Speaking up in intimate relationships by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 May 2019

     There is a meme doing the rounds at the moment that I think is exactly right particularly where relationships are concerned, that is. It reads, “Be careful what you tolerate, you are teaching people how to treat you.”

     Unless you speak up and say what is bothering you, others will think you agree with them, or at least don’t really care, because otherwise, how would they know.  A lot of gaslighting begins here. The gaslighted tolerates quite a bit of abuse for a variety of reasons including the idea that the abuser is aware, without us telling them, that their actions are having a bad effect on us. The thing is, most of the time they are not aware.

      By repeatedly not speaking up, a person can get really confused by the seeming lack of empathy coming at them from others and in this confusion they can feel a deluge of contradictory responses to them, such that they don’t know themselves anymore. This give a clue to where a person is at emotionally. I see a number of people in this disempowered mindspace who are experiencing interior collapse, without knowing where to start to regain their sense of self. The other person blithely continues this line of unexamined abuse for they don’t have a gauge of the us.

     The belief that others sort of know us without being told is a hang over from early childhood when the child thinks the world revolves around them and that everyone shares the same mindspace as themselves. This is classical magical thinking.  Magical thinking assumes that there is a causal link between one's inner, personal experience and the external physical world, and that other people automatically know what  the child is thinking, hoping for, wishing for. I suspect that a lot of adults harbor some beliefs of this kind. It is, interestingly, in intimate relationships where the magical thinking of childhood tends to reemerge. For it is in such relationships we often expect the other person to know us more than perhaps they do, and when they don’t, we get a shock.

     Magical  thinking is implicit in the idea of romantic love, something writ large in popular culture.  There we have ideas of how it is to be in love, where heart and soul are shared, where there are not two, but one, where there is a sacred unity in love making and where we are destined to be together. I am not saying that this kind of experience doesn’t happen; what I am saying is that such an experience isn’t present all the time, and shouldn’t be.

     Too much gets assumed, consumed, presumed, when we expect a closeness that is unexamined. It is in the unexamined that abuse is free to occur, and often does. It is in the unexamined and unspoken that one or the other of us can assert a control over what they deem suitable or unsuitable for us: clothes they want us to wear, music they don’t want us listening to, members of the family that they expect us to not associate with, whole philosophies of life that they assume we are not interested in.

     A sense of being together is important, but also important is a sense of remaining an individual capable of speaking up when required.  When we, as individuals, speak up we give permission for ourselves to be different people and also allow the other person their uniqueness. They are not us, and we are not them. How nice it is to be recognized and loved for ourselves, and not merely as a projection of our first caregiver (usually our mother). Our adult relationships need to be different from  our parental ones. This differentiation, this separation, is the beginning of the positive state of being caste out of an Edenesque unconsciousness to an individuated self.

     Consciousness requires us to examine and speak of our individual truths and lives.  When we speak from our unique place we define ourselves and we literally shape how others treat us.  And we, in knowing ourselves differently, can speak increasingly with confidence and authenticity.

Thinking Beyond Stone by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

March 2019

     Many years ago, sometime in the mid 1970s I was in Zurich, Switzerland sitting in an interview with the head of the Jung Institute talking about things. I was querying a fundamental doctrine of Jungian psychotherapy and the man said my question showed the emergence of the shadow of my father. I thought to myself, “bull,” but politely smiled and stayed silent. This one instance ultimately gathered enough steam for me not to stay a Jungian. They were not open to examination and questions.

     Last week, in a peer group gathering after hearing a lecture on an aspect of Freudian psychoanalysis, I once again piped up expressing my doubt about something said as an apparently irrefutable fact by the lecturer. I said then that I’m still thinking about the matter at hand and that I’m unwilling to accept the explanation given, unexamined. Interestingly, the guy running the group told me, in a roundabout way, that my question demonstrated some developmental anomaly in my psyche. Again, I thought to myself, “bull,” but didn’t saying anything in reply. I did say, I sense there is more to be thought about here, that we need to examine this thing further and maybe it’ll take twenty or so years to do that, but let’s do it. The idea that there is only ever one answer, a thing set in stone, is just lazy and not terribly useful.  It’s sort of like saying, as it used to be thought, that fire obviously has a substance called phlogiston and everybody who is anybody knows this. Phlogiston, they said, is contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion. For a very long time, this was the “scientific” explanation of what fire is, and people accepted it, and many people stopped thinking about it. In the late 18^th century, freer thinkers came to understand fire very differently. Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, release heat, light, and various reaction products. There is no phlogiston.

    A teacher of mine once said of me, I have a bull dog personality and won’t let go, unless I am satisfied.  No amount of persuasion, no amount of appeal to a “higher” authority will move me, as I am more interested in the fluidity of possibilities than apparent certainty. This is all very nice, but too often I find myself on the outer because of this, acquiring “diagnoses” along the way!

     The laziness in  accepting something because a person in authority has said so is giving up one’s personal agency as a thinker and that means getting stuck in stone, in my view.

     Fritz Perls, a founder of Gestalt Therapy, coined the term “introjection” to describe the unexamined, undigested, swallowed whole foreign bodies (ideas) taken in uncritically from the caretakers (mother, father, school teachers, church ministers, social media) of our lives. Quite often these introjects are consumed like this because of the pressure of fashion, tradition, shame and fear about being different, and direct coercion. Usually the introjects are contradictory and the person spends agonizing hours trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. The noise from introjects consist of “should should”, leaving little room for developing one’s own personality. Interestingly too, where a person is dominated by introjects they also have a lot of digestive issues. They literally cannot digest what has been fed them, everything sticks in the craw (nothing goes down, nothing nourishes). Quite often, as soon as introjects are identified and known as coming from elsewhere, their tummy troubles ease up. Identifying introjects is one very important function of counselling. In each counselling session we work together on identifying what is yours, what came from your parents and other caregivers,  whose ideas about this and that have you swallowed whole, and why, and getting to think beneath the stone to the soft earth and water below where all of us are free to examine whatever it is we wish without taking on board another person’s dogma and doctrine for our own creative life.

     Beyond the certainty of stone is a fluidity of being open to multiple ways of seeing and a freedom of being.

Diving down by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

February 2019

     I’ve ordered a full length, upper and lower body rashy for snorkelling and diving purposes. It had to be bought online because I couldn’t find anyone locally who sells them. I have a wetsuit for scuba, but find it cumbersome and too warm for comfort for shallow dives and hovering around on the surface of water. This purchase comes hard on the heels of my January birthday and the confirmation to self that, beside the work I do as a psychotherapist, snorkelling and diving are my favourite activities, along with music, and I want to do a lot more of those.

     As I muse upon these things, I am reminded again of an account told to me by my diving instructor from ten years ago, which in turn triggers a realization that what occurred in that incident, exposes the nature of dreams in a curiously similar fashion, though without the same conditions.  

     My diving instructor and his girlfriend did a dive in the Truk (Chuuk) Lagoon in Micronesia and the girlfriend suffered nitrogen narcosis (also called the “martini effect”) where she lost her entire memory of the dive. Nitrogen narcosis is a temporary condition caused by the effect of gases breathed in under pressure. She couldn’t recall anything of the dive at all. Then one day, eight months later, she said she’d had a dream and she related everything they’d seen together on the Truk dive. Her memory of the dive had returned.

     To me, this account shows the stratospheres of the mind and the usefulness of dreams in bringing knowledge that is not readily accessible by ordinary means but which can be useful in ordinary and therapeutic life.

     I usually ask my clients about their dreams, not only because they prove useful tools in the therapy itself, but they allow me entrance into the unconscious of the person, and their inner truth. (As I write this, I am entranced by the word “en-trance” and its seductive suggestion that the dream draws us both in to a trance state, which feels just about right.)

     Dream interpretation should arise from the dreamer, and not be imposed by dictionaries of dream interpretation, nor from the therapist. The image of a snake may have nothing to do with sexuality, even though a dictionary might say otherwise. It might suggest, or not, the healing powers of injury and suffering, as the symbol of the entwined snakes on the staff, the caduceus (the staff of Hermes), or anything else more relevant for the dreamer.

“The dream,” as Jung puts it, “shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.” (1934)

     I reveal myself when I write of diving down as entering the unconscious, but that interpretation would mean nothing to someone who does not dive or who has no associations in this way. My way of thinking is not universal, and likewise for you.

     Because I both dive and interpret dreams and because I’ve made the association myself, diving down is rich and redolent with meaning for me. Because I operate this way, I’m attracted to certain therapeutic ideas over other ones that speak to me. I am attracted to psychodynamic psychotherapy, and always have been. My first training was in Jungian psychology in the 1970s.  C. G. Jung’s ideas resonated with me and so I engage with him, and others similarly inclined, and continue to think and learn and mull and dive.

     I have colleagues who do not work with dreams at all and see no point in them, seeing the dream as silly and absurd. To those I say, why would we dream, if not to have this as a resource for possible discovery? We all dream and there are  inklings of meaning to be had in exploring them. But, whatever each of us seeks, so that should be the point of any counselling. I seek the healing of the whole person, and so diving is what I do.

“What we perceive depends on how we direct our attention.” (Milton Erickson) by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2019

     Perception is an interesting thing. Most of the time we see our world as we have become accustomed to seeing it. This is generally useful as it means we are not having to work hard at living life, but can assume a lot of things and then get on with making sense of the novel. 

     Our responses to what we perceive can largely become part of a well-oiled machine, which is not to say that this is necessarily good. In families, old patterns of behaviour in interactions between members and beyond that to interactions with other people who simply remind us of a family member, can be practically set in stone in a destructive manner. For example, a little girl is bossed around by her older sister who has been given the care of the younger one because mother is ill. The older sister has always been angry at having to be “mother” to her sister and forced, more or less, to give up her own childhood. The younger one doesn’t really know any difference. Mum is sort of there, but not as a comforter when she is hurt. “Mother-sister” is unreliable (she’s angry, after all), but who else is there? Father works away, and there is no other family nearby, and so the little one has to depend on this person who feels good/not good. When she grows up, she meets a man who is good and not good. He is familiar, but still not quite known. He behaves unpredictably and erratically, he is there and then he disappears and returns to surprise her, and then goes, and then comes.  Every time the woman meets with her older sister, she feels attacked and sort of depleted. She notices that afterward seeing her sister she eats a lot of sweets even though she isn’t hungry and even though she is now pre-diabetic. She attends psychotherapy sessions and starts to notice the patterns of behaviour in her own life as well as that in the man she’s with. She breaks up with him and at the same time, builds an understanding her sister more. She starts to notice that as her perceptions of that woman’s behaviour change, so are her reactions changing. She doesn’t feel the same imploded feelings so much and doesn’t consume massive amount of  ice cream in the way she used to.

     The process of psychotherapy interrupts not only tired old modes of interaction that are not working, but brings insights that create an ongoing capacity to change how we respond to others in the world. This, though, doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. As anyone who has experienced how it is to stop reacting as one has traditionally done within families and other groups, one’s non-reactions disturb the machinery of the family system and certain others can become belligerent and nasty. My suggestion when such things happen is to walk away and leave the antagonist to fight their own shadows. I’m reminded of the martial artist who, when the opponent lunges aggressively at them, simply steps aside. The opponent topples over. Neat.

     In time, the perceptions of other people in response to us change as we change and how they behave towards us changes too. Family and other social systems are not immutable, but fluid and flexible. What once was, doesn’t have to be forever. Our perceptions change according to how we direct our attention, and that changes practically everything.