experience within relationships, so therapy isn’t about destroying those strategies, but loosening our dependence on them as well as introducing new strategies that free up our life experiences in healthier ways.

     Patterns of relationships evolve from the primary relationship of infant and primary care giver, as noted above. These are called attachment styles.

      The secure bond between caregiver and child is emotionally charged: there is eye contact, touching, proximal seeking, vocalizations (and later linguistic exchange), etc along with an increasing courage and capacity for the child to explore their environment. So emotional closeness is paradoxically associated with a growing independence and capacity for curiosity, exploring, experimenting, testing other interests and developing self reliance and independence.

     How a person relates is intergenerational, unless some intervention has occurred. Lack of emotional closeness tends to be passed on from generation to generation. It is significant fact that many of my patients come because of lack of a secure sense they experienced in their family of origin. A quick exploration usually shows that this experience was shared down the generations. The wars also contributed to lack of any sense of safety.

     Attachment is a basic human process for a close and intimate relationship between infants and their caregivers. Without  a secure base,  where the primary caregiver  is always anxious, the child tends to develop problems with relating to other people, lack of confidence and distrust.  This is not writ in stone and can be transformed and when transformed can become the tools for budding healers and teachers, as the archetype of Chiron shows us. The work of self awareness, however, is, I believe, necessary for the development of such skills and thus I recommend psychotherapy for healers as well as those we heal.

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.