Being for Oneself; Being for Others by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I’m interested in the problem of those who live with the consequences of feeling they have to fulfil the needs of others because of parental expectation. I’ve listened to the accounts of clients who’ve expressed a certain resentment for this in their own lives, or know someone who has been very damaged by such expectations. I’ve also been reminded of rather extreme forms of this vicariousness in literature.

     In order to have a sense of being your own person, you need to have an independence of thought, feeling and action.  Being your own person is having a sense of authenticity, a willingness to stand your ground, self confidence, and a willingness to experiment with new ways of doing things, tasting new things, going where you’ve never been before, and playing with wonder.

     You need an independence that isn’t heavily dependent on other people’s direction. Obviously, when we are born we are dependent on the physical, emotional and communicative support, nurturance,  and, hopefully, love of our caregivers. We need an education into the cultural ideas and practices of our community and the development of knowledge and the associated skills, as well as knowing the boundaries of self and others. These are necessary.  Conformity, to a degree, is helpful, but when this dominates, then a sense of self is compromised, so a balance between independence and mutuality is really useful.

     It’s interesting that when people are brought up to be heavily dependent on others, they often have a feeling of being out of control, confused, clingy, devalued and easily manipulated. One of the most common emotions for these people is  anger, depression and psychic collapse. Many find themselves in the mental health system, being moved from psychiatrist to psychiatrist and medication to medication. Where is happiness in this; where is a sense of self?

     Parents who bring up children to be so needy tend to  have  children because they themselves haven’t known much love and nurturance, for reasons as complex as war, abuse, abandonment, or lack of consistent parenting of their own. They have the children to “fill a hole” in themselves. Their experienced absence of love gets transferred to the unborn child and the child is taught that independence is bad and wrong, but these children feel the inner turbulence, as described above. 

     If the mapped life, the vicarious life of the parent, is adopted (and many children find it practically impossible to resist), their accomplishments are not sensed as their own, and underneath it all, they can believe that the lie that they are living will soon be discovered and they will be exposed as the fraud they feel themselves to be. The doctor, the lawyer, the actor, the musician, the football player, the academic (I met many when I was at university) can all feel these feeling of inauthenticity, because they trained in these professions to fulfil the dreams of parents.

     The need to have a child to fill “the gap” can take certain parents to extreme places. I’m not talking about adoption here, but biotechnological means whereby natural processes are bypassed.  Now I’m not saying this is wrong in itself, but I am keen to ask some difficult questions, like, for instance, what level of sensed independence will the much longed for child have? Will their sense of self be skewed to being dependent on the existence of the other person? Will they know their separateness? It does, naturally, depend on how the child is brought up and the values translated to them.  Let me be clear here, I’m not saying wanting a child by whatever means is always a consequence of a parent not feeling loved; I am merely wondering about the child who came into the world to fulfil someone else’s perceived need.

     We live in strange times. Biotechnological intervention in the design of children is reaching bizarre levels. In the late 1990s the first child was conceived for the purpose of harvesting cells in order to save the life of his sibling. There have been several other cases of this “saviour sibling” phenomenon. A novel has been written (“My Sister’s Keeper,” by Jodi Picoult)  and a movie made of this semi-fictional account of such a situation.

     The “saviour sibling” is a child conceived in order to  provide an organ or cell transplant to a sibling who is affected with a fatal disease, such as cancer or a fatal form of  anaemia. So, in other words, the ne healthy human being is there for the benefit of their brother or sister, and is supposed to willingly undergo medical procedures and surgeries, whether they like it or not. This is an ethical mine field that is still poorly understood.    

     I’ve been reading as much of the literature I can get my hands on, including the accounts of the donor’s themselves. Many papers quote a single account of an interview with a child, who when asked what they thought about being alive just because their sibling needed saving, said, they were glad to help. Another account is less forgiving:  this saviour sibling “donated” (not voluntarily) spinal material to his brother who later died. Their parents disowned the “saviour” and he grew up without the love of parents.

     So how to love a child for themselves, without them being there to fulfil our own expectations? I guess much of this comes down to allowing, and playing with, our own desires and ambitions to manifest in our own lives the things we haven’t yet fulfilled, and to not attempt to transplant those desires into the lives of others. It becomes a question of owning what belongs to us and what doesn’t.  Counselling has a huge part to play in the articulation and realization of our own ambitions. In the end, we are responsible for our own lives and for creating the space for other lives to be lived well.

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Clearing a Room of Ghosts by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons), M. Couns., PhD.

 April 2016

  

     It’s a funny thing reading other people’s letters, particularly when these letters are those between one’s own father and his lover and cover a period of over thirty years.  It’s unnerving to discover that they make no mention, at all, of me, and my life and only speak of their tumultuous love, regrets, and enduring passion. They only speak of wanting to be together, and his resisting divorcing my mother, and her divorcing her husband, and on and on. The drama is between lovers and a room full of ghosts.

     My own life during that time was eventful, as most are, between the ages of 16 and beyond. I graduated from school, and the various degrees of university; I travelled to Europe a few times, I studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich, I returned, I married and divorced (and all the related catastrophes), I found and lost God, I got on various committees, got jobs, moved on, and on. All these events are not found in the letters I’ve been reading. It is as though I’ve occupied space in another universe to this lettered one of my father. And yet I knew him too, and he was beautifully generous to me and I loved him.

     These letters are amongst various other bits and pieces I’m only now looking at. My father died in 2007, at the great age of nearly 101. This stuff is ancient history. The lover is probably dead. It is all past.

    In amongst the letters is a very evocative little fairy tale written by my father in 1972. It’s a story about two lovers. She who married and had children, but hadn’t really found love, and he who longed for the “perfect” woman and had not yet discovered “even the shadow of one” and they met “almost by accident” and it was like “two stars melting into one”.  Quote, unquote. For the likes of me, a psychotherapist, the tale is interesting. It bespeaks of a mind stuff (even a mind field) populated by notions of “perfect women”, as if there were such ephemeral beings. This tale is placed together in this collection of letters, of hers, and copies of my father’s letters to her (for that was the kind of man he was: he wrote out, without carbon paper [those days had no photocopiers], copies of every letter he wrote this lover of his). Why he kept all these letters, I don’t know. Perhaps he thought he would defy death and live forever, perhaps he didn’t know what to do with them,  or maybe he actually did want me to read them. I shall never know his intent. His fairy tale fantasy does make mention of his hope that other generations will know the kind of love of which he experienced.

    Mmm. This is all very well, and I am glad to have read these letters, but my actual  impression of them though is not that it is a saga of true and perfect love, but years and years and years and years of one person trying to say to the other, “Hey, I’m just an ordinary person, and not the personification of “the perfect woman”. Hey, I shop, I eat, I get sick, I travel, I have problems with my kids, I drink – probably far too much, I smoke – yeah I know that’s really bad, I care for my aged mother, I go to parties, I don’t get invited to some parties – because of our illicit relationship,  etc, etc.” And the other person says, “I’ve never loved another as I love you. You are the, my, perfect woman.”

     This is the crux of the matter. Here is a love story that is probably all about projections and a room of ghosts, with very occasional brushing against the ordinary world.

     You see, I heard it all from the next room, the arguments, the crying and all that between my parents, even the words, “Don’t tell Liz.” I was a teenager then and I did not know, nor could find my voice for many years after this in how to say, “I do know, and do not like it.” 

     In the warped wisdom of my parents at the time when I was sixteen and when the great love affair of thirty years and more between the woman who was not my mother and my father had just begun, they thought it a good idea to send me to a psychologist. I’m very, very glad they did, for seeing the psych gave me my eventual freedom from the ghosts in the room.

     From that time forth I have been seeking authenticity: how to be real, clear and direct, all my life. It is likely that this is what drives me to do the work I do with my clients. I like the clarity that being real brings, and I like the freedom that is made manifest.  It is like the opening of the doors, the letting in of the light and air and the multiple choices that reveal themselves.  It is the clearing, and it is wonderful.

Anxiety

Anxiety    by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

    I’ve just realized this is the last Wednesday of the month, the deadline date for contributing articles to the Nimbin Good Times. To say I’m a bit stressed and anxious, is an understatement. I’ve contributed to this fine paper every month since March 2009 and really don’t want to miss an issue, if at all possible.

     Anxiety is my topic, appropriately. What a better way of working than working with material currently experienced.

     At the moment I am participating in an online international conference on the use of hypnosis in the treatment of anxiety. The tools we are adding to our repertoire are extremely useful and are available to any client wishing to work with me. So the matter of anxiety is close to me at other levels too.

     Anxiety has a structure that is pretty well universal. There is an internal voice that repeats messages of fear, danger, maybe lack of ability, that manifest alongside the mental reiterations, a physical component of tightness in the chest, perhaps some breathlessness, palpitations, dry mouth, and the like. The internal voice is quite high pitched, strained, and rapid. The message is not really rational and it repeats itself.

     Anxiety distorts and intensifies normal interaction in the world and with other people, so that our whole selves can feel overwhelmed with emotion and a sense of being out of control. The art then is to change those perceptions.

     For me, at the moment, my stress at needing to get this article written is being accompanied by fear of losing income. Ridiculous, isn’t it. These articles are one of my sources of income, so I have to write them (or at least so I think). At the forefront of my inner chatter are the words, “hurry, hurry, hurry”. There is, though, another voice that is taking the micky out of this and the “hurry, hurry, hurry” is acquiring a sort of sing song chant, “hari rama, rama rama, hari krisna, hari krisna” – and thus the tension is lessened. And here is a key to losing anxious feelings.

     It is impossible to maintain anxiety when other processes are introduced. There is a technique where the therapist suggests  the client writes down the words of stress in very small script. Then the client reads what she/he has written in a normal voice, and then re-reads the script in a very slow, bored voice. Such a technique changes the non-verbal qualities of the inner talk, and even changes how the body feels as the exercise is carried out.

     Neurological research is showing how this is possible. Changing a person’s experience of inner talk actually changes how the body-mind operates. Inner talk is iterative, that is, it has a quality of rumination, where stuff is thought of repeatedly. In terms of neural activity in the brain, the same pathways become entrenched and sometimes pretty difficult to get out of.  Worry that occupies us, occupies us more and more, unless we can break the looping that occurs. Breaking the pattern, as for instance, taking the micky out of the inner story (my “hurry” changed to “hari rama”), or slowing the words of worry down, or singing the story, or speaking the words in an ordinary  voice, have the power to actually disempower the rumination and the looping and thus forge new neural pathways. Breaking the pattern changes the body’s response to what used to be plain old anxiety and increases a relaxed state. The tightness goes, leaving a softness and a sense of being more fluid and easy.

     Other techniques are useful too. One technique  is remembering the tools we used to use to relax ourselves and learning to incorporate these tools when feeling stressed. For me, writing has this power. As I write this article, I feel more settled. Swimming is another means for me.

     A year or two ago, I had a client with a particular form of anxiety. I wont say what it was about, but I discovered she had a great love of running, down by the sea. In the hypnosis sessions, I “ran” with her in the wind, for in invoking such a scenario, she was able to enter into a deeply relaxed and yet aware state (which is what hypnosis is anyway); a state she was able to evoke whenever she needed to. The inner iterative voice lost its power and her whole demeanour changed in an enduring way. From week one to week three, her face was no longer pinched, her breathing was easy, and her skin glowed.  Along with these changes was a shift in how she worked with the people in her world and how she saw herself. She lost her belief that she was a weak/bad/anxious person. She become confident and looked it. Really fundamental changes occurred.

     Anxiety has a lot of energy connected to it. Unlocking that energy in a creative and helpful way can release and relieve a person very deeply so that they can live more fully and more easily in the world.

Not set in stone by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     When I was an academic at Murdoch University in Perth, WA,  I came across a lot of people convinced they were imposters and that they would soon be exposed and kicked out. I didn’t really experience this myself, and felt this time of my life as being wonderful fun. This may be because I’d spent ten years or so prior to this working as a researcher and editor of the writings of academics and ordinary people alike and knew that I didn’t need to set myself up as an expert, for I had certain skills and certain failings as well, but I was always willing to learn and expand my expertise. This is the key, I think. If I had thought of my knowledge and position as static and immutable, I’d be terrified if it was questioned, for then my view of myself would come tumbling down.

     I am not fearful of what life throws at me. I don’t identify myself with status or label, or whatever tag might be attached to me. This is not to say I am free from inner stories that  come to bite me. This is the human condition, I think. What has become different, as far as I’m concerned, is that I go for the thing that might otherwise inhibit me from acting, something that allows me to roll rather than get stuck. I wasn’t always like this. I was in fact a very fearful child.

     This not getting stuck in ideas about myself is useful in many aspects of life. In an article I read recently, the non-identification of  oneself in a negative status allows for fast healing, particularly in terms of relationship breakdowns. Those people who self talk with “I’m no good at relationships”, or “I always choose the wrong guy/woman” take much longer to recover.  By not identifying oneself as the inevitable cause of the breakdown of a relationship we’re free to say, simply, “this relationship was not right for me,“ and move on.  This is sometimes easier said than done, and sometimes counselling is useful in freeing ourselves from the negative self talk.

     Nothing really is set in stone as far as life is concerned. Memories of past times are wrapped in the paper of many layers of personal history and these can inhibit us moving forward. Sometimes what we tell ourselves about who we think we are gets in the way of doing what we really want. I nearly had this experience recently.

     I went to Perth during my recent summer holidays and was taken on a couple of trips to my favourite place, Rottnest Island, a place  dense with history, my own included in with prisoners of war and, before that, aboriginal incarceration. There are parts of the island that I have known intensely at significant points in my life from infancy onwards; parts that evoke a complex mix of delight, poignant anxiety, and  pangs of longing. The beach rosemary is so intensely beautiful that each time I go, I break a little piece and conceal it in my clothing to take home: rosemary for remembrance of sunny days at the beach.

    On one of the trips, I travelled on a friend’s boat. We snorkelled and frolicked off Green Island, a small rocky stack off the south side of the island, and a couple of the men donned their diving gear and went crayfishing. I remarked that I would love to dive, if I could. So after their return I was kitted out with weights, buoyancy control device, cylinder, fins and mask. It felt so incredibly heavy, heavier than I’d remembered it seven years ago when I used to dive quite often. I thought, I can’t do this and my mind was thus ablaze with  conflict: to dive or not. Thousands of reasons why not to dive, the thousands of images of myself as “the fearless one” came and went along with “I’m just a little middle aged weak lady,” blah blah blah, images of dying, of living, of disappearing into the deep deep blue,  arose and fell, and so on and so on.. I contemplated flipping myself over the side of the boat, but had images of knocking myself out doing it, so in a near trance I edged my way to the jumping platform, sat down and let go into the water. There was a sort of inevitability in all this and I merely dropped to the sea floor breathing as naturally as a fish.

     Diving always throws up my inner talk, and throws out beliefs I have about myself , but  in the end, I just have to get on and do it. No escape. Once you’re in the water, that’s it. The weights drag you under, and though you can inflate your vest it is so uncomfortable the underwater beckons, and that is so lovely.

     There is no escape in anything one chooses to do, really. Doing psychotherapy (like doing teaching) as opposed to being a psychotherapist (or being a teacher), there are no “outs”, unless of course one actually wants to be completely useless. Doing psychotherapy means being there, thinking, making metaphor, analogy, and being present with the other person where they are and challenging that when appropriate. This is not the time to set in stone anything. Not a time for having an immutable belief about oneself, nor thoughts  that one is brilliant or bad, or insipid. All is changing all the time, just like being in water.  Nothing is set in stone.  Living is being, and not being a thing.

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.