“What we perceive depends on how we direct our attention.” (Milton Erickson) by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2019

     Perception is an interesting thing. Most of the time we see our world as we have become accustomed to seeing it. This is generally useful as it means we are not having to work hard at living life, but can assume a lot of things and then get on with making sense of the novel. 

     Our responses to what we perceive can largely become part of a well-oiled machine, which is not to say that this is necessarily good. In families, old patterns of behaviour in interactions between members and beyond that to interactions with other people who simply remind us of a family member, can be practically set in stone in a destructive manner. For example, a little girl is bossed around by her older sister who has been given the care of the younger one because mother is ill. The older sister has always been angry at having to be “mother” to her sister and forced, more or less, to give up her own childhood. The younger one doesn’t really know any difference. Mum is sort of there, but not as a comforter when she is hurt. “Mother-sister” is unreliable (she’s angry, after all), but who else is there? Father works away, and there is no other family nearby, and so the little one has to depend on this person who feels good/not good. When she grows up, she meets a man who is good and not good. He is familiar, but still not quite known. He behaves unpredictably and erratically, he is there and then he disappears and returns to surprise her, and then goes, and then comes.  Every time the woman meets with her older sister, she feels attacked and sort of depleted. She notices that afterward seeing her sister she eats a lot of sweets even though she isn’t hungry and even though she is now pre-diabetic. She attends psychotherapy sessions and starts to notice the patterns of behaviour in her own life as well as that in the man she’s with. She breaks up with him and at the same time, builds an understanding her sister more. She starts to notice that as her perceptions of that woman’s behaviour change, so are her reactions changing. She doesn’t feel the same imploded feelings so much and doesn’t consume massive amount of  ice cream in the way she used to.

     The process of psychotherapy interrupts not only tired old modes of interaction that are not working, but brings insights that create an ongoing capacity to change how we respond to others in the world. This, though, doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. As anyone who has experienced how it is to stop reacting as one has traditionally done within families and other groups, one’s non-reactions disturb the machinery of the family system and certain others can become belligerent and nasty. My suggestion when such things happen is to walk away and leave the antagonist to fight their own shadows. I’m reminded of the martial artist who, when the opponent lunges aggressively at them, simply steps aside. The opponent topples over. Neat.

     In time, the perceptions of other people in response to us change as we change and how they behave towards us changes too. Family and other social systems are not immutable, but fluid and flexible. What once was, doesn’t have to be forever. Our perceptions change according to how we direct our attention, and that changes practically everything.

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.