Deepening Perceptions

 Deepening Perceptions  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     In recent times I’ve found myself embedded in stories of unusual perception and sensitivity. I re-watched Tous les Matins du Monde  (All the Mornings of the World),  directed by Alain Corneau, 1991,  on the life of a 17^th century viol da gamba player, Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, who, on the death of his beloved wife retreats from his daughters and fine house to a hut in the garden to practice his instrument seventeen hours a day. His musicality increases to the level that he is sought out for his extraordinary skill by a brazen young man who wants to learn everything from him, but the master says, “No, you have skill but no musicality.” Time passes, with tragedies, and the man returns after a life of glitter and fame and requests his first lesson. The old master asks him what music is; is it this, is it that? What music is, says Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, is that which wakens the dead, and thus the lesson begins.

     This is a film, for me, of the extraordinary translucence of music, that strips away the extraneous useless matters of gestures and habituations of daily life, to the raw essence of being.  It is here, at least for me, where deepening perceptions begin.

     A few days after watching All the Mornings of the World,  I  saw Perfume, The Story of a Murderer, directed by Tom Tykwer, 2006. Here is a story of a fictional Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an eighteenth century man born with an extraordinarily heightened sense of smell (hyperosmia) who is obsessed with capturing the essential scent of young women, along with perfumes of flowers and fruits. He experiments with scent capturing techniques by murdering women and trying to urge off their pheromones into an unguent. Pheromones are those chemicals exuded by the body that affect the behaviour and physiology of other animals, including us.

     And then I’m reading Like Water for Chocolate, A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, by Laura Esquivel (1989). This about a woman who, forbidden to marry her lover, sheds tears that enter the meringue for the cake she makes for her sister’s wedding to her own lover that alters the perceptions of all those that ate it. From then, everything she cooks transforms its partakers.

    And then there is my work with clients. Much is about expanding perceptual awareness so that stuck patterns of living are freed up.

      It is very easy to get stuck. Taking up smoking or drinking or endless computer game playing or any other nerve calming activities  in times of stress makes sense. What doesn’t make a lot of sense is when these activities start to rule us. This is when tapping, once again, into doing things that naturally lead to expanded perceptual experiences can free us up, free us from the mouse-wheel of the same old, same old. The freeing up and the deepening of perceptual knowing in one individual has the capacity to change how we relate to other people and how they relate to us.

     Making music, perfume making (I’m not advocating murder!), and cooking, are activities that can help expand perceptual awareness and enjoyment and change lives. There is dance, running, swimming, painting, gardening, and so on, as well. All are active and require embodied engagement, and not just sitting back and entering fantasy realms. The point, though, is that just doing these activities  may be not enough to release a fixed mind-set that leads to harmful and habitual practices, we still have to know how to let go of them (even after we have stopped puffing), we still have to learn mindfulness  techniques that deepen perceptual awareness, so that the symptoms don’t return. This is where counselling and clinical hypnotherapy are  most valuable, but meditation or anything else that focuses on mindful participation helps. The talking cure of therapy is a very valuable one, though, for takes the exercise into an interpersonal realm and that helps release us from the things that bind us, releasing us into a fuller participation in the world.

Nothing is the Same

Nothing is the Same by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I recently went West back to my home town to look at wildflowers and catch up with friends. It’s a funny thing to try to do really, for going  back can never be achieved. One might return to a place, but the place, like everything shaped by the flux and flow of time and change, is not the same place.

     This was particularly poignant for me in two ways: some old friendships, it became clear, just don’t work anymore and the characteristics that I was once attracted to, are now just irritating. Some old friendships, on the other hand, remain buoyant and are a sheer pleasure to share in. These ones have moved with the times and we have grown to another level together.

     The other way was discovered in walking around the streets of my childhood and youth. The last time I visited, this place was all spick and span with new buildings and pavements and an atmosphere of get up and go. This time, I had a sense of a decaying ghetto. The block of units  now occupying the land on which my father designed and built our house now looked run down (and all in a remarkably short time). All the buildings in the street looked tired. The buildings that used to be an eclectic mix of Federation, Californian, and modernist designs, held together by loquat trees and rambling vines, are now boring units interspersed with sad houses with weeds of wood sorrel and daisies, gone to wrack and ruin. It seems the dreams of developers have somehow missed the mark, or else the population is transient and not the sturdy suburban stalwarts of old.

     Heraclitus (535- 475 BC)  said, “You cannot step into the same bit of river twice.” The water is different, the sand has changed and rocks worn down, the flush of new growth has grown old, and the old has grown new and interesting slimes and young fungi; there is nothing the same with this river that is life.

     I inevitably wonder whenever I go back to the landscape of my youth whether I should return there to live.  Every time, though, I cannot see why. I have made my home and my clinical practice in the northern rivers and I like it here. There are almost far too many memories back in the West for me to see the landscape afresh without its archaeological digs of personal history, and I rather  like only visiting those memories when I wish. Yes, I know, it seems I am contradicting myself here. I recognize that all is change, and that I cannot return to a time before the present, but that place is redolent with memories and it is my mind that try to hold the place in place.

    I’m not any different from anybody else here.  We all do it, but however much we try to keep our place safe from change, it doesn’t work. The mutability of living is just like water: impossible to keep in an unchanged form, forever.

     It interests me that a symptom of depression and obsessive compulsive disorder is the iteration, the doing or thinking of the same thing over and  over in a stuck way.  Seeking to find sanctuary in the repeated now doesn’t work. There is no peace here; iteration is just irritation and a place of anxiety. How nice it is to let go into flow, to not hold back nor try to hold still a pattern that, perhaps, used to be useful in times of stress. How good it feels not to have to regurgitate those old things that do not improve with time.

     The substance of  moving from this moment to the next to the next to the next is the substance of  the blood, flesh, bone and breath of life. Nothing is the same. All is change and I rather like it.

Playing and Working at Coming Clean

Playing and Working at Coming Clean  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

In this article I write about working at coming clean as part of a life’s individuation process.  It comes in two parts: The first written around 2pm and the second part, composed at 8pm. My reason is that the first expresses an exuberance untempered by useful critique and the latter with its bit of  reality check. Neither exuberance nor reality check are any better than the other, for both get change going and maintaining it.

2pm  

     I have taken up the cello again after a six year break. I’m revisiting the music I knew so well for the decades of music making and it is exhilarating.

      The cello sings my soul and I love it dearly and deeply.  I hear the music in my dreams, I hear it on the wind, I hear it among trees, in the ocean, on the streets, I hear it even in engines. 

     I was sixteen when I first sat down with a cello. It was exquisite. I’d played the violin for six years and, while quite nice, it didn’t fill me with joy. I asked my father if I could learn to play this instrument and he, dear man, found a cello and a teacher and so it began, this love affair of mine.

     Hearing and playing the music that sets one alight  is part of a celebration of integration of being who I am. Many people can identify with that, I know. Runners, cyclists, dancers, shelf stackers, writers,  even hypnotherapists and their clients, all know “the zone”. This flow is the state of relaxed focus that energizes us and it is something that has the power to change us fundamentally as we let go of old restrictive mind games.

8pm

     I drove to my cello lesson today in a town an hour from home, met my new teacher, took my beloved instrument from its case, tuned it up, and started playing. I played like a person only half awake, only partly conscious: old bad habits and weak hands  mingled  with passion, as well as a sneaky awareness that for a long time I was not using all of my brain. There was a passage I could not get right and I was mortified that I couldn’t do it. I felt such a fool. My teacher pointed out what I was not doing right and how I could make it better, and he wouldn’t let up. I had to do it.  I took over from his insistence and made myself do it.  I had become aware of my own muddied confusion and wanted clarity.

     This has given me an acute awareness of what my clients feel as they begin the process of detaching from old, damaging patterns and habits in their lives. First there may be an exuberance for the new work, but then the realization that strategies are needed to maintain and extend new insights. Both exuberance and plain old work are part of the transformative process of individuation. Individuation, as

the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) described it, is the bringing and integrating into consciousness the personal and collective unconscious. It is integral to the development of a sense of selfhood. It is also a process that continues throughout life.

     Music making is a wonderful metaphor for this individuation process. There is passion and desire for making music, for hearing it from the mountain tops, in the wind, and under the sea (I sometimes sing trumpet voluntaries while snorkelling),  and then there is the work: the adherence to making the making of music as clear as can be. It is as much a discipline as a passion. We want to live cleanly because we want to be understood, heard for who we are, and we want to speak clearly our truth without muddied confusion, and we seek uncluttered being. Both making music and therapy are neat ways of learning to do that, because the disciplined flow takes us there, without losing the passion. The soul sings.

Not at all like Topsy

 August 2016

Not at all like Topsy   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     There are three stories I want to tell.

     The first has to do with Topsy, a rag doll I was given when I was born. This doll was beautifully made out of brown felt cloth and had a sweet face sewn on her curly haired head. Her limbs were long and floppy and her body sturdy and girlish. She wore a red dress. I grew to love her.

     Each birthday my mother and I would go into town to buy Topsy a new face, as the old was well worn with all the kissing she received.

     Topsy and I grew up together, though her change was structural. Eventually

her stuffing came out and the cloth that was her skin became threadbare.

     Topsy, unlike her namesake in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by  the nineteenth century American author Harriet Beecher Stowe,   wasn’t just born, didn’t just grow’d, she came with a history, a maker (the lady upstairs in the block of flats we called home), the cloth maker, the face maker, the dress maker (my mother),  my history, my family, the context of middle class life in the fifties, in Western Australia, and so much more.

     The second story is about the period when I’d returned to university to do my Master of Counselling degree and was studying family and couples counselling. As part of our assessment we had to write a family history identifying specific characteristics typical to our family.  Until that point, I had a rather general curiosity about genealogy, but nothing more than that. I was amazed to find in my research definite patterns of behaviour on both sides of my family of origin. I discovered, for instance, that practically each generation on both my father’s and mother’s side had at least two, sometimes more, spouses and that there were split-level families dating back nearly two hundred years. Both sides of the  family were also adventurers, some travelled across the globe to escape conflicts of war and ideology.

     The third story describes what insight was brought to me while researching and writing my doctoral dissertation. I’d stumbled upon a book on Taoism, and was particularly taken by its Acknowledgements section; usually a place where the writer thanks their husband or wife, or colleagues. The author of this book, instead, thanked the trees and fungi, the sky, the birds, the pet dog, family, shopkeepers, library staff, colleagues and friends: all of which ameliorated the making of this book on the Tao of being in the world, which is a natural order of life. I was moved to write a similar Tao of acknowledgements and include in it not only my immediate milieu, but my academic influences: those thinkers who shaped my work and sense of self.

     All three stories are accounts of  realizing interrelationships. I’m moved to tell them because of a certain frustration I have concerning quite a lot of psychotherapeutic modalities that ignore the context of a person to concentrate on only individual and isolated behaviour,  as for instance, a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy, or relationships as if they are merely apparent fantasies and disembodied ideas. I’m thinking here of traditional psychoanalysis and Jungian analysis. A lot of solution focussed therapies also ignore the living system  that is being in the world. An awareness of the individual is important, but without a sense of the richness, or paucity, of experiencing others, we leave too much out in our therapeutic approach to the healing of clients.

     We didn’t just grow’d, and our behaviour cannot be extracted from what else is going on. Our family of origin and  our environment make us who we are.  We live in a Tao of relationship, and this is ground that therapy, I believe, needs to work within.

Feeling Secure; Adventuring Out

Feeling Secure; Adventuring Out   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD.

     When I was a little child I got fed up with being in my family and thought I’d run away. I scooped up a few essentials and scampered off down the road, without saying goodbye. The further away from the house I got, the less sure about my decision I became, until I got to the point of thinking, “Now what? Where do I go?” After all, where can a kid go, really? So I went back. Nobody knew that I’d left and nobody questioned me when I returned home; such was the nature of life as a  kid in a safe neighbourhood in the 50s. Whatever my own somewhat ambivalent difficulties with my mother were, I still felt safe at home in the family house with her, my brother and father.

     Security is a primary human need and so it is that in order to feel secure we form attachments to one another. From this place of security,  we find safety and freedom to explore the regions beyond this point.

    Attachment is that psychological connectedness that occurs between humans and lasts for a lengthy period of time. The level of this connectedness generally waxes and wanes and waxes, in a continuous circle of renewal and disintegration and renewal again. It is a thick space, with a richness that holds and releases and welcomes again. This looping is what a group of family therapists around the world call, “the circle of security”.  The circle of security allows a child, and later grown up, to venture out and explore the world, and return knowing they will be received by those that care for them with trust, respect, and in an attitude of freely given love.

     I meet a large range of people in my clinical practice and many of them are explorers of the greater world. Some, though, are very fearful of change, of different environments, and of people. Even coming to see me is felt to be a big risk. A very small number have never left this country town I now call home, and which I moved to seven years ago. This always sort of surprises me. I am a traveler from a family of travelers and enjoy going where I have never been before. I do, however, like to feel some sense of security wherever I am, and with this security comes a sense of being home wherever I am.

     Feeling safe is a key for all people. As infants, we reach out to our caregiver (usually our mother, but not always) and other close people and it is their level of sensitivity and responsivity that helps us develop a secure sense within ourselves. It is also in this space that empathy is born. Empathy is like going out to meet another person and walking with them awhile, without ever changing places with them.

     Part of the being present with another and sensitively receiving them is the sharing of eye contact.  Indeed the sharing of eye contact is one of the identifiers of healthy human development and more generally, a balanced psychology.  

     Not all can participate in such a sharing. People on the autism disorder spectrum are some who cannot hold such contact; others are avoidant because of certain learned behaviors dating back to infancy. Current research and therapies are finding ways to shift this pattern to a more fulsome contact. Such therapies introduce the person to incremental exposure to shared eye contact and the results are coming through that indicate there is an improvement in interpersonal relationships and a greater capacity for empathy. This work is exciting as it shows that the human brain is flexible and conditions that we previously thought could not be changed have some capacity for quite fundamental shifts. Furthermore, this work is suggesting that the principle of feeling secure and adventuring out isn’t just what happened in infancy shaping how we are the world, but is in continual negotiation throughout life. This is why psychotherapy works and this is why I work in the field. What we were once isn’t necessarily what we are now. We can and do change.

Selfies: Real Self or False?

Selfies: Real  Self or False?    by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     As my friends are probably well aware, I don’t like having my photograph taken. I never have. The few photographs of me as a child show an awkward child hiding behind my mother’s cotton dresses, or twisted around behind a fence, or something. I never liked being the object of “the gaze”, as literary theorists put it. So you don’t often see me smiling into the lens; you see something serious, which isn’t the whole truth of me. I can be silly, funny, and lightsome.

     Someone once did a study on who most smiles into the camera and psychotherapists and photographers are least likely to. We can conjecture here, as I have done on several occasions, that photographers and therapists prefer to do the looking and not be seen to be observing. We earn our living watching and listening intently and working with others to find a more comfortable place within themselves and in their relationships. A good photo provides a sort of anchor to experience and a good therapeutic session brings a greater ease into life.

     You wont find me taking selfies. This phenomenon that is extensively exhibited on social media is alien to me. My facebook page has a picture of a seal, at the moment. At other times, you’ll find the tiger, named Richard Parker, from the movie, The Life of Pi, or some raven, a whale, or something or other. For me to put up an actual picture of me doesn’t make me feel awkward, so much as just bored senseless. Now this is not to say that I am contemptuous of those who post pictures of themselves, I am merely saying that I am uncomfortable posting pictures of myself on social media.  My self-ness isn’t connected, in my mind, to pictures of myself.

     It’s an intriguing thing, the picture of oneself. Such artefacts reverse the image, so that a photo isn’t an actual representation of oneself, yet many of us identify with the picture, believing that the moment captured digitally is us. I read a lot of forums online, interested as I am, in the questions people ask about ordinary life, love, and meaning, and have noticed an exponential rise in recent times in questions along the lines of “am I pretty/handsome, will the boys/girls like me” accompanying selfies. It seems that these questioners identify very much with  their representation of themselves, that their sense of selfhood is actually contained in the photograph. I get the sense that such a belief in the image hides selves who are extremely lonely, full of doubt, and suicidal. The endless taking of the selfie, ironically, endeavours to connect the self to a presence among people, and yet it often fails to do so.

     I am interested in presence and immersion in environments. Perversely, possibly, I actively seek the rawness of encounter, and thus I enjoy diving to the bottom of the sea, or slipping over icy pavements, or plunging head first into wild places and thus I hardly ever actually photograph anything.

     I do admire beautiful pictures taken by others. Photography is a wonderful medium and often, but not always, very creative. As a representation of reality, though, it isn’t particularly. Whatever is depicted is still only a two-dimensional thing; the presentation of depth and light and shadow are merely tricks of the eye. The presence of a person is manifestly and magnificently greater than the image on an iphone, newspaper, or whatever we hold in our hand. Presence is the richness of contradiction, of concordance, of playfulness, of tears, of heartfelt meeting, of serious words, of changing visage, of the generosity of story and experience, of low points and exhilaration, of anxiety, doubts, and despair; it is being in a way that mishmashes together layers of interconnecting falsehoods and realities.  To be a presence is all these things. The photograph takes one piece and calls it everything.

     This one piece, though, has its place. It is a beginning of an exploration to the real self; any piece of self (real or false) is this. This will be part of the theme of an upcoming workshop.

     In August  (20^th – 21^st),  Indivar  from Perth will be returning to this region to run a non-residential weekend workshop, titled “From the False to the Real” which I will help facilitate.  Please email or phone me for details (dr_mccardell@yahoo.com, mobile 0429 199 021).

     Indivar (Jim Coventry) has over 50 years experience as a clinical psychologist and group leader. He is a gentle, incisive, insightful, creative, and very funny man and workshop participants often come away feeling that deep and complex issues have been addressed and selves spoken to at a deep hearts level. I’ve looked at the faces of the people and seen profound shifts and a new ease of being.  This is the kind of shift I observe with my own clients and it’s very heartening.  It’s a privilege to be present in the presence of fellow discoverers who are serious about living their lives with conscious awareness and delight in new understanding.

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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