Speaking up in intimate relationships by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 May 2019

     There is a meme doing the rounds at the moment that I think is exactly right particularly where relationships are concerned, that is. It reads, “Be careful what you tolerate, you are teaching people how to treat you.”

     Unless you speak up and say what is bothering you, others will think you agree with them, or at least don’t really care, because otherwise, how would they know.  A lot of gaslighting begins here. The gaslighted tolerates quite a bit of abuse for a variety of reasons including the idea that the abuser is aware, without us telling them, that their actions are having a bad effect on us. The thing is, most of the time they are not aware.

      By repeatedly not speaking up, a person can get really confused by the seeming lack of empathy coming at them from others and in this confusion they can feel a deluge of contradictory responses to them, such that they don’t know themselves anymore. This give a clue to where a person is at emotionally. I see a number of people in this disempowered mindspace who are experiencing interior collapse, without knowing where to start to regain their sense of self. The other person blithely continues this line of unexamined abuse for they don’t have a gauge of the us.

     The belief that others sort of know us without being told is a hang over from early childhood when the child thinks the world revolves around them and that everyone shares the same mindspace as themselves. This is classical magical thinking.  Magical thinking assumes that there is a causal link between one's inner, personal experience and the external physical world, and that other people automatically know what  the child is thinking, hoping for, wishing for. I suspect that a lot of adults harbor some beliefs of this kind. It is, interestingly, in intimate relationships where the magical thinking of childhood tends to reemerge. For it is in such relationships we often expect the other person to know us more than perhaps they do, and when they don’t, we get a shock.

     Magical  thinking is implicit in the idea of romantic love, something writ large in popular culture.  There we have ideas of how it is to be in love, where heart and soul are shared, where there are not two, but one, where there is a sacred unity in love making and where we are destined to be together. I am not saying that this kind of experience doesn’t happen; what I am saying is that such an experience isn’t present all the time, and shouldn’t be.

     Too much gets assumed, consumed, presumed, when we expect a closeness that is unexamined. It is in the unexamined that abuse is free to occur, and often does. It is in the unexamined and unspoken that one or the other of us can assert a control over what they deem suitable or unsuitable for us: clothes they want us to wear, music they don’t want us listening to, members of the family that they expect us to not associate with, whole philosophies of life that they assume we are not interested in.

     A sense of being together is important, but also important is a sense of remaining an individual capable of speaking up when required.  When we, as individuals, speak up we give permission for ourselves to be different people and also allow the other person their uniqueness. They are not us, and we are not them. How nice it is to be recognized and loved for ourselves, and not merely as a projection of our first caregiver (usually our mother). Our adult relationships need to be different from  our parental ones. This differentiation, this separation, is the beginning of the positive state of being caste out of an Edenesque unconsciousness to an individuated self.

     Consciousness requires us to examine and speak of our individual truths and lives.  When we speak from our unique place we define ourselves and we literally shape how others treat us.  And we, in knowing ourselves differently, can speak increasingly with confidence and authenticity.

Being Real

     I was going to title this piece, “The Personal is the Professional” but realized I wanted to go a bit further into the encounter of therapist and client and beyond that to being real throughout work and beyond.

     I cannot sit back, detached, uninvolved, impenetrable, spouting stock phrases, when I work with a client. I am engaged, I feel, I think, I occasionally share; I act ethically and responsibly as I create a space for the client to speak of what they wish to speak about, and yet I am impartial. This genuine regard for the other flows from my own life choices and how I live my life. I seek an economic, intentional, honesty in my life. If I was duplicitous and led a life of wild debauchery while promoting economy, intentional and ethical honesty, I would be at odds with myself and would come across as a fraud, which indeed I would be. I make mistakes, I don’t know some things, I assume stuff every now and again, I have biases, but I work towards presence and realness in the same way as I encourage my clients to explore.

     There is some difference between how I am in work and outside work. Doing psychotherapy requires particular skills to be employed, just like any other work practice. There are, however, some basic themes running through both.

     I have to be engaged, but I have to be impartial. I cannot declare myself powerful and infallible and yet be open to what is said and not said to me (to listen to the quality of silences between). I need to be able to hear the painful accounts of other’s lives, and yet also be relatively impartial and balanced. Being impartial means setting aside my own ideas of how things work and actually listening acutely to how things are for the other person.

     I need to be inventive and appropriate, in order enrich my encounters (as much for me as being with others). The conversations I have with my clients are not like any other ordinary conversation and therapy is more than conversation, anyway. There may be experimentation, journaling, drawing, music making, dream work (which I do a lot of), hypnosis, building, or not, the transference, challenge, etc. Whereas a conversation with friends and/or family depend heavily on partiality and the mutual feelings from a shared past, the therapeutic relationship doesn’t. In my own life, I’m endlessly experimenting with choices and strategies for the best outcome. In this way, how I am in session and outside is very similar.

     I need to be real in who and how I am. Irvin Yalom asserts that the gift a therapist brings is her/his own humanity and this allows deeper and deepening encounters. With this process an intimacy builds that is born from a solid bond of trust. It is in this space that a client’s intimate revelations can be spoken of, felt through and through, cried with, and be responded to by the therapist in an attitude of actual empathy.

     The personal is the professional and the professional is the personal. This is a truism, but there is risk here. The therapist needs to be able to finish at the end of the working day, prepare a meal, relax, exercise, socialize, or whatever, and get on with their own life; in essence to “forget” the other lives shared during the day. To maintain a professional integrity – being true in work with others, requires a right intention for the same in a therapist’s ordinary life. If they are at odds, then, I think, the practitioner is in trouble. This is one very good reason to maintain a practice of regular clinical supervision and peer conversation. The therapeutic work only works when the therapist healthily maintains connections with others outside their work. We’re human, after all.

      Aiming to shoot straight the arrow of integrity, mindfulness and realness through work and beyond suits me, because I like the imagery of the archer and I aim to be an archer of life.

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.