Sending Love Songs for Connection by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., Ph

August 2019

     We all walk in the memory footsteps of those who came before us. In a family, a child is born from a relationship that may or may not have been loving, from parents who may or may not have known love from their parents – perhaps through war or separation – but who may, perhaps, have sought some love from their newborn. The need is reciprocal. There has been, somewhere, a deep desire for connection and if it hasn’t been met, we continue seeking it. This is true in families and the greater community.

     Connection is the medium through which we are held, nurtured, fed and, hopefully nourished from the time of our birth in all that we are. Without it, we suffer, and suffer enormously throughout life.

    The best connection is a sustained one so that when we as little children prepare to explore the greater world, we know that we can return whenever we like. This connection confirms to us that we are free to return to our caregiver’s arms or go off and play somewhere. When connection is intermittent, or worse, absent, leaving is hard and returning can be even harder. A child who never quite knows if their caregiver will be there or not, can never quite feel safe and secure with their caregivers, other people, or even, themselves. A child who feels unsafe is an anxious one; one who is hungry for sustained connection. This is true for a child and for all of us. Being met, greeted, hugged, listened to, played with, accepted are the requirements of us social animals throughout our lives.

     Scared children grow up without any sustained sense of security and safety and  they will tend to continue to seek security somehow, and can become addicted to it.  Some turn to alcohol, glue and petrol sniffing, some turn to other drugs and/or sex that help them forget their pain, some have serial relationships with other people who offer them unsafe sanctuary (though quite often with a price), some pursue power and money as ends in themselves, some clamber after danger for the thrill of it all and the satisfaction of a post-endorphin fix, and some reject other people entirely – going off on their own because seeking connection with others is just far too hard.

     We are social beings and, without other members of a group that we can connect to, we struggle.

     Johann Hari, a journalist who writes about mental health issues and addiction, has proposed that instead of asking those with addictions, “What’s wrong with you?” instead  ask, “What happened to you,” to open up where the pain has stemmed from, how it is being felt, who “missed” you when you needed them and who is here who can be with you now. It’s in here that healing can at least begin to happen, and it is not just their healing that will happen, but ours as well. We are all affected by an act of outcasting someone else. The sickness of exclusion damages all of us. We begin dividing the human race into us and them and refuse to listen to other experiences of being, becoming instead paranoid and selfish.

     When we ask “What’s wrong with you?” we put the blame on the individual and we treat them as though they are bad, crazy or just odd. Effectively we excommunicate them from the safety and security of our communities, which is exactly the act that made them seek their addictive behaviours in the first place. Hari puts it beautifully, 'For 100 years now, we have been singing war songs about people with addiction problems...We should've been singing love songs to them all along.' Love songs include and reconnects us in acts of caring communication and connection. Let’s  ask, “What happened to you?” and celebrating the homecoming, with music.

Continuing to Heal by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

July 2012 

 

     In the bad old days, it was thought the brain grew during childhood, stopped changing in any way, then began a process of decaying, declining, and dementia-fying. In those days the brain was viewed as a bit of  beautiful meat, essentially, and incapable of forming new neural pathways. The current sport of brain gym exercises was not thought useful, even relevant. You were born with an x amount of intelligence and you could be educated, but you couldn’t change your destiny – so it was thought. If you got schizophrenia, you got something that damaged your brain and a damaged brain is what you had. If you had obsessive compulsive disorder, you had ocd. That was it. If you got post traumatic stress disorder, you could be treated with medication, but that was it. Counselling, the talking cure, was thought not to be effective in the treatment of these conditions, except for offering care and support.

     That old model of an inflexible brain has gone by the wayside. We are now seeing the brain as a plastic organ (plastic in the sense of  fluid,  flexible and changeable, not the plastic of tuppeware!) where grey  matter may shrink or thicken and neural connections are forged, refined or weakened and severed in response to new encounters or habits repeated or activities not practiced. This is a physical process that is expressed physically, functionally, and chemically throughout life.

      Brain or neuro-plasticity, as a way of viewing the brain, excitingly and finally takes account of the whole human being in body, experience, and psychological state, for functionality is seen as not only being a result of brain process but a contributer to brain physiology and its processes, as a reciprocal process.  Each time we learn a new skill, like playing an instrument, or crocheting, or plastering, or enhancing pre-existing skills, like writing, or cooking, or singing, we forge new neural pathways in our brain which changes how we do things and how we experience them, sensorially and in our thoughts, in other aspects of our lives. It is in this two-way process that effective treatments are being found for the supposed intractable conditions described above, and for slowing the rate of dementia. Individuals exercising their brain through puzzles and learning new skills is also extremely valuable. Treatments are now utilizing many of the techniques developed and found useful by psychotherapists and counselors. Techniques we developed from an interest in the interface between lived experience and story telling, as well as more hard-core symptom control.

     Acute trauma counsellors, for instance, often use the method of asking the distressed person to tell and retell, in detail, what happened to them, while sitting warmly and comfortably and supported by the counsellor.  Likewise, when the acute trauma continues to be experienced years after the first event becomes chronic (when the neural pathways in the parts of the brain iteratively repeat the course taken before), the therapist  uses the same method with their client. We ask the client to tell and retell in as much detail as possible what happened to them and what feelings arise in them as they give account of  the original traumatic event. In the process of telling the story (I use this word advisedly for I do not wish to imply a fictional account at all; this is real stuff), and retelling it, an interesting capacity arises: a sense of being a witness to the experience, which – over time – lessens its effects on the psyche and felt experience.

     It is interesting that neuroscientists have recently found that getting a person with post-traumatic stress disorder to write down and retell over and over, the traumatic event, in minute detail, and increasing, in this mindfulness exercise, what they call the impartial spectator effect (the witness) changes brain physiology.  The use of magnetic resonance imaging show a shift from neural pathways used over and over (the post-traumatic stress disorder brain) to vital new activity in the person’s brain. The shift to a capacity to look impartially upon a previous torment frees us physically, emotionally, chemically, and psychologically to experience life entirely differently. All thanks to a plastic brain.

     Healing, real healing from a psychological wound is possible  - at a deeply, neurophysiological level, at a functional level, and at the heart of lived experience.  Little, it appears, is fixed. Fluidity of being, a creativity of being, and an awareness of being, integrally intermingle in the healing that continues.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell