Prose Poems

I thought I'd add this link to some of my published prose poems in Episteme journal.

http://www.episteme.net.in/index.php?option=com_phocadownload&view=category&id=105:prose-poems&Itemid=625

Falling from the Cloud. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2016

     I’ve been wandering around for a couple of days thinking about what to write for this article, trying to focus the mind, but having difficulty. It’s between Christmas and New Year and I’m caught up in the bardo space of neither this nor that, which many of us feel at this time of the year. Some businesses are open, most are shut, the streets are quiet in the most part, and the place has a dreamlike quality. Topics rise up in my mind: guilt, shame, community, getting stuck and unstuck, and moving on and I’m moved to consider them in the writing, but a fall from the cloud  of community is the one that captures me.

In computer speak, the Cloud is a public WiFi provider that allows for the sharing of data and information for the benefit of streamlining resources and creating community coherence. Without public WiFi, the internet connects us anyway, however much we seek it. Within the internet are deeper, darker depths where few choose to wander.

In meteorological terms, the cloud is a visible mass of liquid or frozen droplets of water and various chemicals that gathers together to form types of communities of droplets.  Some droplet communities are very dense and some less so.

Issues can be cloudy, in that they are not transparent. Moods can be cloudy, where suspicion and worry lurk. There are clouds before a storm, and hunters of storms observe the clouds. I watch them: the clouds of meteorology, moods, and thoughts.  Being a cloud watcher all my life, I like the meditation practice, adopted by some hypnotherapists, including me, of thinking of thoughts and feelings like clouds, and watching them gather in cloud form and disappear.

Community has cloud-like characteristics. Community is a social unit of any size that is connected by durable relations, with rules, said and hidden, that work towards keeping the unit going.

I like to watch clouds. I gaze at them, endlessly, from my back veranda, watching them form and dissolve and form and dissolve. I saw a red dragon once. There it was, this red glowing dragon seen through clearly defined luminous clouds. He raced across the sky, and was gone.

Community is highly complex and can be studied by anybody and from a range of disciplines: ecology, anthropology, social science, information technologies, organizational perspectives, philosophy and psychology, for instance. I am, though, most interested, given my profession and inclination, to want to consider it from the perspective of the individual person.

shame and guilt and wondering about the given wisdom that guilt, as the feeling of having failed in some obligation and shame, as the painful sense of distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior, are individual phenomena. I question this, because underlying these senses are two things: an implicit belief in the rightness of something and a sense that we will be judged by other people in our community for feeling the things we do, even though it usually doesn’t ever come to that, as we keep our guilt and shame secret.  But keeping such things secret doesn’t mean they do not arise inter-relationally, even though they are rarely articulated. Being an inter-relational phenomenon also doesn’t necessarily imply an actual condemnation of one’s behavior, just a disturbing feeling that such a thing has, or is about to, happen.

     I’ve been mulling about certain intangible codes of behaviour that are apparently present among groups of women, for instance. I’m thinking of the “code of silence” that seems to operate, whereby some things are never spoken of, and when they are, individuals are singled out and expelled from the group. This dynamic shames and blames girls in the school yard and mature women in the workplace, and among friends.  It’s a code that is learned very early on and forms what sociologists call, “the hidden curriculum”.

     I, like a few, never learned this particular code and it gets me into a lot a trouble every now and again. I wasn’t present when that bit of learning took place. I was at home in bed with yet another childhood illness. And so I get into trouble by inbeing blunt and declaring things, things that seem to me as clear as day, when the code has it I be silent. When I break the silence, I do not feel ashamed nor guilty, even though someone says explicitly that I should (and say I’m sorry), for I see the dynamic pretty clearly. I’ve lost friends this way, and that is sad. It does, however, give me an insight into how groups work, and do not work.

     The inter-relational is difficult to pin down and codes of behaviour are rarely ever actually articulated. Much goes by at a sort ethereal level. Things are vaguely felt, except when things are said that are said against the code that inheres the group. It’s against this cloudy backdrop that the problems of guilt and shame are manifest.

     Much psychological literature identify guilt and shame as individually felt things. Guilt and shame certainly feel like they are individual. I may not know the code of silence, but I know other codes. I know how it feels to fall upon the guilt-edged sword of shame. It hurts in a nagging, dull sort of way. But, you know, how is it possible to have a sense of a conscience outside a code of practice lived by the rest of one’s community? A conscience arises in relation to beliefs and ideas about community for the benefit of community. Having a sense of right and wrong are relational, indeed, inter-relational within community, and, as such, are endlessly negotiated.

Martin Buber, the existential philosopher in his book, On Psychology and Psychotherapy, beautifully identifies the point at which an action of conscience is felt as being apparently objective truth. It is a point that we tend to attribute possible reactions to our personal stuff as a condemnation by the group, even when what we’re experiencing is an introjected idea of the mores of the group. To introject is to take what is outside into ourselves. The introjected idea can be very flawed. I think a code of silence is one of those: when not speaking up is lauded over saying what needs to be said for the safety of others. Sometimes the introjected idea has come via sources that should not be trusted. Examples of an untrustworthy source of ideas is the belief that plane travel is dangerous, or you should never step into the ocean because sharks will get you, or New York is a dangerous town, or all men are beasts, or women are all gold diggers, or whatever. Such are beliefs that interfere with good choices….

The Dance of Focus and Relaxation in Hypnosis by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

December 2015

     I remember, years ago, studying qi gong and being taken by the rhythm of yin and yang. In this Chinese practice, each strong movement is followed by a gentle one and every movement comes from a state of relaxation and focus, with a strong sense of balance and harmony and a centre point felt within.  I realized that this pattern was very powerful and set about employing in everything I do. It is there in my counselling and it is there in my clinical hypnotherapy work. As a conscious practice, I discovered that I don’t get tired when working with someone.  Enter the dance of challenge, support, challenge, support and it flows.

     What comes to mind right now is that wonderful scene in the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” where fighting goes on in a field of swaying bamboo. Each action is followed by an allowing, a swaying, a challenge, a swaying, challenge and a block, and a swaying; it’s hypnotic and very beautiful.

     The rhythm of relaxation and focus is similar to what occurs in exercises of mindfulness. This is very relevant for clinical hypnotherapy, as certain mindfulness techniques are employed in hypnosis. Mindfulness might be identified as putting a focus on what’s happening right now. After all, when

you’re in the moment you’re not ruminating about  the past, not in the future, not caught up in memories, nor thinking about  other things, judging anything, or making decisions about anything.  You are noticing what you’ve overlooked before and in bringing such awareness to mind, you are reprogramming yourself, or even repriming yourself, to noticing things (solutions, delights, insights) that you had previously been unconscious of.

     Mindfulness is a tool, but so is hypnosis. You can use mindfulness in meditational practices and your purpose there might be enlightenment. Using mindfulness in hypnosis (and counselling, for that matter), however, and the purpose is much more ordinary. You are doing it to dispel problem thinking. This is a solution focused exercise.

     Fundamental to both mindfulness for meditation and mindfulness for therapy is that it provides a means of dissociating oneself from everything extraneous to what is brought to one’s attention by your own choice and guided suggestions of the hypnotherapist; suggestions which I invite you to ignore, if you wish. The process of offering choice is critical for a person to feel they are not being manipulated (and I’m certainly uninterested in manipulating anybody) and for them to choose which course of action sits best with them. Choices made like this are most enduring and likely to be employed later on in ordinary life.

     Dissociation is a very useful, and very human, ability. It allows us to focus on whatever we are choosing to do, like, say, sewing a piece of tapestry and ignoring the lawn mowing going on next door.  Focus is a tool of awareness. If we lack focus it is hard to do, or change anything. The act of being mindful narrows down what we are experiencing and thus allows us to identify what is important to us and gives us the skills to go for it.

     Hypnosis is a relaxed and yet focussed state. I invariably tell my clients this at the start of a hypnosis session. I often tie this observation to the very act and awareness  of breathing: an inhalation is an inspiration and an exhalation naturally an act of letting go and feeling the wonderful spread of a deeply relaxed state. When we are inspired we can achieve  much, when we let go of  the problems that we used to have,  we can allow ourselves to feel nourished and supported. Both become a dance of yin and yang and a dance that sustains us throughout life.

Fear Itself

Fear Itself  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I remember 30 or so years ago having developed a fear of heights. I’m not sure of the reason for it, but it had become quite apparent that my fear was getting in the way of doing the kind of things I really enjoyed, like climbing sea walls and up and over rocks in order to get to special swimming holes. I thought to myself, I must overcome this. So I set  to break the phobia.

      I challenged myself. I travelled to the tops of buildings and stood on balconies. I could feel myself  nearly losing balance, nearly teetering over. Nearly, but not.

     At the time, I worked in a tall building that, disconcertingly, had a glass lift in the middle of the place that took you from floor to floor in full view of everything. People could look in and people could look out. It was scary. Until my decision to break my fear, I used to ride it standing dead centre with my eyes closed. Afterwards, I’d stand exactly at the edge facing outwards and allow myself to go deep into the experience, immerse myself in it, and ride that elevator.

     This immersion therapy worked and I came eventually to really enjoy the experience of near flight by going to the heart of fear itself. There are kinder therapies around though, and hypnotherapy is one. Rather than exposing someone to the den of the lion of fear, the subject of fear is contextualized as part of ordinary, every day experience and it thus loses its ferocity.

     Fear is a useful survival tool and gives us the means to avoid situations that could be life threatening. Fear causes a flooding of the whole body of useful adrenaline and cortisol that allows us to get away from danger. It’s when the danger is not to the body, but to our emotional state that fear can turn into a psychological phobia. It’s then problems arise and it can cripple us.

    There is a very rare genetic problem, called Urbach-Wiethe disease. Sufferers don’t experience any fear at all, or so it is thought. There is a certain degree of evidence to suggest that some forms of fear may be experienced by these people.

Fear is processed in the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain, as well as other emotions. In people with Urbach-Wiethe disease this part of the brain is calcified over, hardens, and shrivels up, and doesn’t function for fear, even though sufferers have normal cognitive function and can experience feelings of joy, happiness and sadness.  A sense of fear, though, can be induced been getting subjects to breath high concentrations of carbon dioxide, as a recent study has shown. The feelings of suffocation and panic were similar in both the control group and those with amygdala damage. It seems life is much simpler than brain physiology indicates, at least at a very basic level.

     The word fear is intrinsic to the English language.  In Old English, it was faer, in Middle English  it was fere, and meant a sense of sudden danger. It came to mean “to terrify and frighten”. A phobia is “an irrational fear, horror, aversion.” The word phobia comes from the Greek phobeo, “terror, fear, panic”. Phobos is the name of one of the moons of Mars. It is also the name of one the twins born to the Greek God Ares (God of War) and Aphrodite (Goddess of Love). Phobos (fear) was twin to Deimos (terror). I find mythology very interesting because here is a kind of psychological awareness of how it is with us humans; semi-aware parts of ourselves are personified into gods, goddesses and demi gods.  Here in war, in fear, love is met, and here is something more than mere survival. In this juncture profound change to a life lived, thus far, is possible.

     Continuing this line of investigation, the word phobeo contains within itself a mysticism, a reverence for something not yet known, something intimated, a mystery, respect, a sense of awe. It sort of reveals itself in Phoebe, daughter of the sky (Uranus) and the earth (Gaia) She is a Titan Goddess of Radiance and Brightness, and a  prophetess at the Oracle of Delphi. She foretells many changes, many hopes and dreams.

    A fear that seems to cripple can be a sign that a war is going on within and a life that brings delight isn’t yet being lived. People come, often bringing more than a fear. They sometimes bring depression and generalized anxiety. There is, in anxiety, a tremendous amount of energy; and energy that can release huge and fundamental changes.

From fear comes the possibility of real and  enduring shifts in perspective. From the darkness of fear, comes this lightsome being of light, so feeling and identifying fear is the beginning of some pretty fundamental change in a person’s life. It’s a very good place to start: from fear itself.

Hypnotherapy: entering the zone. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

October 2015

 I’m currently participating in an online international conference on using hypnosis in the treatment of depression. We listen or watch or read several presentations, ask questions, attend coaching calls where we talk about cases, theories and approaches, and ask more  questions. I’m gathering, expanding, deepening my understanding of things, which only helps those I work with, and also layers on more dimensions to the work I do, which is very satisfying. I am thus moved to write more about hypnotherapy and how it works, because I think such knowledge is invaluable.

     Hypnotherapy, or hypnosis as the Americans call it, is nothing like the hypnosis dished up to audiences attending the latest stage show. It, or I, cannot make a person do anything they have no desire to do, and what’s more, what happens in a session doesn’t involve giving up your conscious awareness nor handing over the control of you to me. This is anathema to the healing principles of any good therapy. Change comes from within  you, from your conscious and non conscious processes. Hypnotherapy is a therapy of change.

     Hypnotherapy provides a wonderful context for moving beyond problems a person might have. The dynamic of a problem is a seemingly endless looping, around and around, with the same thing going over and over in your head, something that doesn’t seem to be solvable just by thinking about it. Indeed, the repeated thoughts, or habits, or whatever it is that dominates a person’s life creates a sort of inflexible space from which escape seems practically impossible. Hypnotherapy can help move a person out of this inflexible space and into fluidity and a certain joyfulness.

     Hypnotherapy facilitates, in a relaxed and yet aware state our mood, freeing and amplifying positive mood states, as well as giving us access to ways of  more flexible thinking and feeling in the future. Hypnotherapy is thus both a present and future oriented treatment. What might be honed in on during a session can become tools for what happens tomorrow, next week, and the rest of your life.

     There are several components of a hypnotherapeutic session. One is dissociation, while another is association, while a third is suggestion, and others. In the dissociative state the person doesn’t know how to produce hypnotic phenomena (eg creating an analgesia) by deliberate means, but can produce the desired effect with no awareness of how she did so. These processes are typically described as latent, or unconscious, and they point to the enormous resources we have at our disposal, though we generally don’t know we have them.  Think here of amazing stories of people finding in themselves enormous strength when faced with catastrophic events and getting out of these situations alive. In association, connections are made between apparently unrelated skills and experiences, connecting the dots, as it were, so that moving forward makes sense.  Suggestion is the added idea offered to the client to ameliorate change in their take on their life. It might be, say, for giving up smoking, that the cigarette tastes disgusting, like a rubbish bin, and that you have no desire to keep it in your mouth a moment longer but rip it out, crush it underfoot, and throw it away. Dissociation, association and suggestion already shift the way you think about things, and introduce into the mix, knowledges you didn’t realize you had.

     When you enter the relaxed and yet focused state that is the hypnotic trance, many things become possible. Changes are already happening to move a person out of the fixed state of a problem so that things can be better managed or removed altogether. The kind of problems beautifully worked on cover: pain management, anaesthesia, anxiety and panic attacks, depression, low self esteem, social anxiety and poor coping skills, problem solving skills, artistic and athletic skills, eating problems, sleeping problems, smoking, increasing mindfulness and relaxation, etc.

     A series of hypnotherapy sessions provides a zone, for experiential and behavioural change and entering into the zone is a pleasant experience: it’s safe, secure, comfortable, and usually easy.  I have a special chair that extends to a soft, supportive, wonderful couch. I call it the magic chair, for it is a tool in the furniture of change. Each session is tailored to each person and I do not use scripts, so I am present with you every inch of the way. You are unique and I work from where you are and what engages you, for engagement is the cornerstone of hypnotherapy. This is the context of learning, this is the zone.

Depression and Treatment

September 2015.

Depression  and Treatment by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Depression is diagnosed as feeling sad or blue for two or more weeks. It is characterised by two things: self blame and rumination (thoughts that go round and round and round your head). Both paralyse decision making skills, feelings of well being, and the ability to move on in one’s life.

Depression, which is essentially a fear-based response to events, relationships and psycho-physiological conditions, can lead to dropping out of society, losing one’s job, ceasing to create, developing heart disease, over-eating, under-eating, smoking, chronic resentment against self and world, smoking and other addictive habits. Major depression is a growing concern, world wide. The World Health Organization identifies it as the fourth most significant cause of disability in the world.

So what is depression? There are many views on this, many perspectives and it rather depends on how you see the world. Contributing factors include biology: genetics (though no depressed gene has been located), biochemical contributions (serotinin, a breakdown in the auto-immune response, etc), health, exercise, and diet. There are the psychological factors: your individual temperament, coping style, attributional style (that is, how you view what happens to you in different circumstances), your personal history, and so on. And the social factors: the quality of your relationships, the culture in which you live, isolation, and so on. Depression is contextual in the sense that it arises in response to something. Interestingly, it seems to have a capacity to be spread (witness the proliferation of deeply depressed adolescents through online sharing of gothic thoughts and cutting). In other words, there are many contributors to whether a person becomes depressed or not.

Childhood experiences, including the quality of support you’ve experienced from your care givers, modeling and what you’ve learned from your family as to how they cope with loss and adversity may  contribute to the likelihood of having depression, but not necessarily. What’s more important is how a person responds ongoing processes, how they use information, how they form relationships, and how they interpret  the meaning of things that happen to them. Socialization continues throughout life and our coping skills are also being developed throughout life. This means we can learn not to follow a pattern that we used in previous times to manage life’s situations.

Treatment of depression ranges from medication, electroconvulsive therapy, diet, exercise and psychotherapy. A single-pronged approach is not likely to work, and doesn’t in many cases. Treating those diagnosed with depression with anti-depressants such as serotonin-reuptake inhibitors is often believed by patients to be sufficient, but, one, anti-depressants don’t work for everybody (they just don’t work in the way researchers thought they would) and the problems that exacerbated  the condition in the first place are still there.

Some interesting research is going on in Leiden, The Netherlands, on the thesis that depression is an inflammatory problem and the use of probiotics seems to have the effect of lessening the inflammation in the body. Probiotics have been found to cut down the propensity for rumination.

Exercise fills the body-mind with good endorphine hormones and feeling good clears the depression away. It’s hard getting oneself motivated, however. The use of hypnotherapy at this level is very useful, as it is on other levels as well.

Psychotherapies that concentrate on present issues are found to be more effective than those that go back over old stuff. This is because certain psychodynamic therapies work using rumination, and rumination, as I’ve indicated, is a characteristic of depression. So a therapy (eg cognitive behavioral, interpersonal and hypnotherapy) that refocuses on what takes a person out of their problem story is more likely to be successful here in changing things.

A metaphor might help. Imagine someone walking through the bush for the first time. This is like thinking about something in a novel way. If, for whatever reason, the person goes that exact same way the next day, and the day after that and the day after that, the pathway gets worn down: old patterns are repeated, negative thought patterns are reiterated, neural circuits become circular, and it’s really difficult to leave the pathway because it has created such a crevasse in the landscape that getting out is now really hard. The walker has sort of forgotten how to walk innovatively. Hypnotherapy can change that, using – possibly – this, or another tailor-made visualization. The creation of a means out of depression needs to be as individual as the person suffering depression. The reason for their depression is as unique to them as their remedy. The remedy, I think, should be holistic, but first and foremost, supported by a therapist who understands the interconnection of all these processes.

Magic Potions, Hypnotherapy and Memory by Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

August 2015

     Sometimes, but thankfully not often, I see a client bounding down my stairs to my consulting room starry eyed and full of expectation that I will hypnotize them and they will remember something or other from their distant past.  I say to them, first, I’ve run out of magic potion and secondly, neither memory nor hypnosis operates like that.

     I know of a therapist who keeps a drawer full of beautiful wands, and I’m quite disposed to getting one because they’re rather fun. They are, though, utterly useless for clinical hypnotherapy.  This is not magic the thing we do. It is inspired and intuitive science, but science nevertheless. In other words, there is a huge body of sound, peer reviewed, research and literature on the subject of hypnosis and memory. Our repertoire does not include wands, potions, and incantations.

     Memory is not a photographic cache from which one can miraculously extract this and that. It is context dependent and co-emergent with situation, time, space, and people involved. It is not possible to drag out a memory that you’ve actually never remembered.

     During the 90s there was a fad for using therapy, particularly hypnotherapy to tap “repressed” memories. This idea is based on the belief that all symptoms are based on past experiences, forgetting that we make meaning of our world in a continual, here and now, process that isn’t locked in the past but is continually reinforced by the way we see ourselves. Symptoms are accessible to our present state of mind, and changeable so we don’t need to dig out old photographs of our past in order to get well.

     Age regression hypnosis has sometimes been used by some very unscrupulous people to crack open what was at best misguided, but worse, dangerous to health, family cohesion and mental stability; in other words, not therapeutic at all. In the latter part of the 90s newspapers, magazines and courtrooms were full of accounts of  “remembered” Satanic rituals and rapes with demonic weaponry, or visitations and medical experiments by aliens. But these so-called memories were mostly implanted in the minds of the patient and the therapists, who did this false memory retrieval work, developed a following of who claimed to have very similar “memories”. The problem was, and is, that these so-called “memories”, or “confabulations” felt genuine, even though they were not anything historically based, nor possible.

     For instance, I had this idea that I saw Zeppelin airships flying over Nedlands, the Perth suburb I grew up in. Zeppelins were invented in the latter years of the 19^th/early 20^th century and used in the First World War. There is absolutely no way I could’ve seen such a thing when growing up in the 50s and 60s, though my feelings of anxiety and terror were real. I can only surmise that I dreamt it. My father had a book on balloons, and my imaginative self loved looking at that.

     Trauma specialists note that things aren’t forgotten; they may be blocked from full consciousness, but the very presence of symptoms such as nightmares, trigger responses, agitation, etc shows how the trauma is remembered: in the physicality of our being. Uncovering memories are not found to be all that useful in the healing process. The brain does us a service in blocking out the extremely unpleasant. Such memories may very rarely emerge later, but in the meantime we have an amnesia for the particulars of the event for a reason (our mental well being), while retaining a global knowledge of the trauma.

     We may remember bits and pieces of something that happened a long time ago, but it is not possible to corroborate such memories for the  truth of the matter. Hypnosis does not reveal truth, just like a magic potion cannot be a truth serum. We do not have any means to locate in the here and now something that happened a long time ago.  Hypnosis can only work with symptoms and change how we see and feel those and thereby free ourselves from them.

     I am not in the business of confabulating a person’s history.  I am only interested in helping a person feel more whole and better about themselves, whether this is giving up smoking, restoring a better diet, better sleep, a much more relaxed sense of well being, less pain, happier relationships, more confidence,  etc.  I don’t put ideas into a person’s head, I merely use the images, words, and thinking style presented to me. I endeavour to keep what I say clean and untampered with from my own way of seeing the world. I am literally using what they have given me in ways to change negative patterns of thought, addictions, recursive thinking, etc. Curiously, and this was told to me  by my teachers when I first started working as a therapist, a patient gives you much of what you need to work therapeutically with them. Quite often the solution is found in the first sentence. It’s there to be incorporated in a healing process. Hypnotherapy, counselling and psychotherapy are all very good at working with what is present now and allows the patient to move more confidently forward without being held prisoner to the past.