Musing on assumptions. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

   
June 2010

     The other day a friend and I went kayaking on the Wilson River in Lismore. What an amazing place we live near, yet barely know. I was blown away by the tumble of lushness tingling with unexpected flowers; a richness of life practically hidden beneath the bridges that link South Lismore to cbd.  We saw a raft of branches and weed ferrying a little group of ducks downstream. I was reminded of the little rafts ferrying Thai children across rivers to school. 

      Fish were leaping, water birds scurrying, as I, in my kayak skimmed across the perfectly glassy surface, amazed, yet again, how easy it is. This expedition was my first in this part of the world. I regularly took my kayak out on the Swan River near Fremantle in WA close to where I lived until early 2009. Sometimes, and that was the most fun, I kayaked on the ocean.  There, I was sometimes visited by dolphins paralleling my movements as we slipped a wave or two together. Ah, the magic of it all.

     It is mucking in, on, and around water that inspires me. I am a swimmer, snorkler, diver, and kayaker and playing in this way I come to know my own thoughts on things, what matters to me, and how I may achieve what sets my heart on fire.

     So, it was in kayaking in Lismore that I began thinking, yet again, about life, death, the inbetween, and assumptions we make about what’s normal. Fortunately, though, this bit of thinking was short-lived on the water.  Kayaking is for being present with water.   I resumed it over coffee, later.

I’ll start with assumptions. Life, death and the inbetween will have to be written about some other time. It seems to me that when we make assumptions about what’s normal behaviour we are short-circuiting a process that is really much more complex. What is normal is open to dispute. My passion for water play (I can’t call what I do, sport) is distinctly non-normal for women of a certain age who relish rounds of golf. The estimation of what’s normal, in this example, arises from a comparison between preferred activities. Is such a quality of estimation reasonable when deciding what’s normal behaviour in matters of the heart: falling in and out of love, grief, feelings of loss, reactions to trauma, etc.?

     What’s normal?  When two people declare love for each other, yet one does not act in a loving way and the other is grief stricken, is the experience of the latter  non-, or ab-normal? This scenario is quite common and one I occasionally witness in my clinical practice. The depth of grief experienced by the person, who has declared her love and meant it with every fibre of her being, is not emotionally met by the empty words of the other, even though the words sound right. Writing this, it seems obvious. No, the loving one is the ok one. Yet, quite often, it is the grieving, loving one who comes to therapy – sent by the partner who speaks well, but means not much. My work, in this regard, is to validate the realness of this person’s experience. 

     How is it that we, so often, doubt ourselves so much, and take on the assumptions about our experiences that effectively undermine what we know intimately to be real? In the example above, it is in terrible heartache and the confusion surrounding the double-speak of the partner that the capacity for seeing clearly is lost. 

     Assumptions subvert the complexity of human interaction. They make things seem to make sense, without necessarily doing so. They are slippery and very unreliable, yet they do serve a purpose in shortcutting across the multiple possibilities of life, the number of which we would have difficulty negotiating otherwise. Getting through a day without making some assumptions would be really difficult. I assume, for instance, that my shoes will fit, my car will go, I’ll earn enough money to stay alive, etc.

      Tragedy comes when assumptions are made about other people, nature and the cosmos and never consciously questioned. Knowledge about the world would be miniscule and our relationships with one another well and truly stuck.

     The art is to apply awareness – and counselling is a very useful tool to learn how to do this – to what is felt and being said by others and ourselves and to determine what is authentic and what is not.  Separating out what belongs to us, emotionally, and what belongs to others is empowering, and a necessary skill in the art of life. 

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Meaning? By Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

          
May 2010

     I went into a bookshop the other day and a display consisting of discounted tarot cards caught my eye. I am rather fond of beautiful objects and these were definitely attractive. Just as I was about to pick a deck up, a man I didn’t know asked me whether I believed in these things. I replied I don’t believe in the cards per se, but am intrigued by the stories they tell and the meanings I make of them. I don’t believe in newspapers or telephone directories or street signs, for that matter. All these are merely means of communication.

      The man then asked me was it true that people commit suicide after using tarot cards. I replied, people who try to commit suicide are just as likely to do so after assuming a voice on the radio is telling them this is what they must do; in other words it is the psychosis that makes the difference, not what the person blames for suggesting they act in this way. A person who hears voices coming from a toaster cannot convince me that toasters are intrinsically evil.

      The fellow understood my drift, for he then spoke about the Tom Hanks movie, The Castaway. Hanks portrays a fictional FedEx employee, Chuck, who is stranded alone on a deserted island after the plane he was in crashes over the South Pacific. He manages to survive using remnants of the plane’s cargo. He finds a volleyball  on which he marks a face, gives it the name Wilson and talks to as a friend. Though this is “crazy” stuff to those of us thinking about it now, the making meaning by making “alive” an inanimate object kept Chuck sane and allowed him eventually to get off the island. The making of meaning is essential for human life, but the medium for it is only a stimulus to this process.

       The capacity to make not only sense of something, but to allow this to enliven and empower us is essential for human life itself. Viktor Frankl, a remarkable Jewish psychiatrist who has deeply influenced me, developed a branch of psychotherapy known as logotherapy in response to his experiences in Nazi death camps. There he noticed that those who used the experience of being there as an opportunity for self growth as well as discovering how to be present for others (see Man’s Search for Meaning), lived, while those who found it all meaningless and closed their eyes and lived in the past, weakened and died. The attitude of nihilism is already a death and a disconnection from life.

        We are much more than our biology, social and psychological conditions, heredity and upbringing. We are selves in relation to other selves and in relation to our time and place and the meanings we make are carried in some form across generations, yet all these enable us to interpret something. Subject to time, space and place, and coming from our particular psychological and bodily state (alert, tired, moody, psychotic, grief stricken, buoyant, sick, hunger, satiation, etc), as well as our belief systems, family conditioning, education, and how influenced we are by our peers also shapes how meaning is made. Every meaning we attach to something is in a process of becoming something more and is always open to interpretation.  Interpretations that are especially nurturing and full of meaning for us personally inspire choice-full behaviour. Inspired by the meaning we have made about something we can then choose to live in creative and empowering ways. 

      This is one very important purpose of psychotherapy and counselling. Such therapy opens up, client and therapist together, innovative, soul consoling, self-nurturing ways of understanding present circumstances and enables the client to move in directions that really matter to him/her.

      The symbols represented in the tarot deck allow for creative meaning making and are neither intrinsically evil nor good (whatever these terms mean), nor can be blamed as an inspiration to suicide – despite what some religious groups claim. The outright rejection of tarot cards on the grounds of hokus pokus, also, misses the point. The cards are a stimulus to self-examination and awareness of inner processes. As such a trigger, the cards are very useful as much as any book that touches, challengers, and inspires us. And, of course, they are often very beautiful items to look at.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

On knowing the essence of the other by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

Jan 2011

     Call it empathy, called it emotional compassion, call it ‘putting yourself in the other person’s shoes,’ call it what you will; at the heart of the matter it is knowing the essence of the other. It is  recognizing the realness of the humanity, in its complexity, of the other person in their flesh and blood.

      We are not born having empathy, for it is something we usually grow into.  As little children we start to recognize what another person is feeling from cues such as facial expressions, laughter, or crying, and how they might be responding from various contexts or situations, like cutting a finger. At first we may experience the distress of the other person as our own distress  (their tears are our own) – which can be overwhelming, but then we develop something called reflective empathy where we gradually learn how to helpfully deal with the suffering of others. This reflective empathy may eventually develop into altruistic behaviour. Altruistic behaviour is where you act for the benefit of another person, without necessarily seeing their discomfort first.

     So what does this word empathy actually mean, and is it adequate in its present form? Does it actually connote a much deeper interrelational process?

     The word empathy is a relatively recent concoction combining two Greek roots, pathetos referring to “suffering” and the prefix em referring to “in”. As such, the whole word means “in-suffering”.  The dictionary defines it as ‘mental entering into the feeling or spirit of a person or thing’ as well as an ‘appreciative perception or understanding’.  But is it merely mental? It is useful to dig deeper into the origins of the word.

     The term empathy was coined by Titchener in 1909 to serve as a translation to the German word einfühlung, which had been appropriated by a man named Lipps in 1903, to be applied in a psychological context. Einfühlung was originally used in the study of aesthetics to describe the way in which observers are able to project themselves into a work of art or a thing of beauty. To know the grain of the art work within the body of the perceiver. The Greek word aisthetikos meaning "sensitive, perceptive," from aisthanesthai "to perceive (by the senses or by the mind) is origin of aesthetics. So the origins of both words, empathy and aesthetics, are far from being understood as arising from wholly mental processes.

       Unfortunately, as with the drift of the study of aesthetics to an elitist value-driven critical study of the beautiful, so the word empathy has moved from the realm of sense-perception, of knowing in your bones, to a moral cognitive one. No longer concerned with our participation in another’s sufferance as part of a matter of knowing the essence of the other, the term has come to mean anything from an imagined feeling with the other person to a communicated by parallel-felt distress. Thus a group I’ve come across known as “Laws of Attraction” adherents can say that as empathy is a mental activity,  taking on the negative emotions of others is a harmful practice because you are attracting those same negative circumstances into your own life. Better, they say, to empathize with people who have what you want!!! There goes any consideration of the needs of others and any reason whatsoever for working towards a more equable world, and here comes a totally selfish way of being, where all work is for the satisfaction of ourselves. The spiritual dimension of empathy, which is what I know as “knowing the essence of another”, has been abandoned by these “Law of Attraction” crowd, for the pursuit of self gratification.

      Choosing not to be empathic and not knowing how to be are two different things. It is possible to learn how another person feels. In my clinical practice when something of this nature comes up, I might get them (M.) to “put on the shoes” of the other person they are not “getting” and speak the words the other person might say, using “I” words (swapping roles around).  For example, “I can’t seem to make sense of M.,” “I feel M. is missing me; she’s not feeling my pain.” “M. just wants things all her way…”  Something often happens, a sparkle of recognition occurs. A small bit of awareness of the other person twinkles into being and broadens and shifts the whole feeling situation and changes the way they interact with this other person.

       Knowing the essence of the other is a deep process. It is much more lovely than a mere cognitive acknowledgement of another’s being. It is a whole body, mind, spirit, sharing that allows us to not only acknowledge the rights of others to their unique experiences, but puts us firmly into being here on earth ourselves in inter-relationship with them. Knowing the essence of another is being with them in a vital, sensitive way; it is being here-now with zing and being in community with the capacity for interactive sharing.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Alleviating Chronic Pain. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip CH

Aug 2013

     I know pain. I know it intimately. I have had fibromyalgia (an autoimmune disorder) for 15 years, contracted originally from a flu-like illness I got in China. I’d gone to there to give a paper at a health conference in Nanjing. After the conference I, and our little group of Australian travellers did a special acupuncture course, working with de-skinned corpses soaked in formaldehyde. Perhaps it was the toxicity of the formaldehyde, or the environment in which we worked wasn’t all that clean, perhaps my illness had more to do with the ages old dust stirred up by the intense building activity going on in the midst of China’s ten year rebuilding plan. Wherever it came from, it made me very ill. Since that time, fibromyalgia expresses itself in my left leg that cramps spasmodically when I get over tired. There used to be a constant chronic pain, but now, after intensive acupuncture and remedial practices, I’m much better. I do know, however, really know pain.
 

     Pain is inevitable, but suffering is not, so says the Buddha, an observation that is very useful to know when we contemplate alleviating it. Pain is necessary for survival. It allows us to avoid injury or respond to injury as quickly as possible. When it becomes chronic, this purpose is less clear. Neurological evidence suggests that chronic pain imprints itself on our brains, amplifying its experience and getting in the way of its resolution. I’ve watched how fibromyalgia works with me: a cramp is felt, my attention goes to the cramp, the cramp intensifies, intensifies until the cramp is all there is, and stays like this for days, unless I break the cycle with massage or acupuncture or some other effective intervention. I wish I’d known more about hypnotherapy, though. This would have broken the cycle much earlier, perhaps not to get rid of the disorder, per se, but then again, maybe it could have.

     Chronic pain (defined as pain that continues longer than 6 months) infiltrates our lives, affects our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviour infecting our relationships with one another, our work and our enjoyment. Understanding this multidimensional quality of pain is most useful for how we go about working with people in pain, as pain managements units attempt to do. 

     I work with people in pain, mental, bodily, emotional, spiritual and social, and psychotherapy, of which clinical hypnotherapy is essentially a part, is very useful in this regards. It’s significant that most research work on the efficacy of clinical hypnotherapy has been done on pain (over two centuries of research). Hypnotherapy was and is used by doctors and dentists and has a respectable place in surgery, in the alteration of heart beats, in the control of bleeding, and even in the diminution of tumours. It is used in childbirth; used when a person can not take chemical anaesthetics, used to reduce the levels of body damaging medications (when morphine is no longer an option), when pain management is now too expensive, and/or doctors no longer know what to do with a person with their ongoing pain. Clinical hypnotherapy when used by psychotherapists, work to manage physical pain as well as psychological issues.

     We now know a lot about pain and also hypnotherapy, although the shifting paradigms of mind-body relations have altered this understanding quite substantially. Where once pain was thought to be psychogenic (originating from the mind), we now know there is an interrelationship between what the body feels and how the mind interprets this. There is still much to be learned about pain and its effective alleviation.

     Pain is a matter of the whole organism and thus its management  is not about convincing the person that it is “all in the mind”, for it is not. What we now know is they we are complex beings where an intervention on one level affects the experiences we have across the board. This is possible because of the plasticity of the brain and each new experience forges new neurological pathways, essentially and fundamentally changing us.

     Pain is a subjective phenomenon, and privately suffered. The way a person explains their pain is really useful in allowing the therapist to structure an intervention with hypnosis or other therapies. The narrative is an affirmation and acknowledgement of the pain’s presence and effects. This chronic pain narrative is a story told over and over, thus increasing the effects of imprinting on the brain.  This phenomenon is what is known as the symptomatic trance state. The art of healing is in breaking the circularity of that state, which is more about suffering than pain itself. The Buddha was right. Pain is inevitable, but much suffering isn’t. 

      Pain alleviation isn’t about getting rid of it, but changing how it is experienced. This can mean shifting the physicality of it from totally dominating our awareness to somewhere else in the body that isn’t so all encompassing.  The clinical hypnotherapist has tools up her sleeve that seem almost magical, but they are not so much magical as transformative. This is why I do the work I do. I am interested in participating in the transformation of lives. This is collaborative and empowering work, and deeply nurturing of client and practitioner alike.  

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

It isn't always the way you think it is by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

Sept 2011

     Many years ago I read of a 1970s (I think) experiment whereby human subjects were artificially physiologically aroused and presented with pictures of happy or sad faces and their resulting emotions reported. Those shown happy faces said they were feeling happy, those shown sad faces said they felt sad. This experiment, performed by numerous others since, shows the plasticity of our capacity to make meaning from our felt bodily state in relation to the contexts we find ourselves in. This is a three-way process, though it looks like just a two-way one: bodily arousal plus context, but the content of the meanings we make are more than just what are presented by external context. The meanings we make arise out of our historical individual take on the social and cultural stories of the environment we most identify with.  This take is built up over time and with reinforcement from family, peers, schooling, and other pervasive institutions. 

     Meanings are not fixed, but fluid and adaptive; indeed they are shaped – endlessly – by alternate views of things. This means that we are able to change how we see, respond to, and inhabit our world as well as experience our own lives. This fact lies at the heart and raison d’etre of effective therapy, along with care of the body.

     I find it very interesting that the body first feels, and then we make meaning – sense - of this first feeling. There is a perceptual gap, a window of opportunity to shift our reactions from habitual responses to perceiving the experience in new ways, or even just observing the physiological sense without attaching meaning to it. By being able to choose the meanings we make allow us to wend our pathway through life less reactively, more choicefully, and wisely. 

      We have a lot to contend with, however. Threats to our existence, whether direct or indirect (for example, being in the presence of a bomb going off, or a bystander to a bank robbery), or just injury (like falling off a rock and breaking a wrist) shakes the foundation of our being; we feel the reverberations for a long time and fear resounds around us. Trauma and abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional) can sometimes cause us to freeze like terrified animals so we cease to be able to respond with more than a rigid repertoire of feelings in relation to those around us. We might turn to drugs and alcohol to “loosen” us up, but such a solution ravages our bodies and minds, rather than offering actual healing. Bereavement, likewise, has long lasting effects on our bodies, as well as our minds, and may be experienced as on-going depletion of our energy. We feel too weak to do what usually interests us.  Depression, as it is now being described, is a likewise a “frozen” response to trauma, and one solution is more exercise and right diet.  The prescription of “exercise” is too generic and fails to appreciate the diversity of exercise styles possible. It isn’t just a case of moving your body more, but moving it in ways that delight you. Right diet can be generically prescribed as well, forgetting that it isn’t necessarily what you eat, but how and with what level of enjoyment. Chocolate may perk you up, if that’s your thing and if you believe it will (I recognize here that the chemical components of substances and activities do have an affect upon the brain), but there is more going here than just this one-to-one correspondence. And, in the case of the experiment mentioned above, there is more to just giving a context to physiological arousal. The meanings we make have to have something to do with us personally. 

     The subjects shown pictures of happy or sad people and then reporting feeling happy or sad after being artificially physiologically aroused had to have been conditioned to respond that way, and conditioning is what being a social animal is all about.  Social conditioning doesn’t end in a person’s childhood life; it is life-long flexible process.  It is also responsive, but not bound by one expression of it, to what arises physiologically. As noted above, there is a perceptible gap between what is felt in the body and what meaning is made of it. There really is a window of opportunity in every moment to change how we view our lives and thus alter how we feel about ourselves, and how we act upon others. Therapy can bring insight into ways we prevent ourselves seizing the day and how we can enliven ourselves to new ways of being, as well as finding ways to not resolving old traumas  but moving on from them.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Intimacy, not fusion by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

June 2011

     I often hear people talk about their partners, husbands, wives, as “their better half” and words to the effect that “the other person completes them” and find myself drawing back in horror. Even more repugnant to me are the requests some men make  regarding the women they supposedly love to subordinate themselves to them, and for women to believe it is right that they give up their hopes and dreams in order to be there for their men 24 hours a day.  Here is a lack of understanding of  what intimacy  and love is.

     The wonderful writer Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet, 1954, writes thus, 

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen… it is a great exacting claim. 

     Our work is not to dissolve into another person, but be clear and clean in our authentic contact with the one and ones we love.  Rilke’s idea of love as a ground for ripening of self speaks of an interaction between persons that is rich, full and not needy or clingy.  Partners who cling to each other and attempt to exclude  a multi-facetted world shrink from life itself. 

     Society has shaped our expectations about intimacy in the following ways. Many women are brought up to consider normal “losing themselves in a relationship” while many men think of intimacy as unmanly or just another word for sex, but intimacy is a subject much more complete than this.

      Intimacy is a substantive relationship between two  or more individuals of equal status. It is a deep reciprocal closeness and it is, as someone described it to me,  like a bridge over the silence of the universe joining people on either side.

     I believe that most  people yearn for intimacy, though some neurotically crave fusion (an undifferentiated disappearing into another person). Intimacy has a number of distinct characteristics that distinguish it from fusion. 

      To be intimate with another  (man and woman, woman and woman, or man and man) is to engage in closeness, time together, nurturance, physical intimacy, communication and consistency. Intimacy is shaped by an ability to face conflict and not shirk away from psychological, emotional or physical rupture. Intimacy distinguishes itself from fusion through a lack of intrusiveness: no separation anxiety, respect of another’s need for privacy, lack of possessiveness and jealousy, lack of overreactivity to the other person’s life problems; a distinction of minds (little mind-reading), lack of thinking we know what the other person wants or needs better than he/she does, lack of aggressive criticism, blaming, hurtful attacks, or a desire to diminish the other, and a lack of attempt to dominate the other in disagreements. To be fused is to see the physical absence of the other as a threat to our very existence. It is to think as normal to walk into the bathroom while the other person is on the toilet (as the husband of a client of mine did on a daily basis). It is to want to sit inappropriately in on an exam with one’s partner or attend an interview between a wife’s boss and one’s wife. A fused relationship may be one in which arguments never take place, or when they do, both parties are convinced that the relationship is crumbling. Fusion in a relationship may express itself when the man “knows” exactly what his partner wants for her birthday, without actually ever asking her (or vice versa). Fusion is found when one member of a relationship dominates, belittles, and undermines the other on a regular basis and thinks it is his/her right. When individuals leave these fused relationships they often go into crisis because they no longer know who or what they are, for they have identified themselves totally as an appendage of  the other person. When people leave healthy intimate relationships (and they are free to do so, for healthy intimacy is permeable and not an end itself) they  ripen further as the individuals they are made to be.

      Intimacy is a choice and not a neediness; it may be a yearning but it is not a craving. It is a natural desire for closeness in an environment where one can express oneself clearly and authentically with another person; it is not a place where one dissolves oneself in the greater powerfulness of the other like a sugar cube in a glass of water. To be intimate is to know and be known by the other as a separate and beloved self. Two (or more) people in relationship.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

99% of the population aren't coping perfectly well. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

April 2010 

     I’ve sometimes heard it said that since 99% of the population don’t need therapy, what’s wrong with the woossy 1%?  Maybe the numbers are wrong, but the gist of this idea is also missing the mark. The trouble is vast numbers of people in Australia, particularly rural Australia, aren’t coping particularly well. Many use alcohol and/or drugs to mask their emotional difficulties, while others turn to gambling, food, and sex to conceal how they actually feel about themselves.
 

     Underneath exhibitions of self-abuse there lies vulnerable people feeling they have no one to talk to.  Family and friends often do not have the patience nor the skills to hear someone out, so feeling bruised, grief stricken, confused, in deep emotional pain, they play dangerously with their lives.

The trouble is, the feelings don’t go away. They may be hidden temporarily, but they pop out when a person least expects it.  These feelings are not always symptoms of a mental illness or mood disorder, like depression or anxiety, but profound distress.  Grief, for instance, can so disturb a person that it feels like there is no possibility of an end to it. Grief can be feelings of loss of a loved one through death (human or animal), loss of a relationship, loss of a job or a familiar lifestyle (experiences of prison can be absolutely devastating to a person’s equilibrium), loss of health and well being (say, through cancer or motor neuron disease), loss of competency and memory (in dementias like Alzheimer’s), feelings of loss when a parent or friend or child acquires a dementia (and this condition is not confined to the elderly) – they look familiar, but they are not ‘all there’; grief has many forms and feeling it does not describe mental illness.  Capacity to experience grief makes us intensely human, though we now know that other animals know grief well.  

      Movies of elephants grieving over the death of a much-loved member of an elephant clan show this. The capacity to grieve is part of the capacity to love.

     We cannot snap out of feelings we have and denying these feelings exist in our waking life, while over drinking, eating (or refusing to eat), engaging in high risk sexual activity, driving too fast, or whatever, does nothing for the distress that arises at night, alone. 

     Counselling, or its longer duration counterpart, psychotherapy, can help restore  a sense of balance within ourselves. It can introduce a sense that we have the capacity to choose from many options in life, rather than go with the stuff we formerly thought was our boring old lot in life. It can invigorate us; bring excitement, even joy to our lives.  Counselling can break through procrastination and artistic blocks, so writing, painting, dancing and music making become not only possible but wonderfully accessible. Counselling is a very useful tool in bringing mindfulness to whatever we do, think, and feel, so that we are not seemingly controlled by other people, habits, and old self stories that get in the way of living authentically.

      Counselling is good, but a holistic approach to working through emotional pain, depression, anxiety, confusion, loss, etc. is best of all. I actively encourage my clients to exercise: walk, swim, run, play sport; to eat a balanced diet (and not over indulge); to take their medicine (as prescribed by their doctor, or alternative health specialist) and cut down the use of alcohol and non-prescribed drugs; to explore ideas in books, talks, the internet, and meetings; to take time out with walks in the forests, massages, spa baths, for instance; and to keep a journal, writing down (or drawing) their dreams, and observations of their encounters in everyday life. Counselling is most effective when it is part of a whole self health plan. When viewed in this way, there is nothing woosy about it. If   1% of the population get to enjoy it, then how lucky are they! The alternative for many people is  a small, ugly, and repetitious life  alleviated (controlled?) by substance abuse and dangerous behaviour. Life is too short for that. How much lovelier to be able to accept what is inevitable, celebrate what is choiceful, and manifest a richer, more abundant presence in the world. 

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell