The Gift of Fish by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2023

Very early on Christmas morning, my friend and I went swimming at a local beach. I was doing my favourite pastime of snorkeling and, once again, noticed how few fish there were for this time of the year. There was a fisherman standing at the water’s edge with his line in the water. This concerned me because this is a marine sanctuary and there were signs up saying fishing is prohibited. As I was debating about how to tell him that he shouldn’t be fishing here, he called out to me saying his line was caught and could I release it. My interior argument intensified: do I help the fisherman, or the fish? Where does my ethical choice lie, and why? In the end I was moved to help the fisherman who was a stranger to me. This decision  came down to the warm feelings that I have for my fellow human beings, even though I will fight rigorously for the health of the ocean.

  found the line, and released the hook and swam on. On returning to the shore and while my friend and I ate our Christmas breakfast, the fisherman came up and gave me two filleted fish. Again, my age old inner conflict was brought to the surface: I love eating seafood even though I am concerned for sea life. None of this is cut and dried for me. I delight in the smells and tastes of the ocean; I luxuriate in the deliciousness of it all even while earlier I might have  been immersed in thalassic waters, but I’m worried by the way the ocean is being denuded. On this day, this Christmas day, I couldn’t say no to the gift of fish, given that the fish were already dead and it was a gift after all and contradictorily, I like eating fish.

 And so, the conundrum of being human, this human, who eats fish and other seafood even while I relish swimming among  marine life: how do I reconcile the contradictions? I don’t. I hold the two parts together in an uneasy holding pattern. Am I any different from other predators? Seems not. Should I be different? I don’t know.  I am deeply connected to the conundrum of my existence in its many manifestations. I know I do not do well on a strictly vegetarian diet (something about my seafaring  northern European genetic makeup) and I love the sea and all her inhabitants. I think of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of marine life and how she chose the sea over marrying a man she did not love and how she decides whether fisherman catch fish, or not, or whether fish eat us or not. She gives, but also takes away. She is fierce, when she needs to be, but loving and giving when she chooses it. In this way, she can be seen to explain something of the ineffable mysteries of connectedness with all living things.

If I have learned anything it is that my decisions have to come about by weighing up my choices. I have to make those choices on the basis of what is most beneficial for those involved as I see fit then, even while I can note that those choices are not clear cut, and not choices that are inflexible to other conditions. Deciding to free the fisherman’s line on Christmas day may not be the choice I make should the situation arise again. Next time it may be the marine sanctuary that is given the voice, my voice. The mystery of connectedness as I felt it that day was all about human warmth, but it need not be. Water, as a symbol, binds us all together with life all around us but it gives and takes away.

Time to Grieve by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

December 2022

 Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did a tremendous service and disservice in identifying what she saw as the stages of grief in her work with the dying. It’s unfortunate that people sometimes give themselves a hard time because they think the way they’re handling their experience is wrong in some way and this idea is sometime supported by helping professionals.  

 Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist in the 1960s, identified in her book “On Death and Dying” what she saw as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. This stage theory suggests that one moves from each stage  in an orderly way, but in reality this isn’t the case. Nevertheless, let’s pretend this isn’t so and examine what she had to say about each stage.

 Stage 1: Denial. Quite often we respond to sudden loss or change by pretending it isn’t happening. This serves a purpose in numbing our feelings and giving us time to process it. You can call it a defence mechanism, or just accept it as a natural way of dealing with loss.

 And then you move from Denial to Anger when your suppressed emotions start welling to the surface. In this anger, there is a lot of sadness, bitterness, or resentment,   hidden away under the projection of rage onto the situation, other people, or even inanimate objects.

Then, you move to Bargaining and you find yourself creating lots of “what if,” “if only,” statements.  These helps you postpone the sadness, confusion, or hurt. If you are religiously inclined you are likely to try and bargain with God to get relief from your feelings that are welling up: “I promise to be a loving daughter of God, if you will take away my pain” kind of thing.

Stage 4 describes Depression. Here there are profound feelings of despair and loss. You feel heavy, confused, foggy and really sad. You want to isolate yourself, and just feel the feelings as they dump upon you. This phase often feels like what people say about the nature of loss, that it is inevitable and that is something that must be taken care of, maybe through medication.  But, hang on, maybe there is more afoot here and maybe then is the time to talk about it all with a counsellor. 

And then, according to Kubler-Ross, you may enter Stage 5: Acceptance. Now this doesn’t mean you’ve moved beyond grief or loss, but have accepted it and have come to some understanding of what it means for you in your life. 

Now this stage theory of grief is  all very well, but, in my experience and the experiences of many other therapists, feelings of loss do not follow a clear cut pattern; rather we dip in and out of such feelings throughout life. One therapist I know who suffered tremendous personal loss when her twelve year old daughter died of a brain tumour thirty years ago, and who now works as a grief counsellor, suggests we consider another way of thinking about the process of grief. She sees the process of grieving not in a stage form but as an infinite loop where feelings of sadness arise and diminish in an accepting kind of way, and accordingly she  continues to celebrate the life of her child with each of the deceased birthdays and the day of her death.

 I acknowledge the wisdom of this infinite loop model and utilize it with my clients. I might, for instance, recommend spending thirty minutes a day giving mindful space and time to feelings of loss and sadness, suggesting to my client that it’s actually ok to feel such feelings for the rest of their life, or not, however they feel. There is no time limit on feelings of loss, and such feelings are not negative, dark entities, but part of the richness of life itself. There are no rules here, and our experiences matter. By spending just thirty minutes a day also safeguards our experiences from overwhelming us into a contained and special place. We can make this time beautiful, with flowers and candles, or not, as we wish. It’s ok to feel sad, to grief.

 

Keeping the Balance by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

November 2022

I’ve been trying to practice samatva, the via media, the middle way, equanimity… call it what you will for several decades now. It is the equal consideration towards all sentient beings, the conscious awareness of the transience of reality, the not believing in and getting caught up in extremes. I came to this not from the teachings of the various religions, even though the idea of keeping the balance is implicit in all of them, but from my own life’s experiences.

 Until my thirties, I was very much thrown around by the winds of extremes and I realized one day that, unless I found a middle path, the torment of extreme feelings would destroy me and so I began a daily practice of discernment and careful listening for what matters and what doesn’t, as well as choosing not to believe in the highs and lows of my emotions (neither elation nor depression). They, after all, are endlessly subject to change and are not a measure of reality itself. This practice of equanimity, I believe, contributes well to my skills as a psychotherapist. My interest is thus less on technique, more on my capacity for staying present with whatever arises interiorily and thus allowing me to be present with whatever the other person brings into the therapeutic relationship.

 Being, and staying present with the other person necessitates being mindful of them as much as myself, with awareness that they have chosen to come because they are suffering in some way. My mindful presence creates a sense of safety for the client, giving them courage to address the issues that surround their feelings of anxiety, depression, or whatever.  Successful therapy changes the client’s relationship to his/her particular form of suffering freeing them to pursue a happier life.

 So, what is mindfulness and how can we achieve equanimity? It’s interesting that despite the term ‘mindfulness’ being so integral to much modern psychotherapy, including the very popular cognitive behavioural therapy, and it is being taught in workshops and in counselling sessions all over the world, it is only now being effectively defined.

 Mindfulness is being in the moment. It is a way of relating to all experience – positive, negative and neutral – such that our suffering is reduced and our sense of well-being increases. To be mindful is to wake up, to recognize what is happening in the present moment, and not coloured by old memories, traumatic reactions, dreams, etc.

 When we are mindless, we rush from activity to activity, we drop things, break them, hurt ourselves; we fail to observe the subtle changes in our feelings, we eat and drink without awareness, and we are preoccupied with the past or the future and are not aware of what’s happening right now.

 Being mindful is being aware of the present moment; it’s paying attention to the circumstances and issues of right now and it enables us to attend to what is required now. It allows us to step out of our conditioning and see things in a fresh vibrant way. All this mindful presence allows us to develop equanimity and thus to weather the storms of unconscious conditioned behaviour with a deep calm and clarity of mind. 

 The process of the development of mindfulness enables us  to reduce vulnerability to stress and emotional distress and allows  us to keep a steady course throughout life.

 Working towards mindfulness and thus achieving a balance is, as I’ve observed before, the aim of all religions. The via media, is a Christian idea; the samatva is Hindu; equanimity is implicit in Taoism and Buddhism; and it is central also to Islam, Bahai, and the Greek philosophies, but as a life long strategy for equitable living it makes a lot of sense. We are less inclined to enter arguments and wars and, very positively, we are more able to achieve a greater simplicity of being open and loving towards the world.

 The Sufi twirling dervish achieves a simplicity and direct experience of the here and now at the core of their being despite turning round and round and round. This is my aim: a wonderful interior harmony.

 

 

 

Remembering and Releasing and Restoring by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

October 2022

 I’m packing up and moving elsewhere. The elsewhere is my home city of Perth. Why? I’m increasingly missing the clarity of the turquoise Indian Ocean and my daily swims there and walks through seaweed and white sand; even the cacophony of sea gulls. I’m missing the landscape of my place, the smells of eucalypts, beach rosemary, pines, and sea salt. I’m missing the dryness of limestone and granite, and my easy access to academic libraries, the Fremantle arts scene and its orchestra that I used to play the cello in. I’m missing my community of old friends and mentors.

 This is not to say I have lived an isolated life here, I haven’t. I have some dear friends in this part of the world too and I do go to concerts and exhibitions, and I do go down to the Pacific Ocean for swims as well as the university pool, but the floods, the rain, the humidity, the mould feel so strange to me, although it is now thirteen years since my arrival in Lismore.

 So, it will be goodbye northern rivers, and hello Fremantle, where I’m planning to live. Hello lots of salt water play: snorkeling, diving, swimming, kayaking, dancing with dolphins under a clear bright sky.

 I remember one time of kayaking around Penguin Island in Shoalwater Bay, near Rockingham and a couple of dolphins came up beside my little vessel and accompanied me from one shore to the next. Sheer magic. And another time, snorkeling with others in that general area and being met with three dolphins heads down feeding in the reeds below. I noticed the glowing faces of other snorkelers around me. We were in love.

 And so I am sorting, throwing away, remembering and uncovering layers upon layers of stories: archaeological finds of my own history and that of my parents, for when I came here it was just a couple of years after my very old father died and I didn’t do much in the way of sorting, as I should’ve done then, but packed up stuff that I have never even glanced at. All this reminds me of a cartoon I once saw of an old man showing his son a garage packed with stuff, saying to him, “Remember, Bill, when I die, all this is yours.” Thanks Dad (not).

 We accumulate stuff, material and just memories – all of which becomes a not always welcome part of our daily lives. Quite a lot of it, though, is unnecessary and sometimes detrimental to our well being.

 Stuff decay and memories fade, for sure, but far too much lingers, loiters around for millennia. The world is drowning in it, the material and the ephemeral but mind grabbing dream world. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has much to say about this, ghosts and demons as well as very attractive angels. As much as the very lovely grabs us, so does the horrible and intoxicating nastiness of abuse and other poisons that damage the soul. So, the choices we make concerning them really matters. We can release, and we can help restore a good life for ourselves and others through an act of giving, but what we retain we need to have mindfully, with awareness. I believe my work in this place, and wherever I am, serves this purpose: of participating in the restoration of  equilibrium through awareness and shared connections. 

 I will continue to offer my work online and face-to-face here and in Perth. Obviously I can’t be in two places at once, but those wanting counselling, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy and/or clinical supervision can contact me and we’ll do our work together online. Until I leave, I’ll also be available for face-to-face sessions.

 This is probably not the final article, but I do wish to say here how grateful I am to have had a platform for exploring the processes and spaces between us in the therapeutic relationship in the richness of life in this fertile land, as well as meeting some pretty wonderful people. Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tabula rasa, it isn’t by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 September 2022

 I’ve hired a painter to do the railings, eaves, front door frame, windowsills, and the like in colorbond classic cream. The door frame to the glorious red front door had been a Chinese green, but now I’m having to subdue my exuberance a little. The plan is to sell my house and move elsewhere, and so I’m following the painter’s advice: provide more of a blank slate, a tabula rasa, for potential buyers.

 The whole notion of a tabula rasa goes against my grain, aesthetically as well as theoretically. Those who know me know I love colour and beige and grey just doesn’t do it. Classic cream, I’m discovering, as more surfaces are painted, is bringing a lovely sunshine to the place. The house has, after all, violet-blue posts and a deep red roof and a wall cladding of soft golden ochre. She won’t be losing her personality getting classic cream railings.

 When I was a child my father would consult me as to what colours to paint the doors of the family house, or the family car, or anything else that needed colour. I loved light green (still do), and so we travelled around in a couple of light green cars over the years (my father clearly liked the colour too). For the exterior doors of the house that my architect father designed, I chose red for the front door, green for my room, yellow, blue and white for the other doors. It looked like a Miro painting.

 My trip to China in 1998 saturated my colour passion even further. How incredible were those archways and porticos of temples in their reds, blues, yellows and greens, dappled in the autumn leaves of November. How very un-beige was that experience.

 I’m not made for the idea of the blank slate, and I certainly know that the art of psychotherapy cannot operate from such a bland stance. A person comes for their first (middle and last and every session in between) filled with their uniqueness of life, their palette of intensity and lightness and darkness and different shades of being. And yet, some branches of psychotherapeutic thought persist with the idea that we are born as blank slates that fill with novel learned and perceived post-natal stuff.

 We are already shaped physiologically and emotionally (and thus style and possibly contents of thoughts) by maternal stress levels, our mother’s consumption of alcohol and drugs, her experiences of economic and cultural pressures, and other environmental influences all contribute to how we are when we are born, and often, how we are throughout our life.

 Too much alcohol consumption affects  pre-natal growth, such that offspring can be born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder causes brain damage and growth problems. The child also craves alcohol. The effects of FASD last throughout life. The problems change as the child grows up. Behaviour and mood problems such as alcohol and drug abuse, depression, psychosis and aggressive behaviour may develop in the teenage years. The problems vary from child to child, but defects are not reversible.  And then there’s Neonatal abstinence syndrome which is what happens when fetuses are exposed to drugs (opiates, mostly) in the womb before birth. Babies can then go through drug withdrawal after birth. Prenatal stress can increase the development of depression and anxiety in babies, that may persist throughout life.

 On the positive side, newborn babies can remember melodies played to them while they were in the womb, according to some research. There’s also that rather mysterious thing of reincarnation: some children, it seems, are born with knowledges of other lives. Who really knows the veracity of these things, but, in some parts of the world, this is idea is built deeply into the psyche of the people.

 There is no tabula rasa, we are all part of the rich abundance of human experience and that everything we engage in remains present in the broader field of lives. Same goes for houses. Whatever others make of my house, some of my presence remains. And that’s rather fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Snowdrop by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 August 2022

 

     One of my favourite plants is the snowdrop. It spends most of the year as nothing more than a small swollen bulb underneath the dark earth. Time moves on, day to night to day… seasons change from hot to cooler to cold, rains come and go and come again, and nothing much seems to happen around that patch of ground. Where did I plant the snowdrop bulb again?

      Life goes on, new decisions are arrived at, new choices made, old stuff is left behind, new plans initiated. Change is constantly with us: some we fear, some welcomed, some just thrust upon us and we are forced into making new choices.

      Why, when transformation is happening within us/ for us, do we try and hold it back, to contain it, to try and continue the same old, same old? Why, so often, are we just afraid of change?  Why do we attempt to hold back the inner juices of inevitable shift in our being?

      The little bulb lying silently underneath the dark earth follows its own apparent inchoate primordial process, doing its own thing: growing roots, and preparing an upward thrust through granules of soil out to the sky beyond; much of which we don’t see until little green leaves appear.

      Are we actually any different? Does change in our own life go unnoticed until we find ourselves seemingly suddenly facing unfamiliar new things? Is meeting the sky unfamiliar to the little bulbed one, or is this new stage already known in the fabric of the cells of its being, in its memory of existence itself?

     My feeling is that we, like the little plant, have a deep knowing of the nature of transformation and a deep reverence for it. The stuff of religious ideas is emergent from it. The Christ rising from the dead, the miracles of lamas who transmogrify into rainbows, the mysteries of manifestations are all implicit in our ordinary processes of change.

      What then, the fear? Much of our lives is spent in trying to hold still the unstoppable. Do we not have faith in natural processes? In the Tao of life?

      I like to watch the making of sand mandalas by Tibetan Buddhist monks. Utmost attention is put to each grain of sand rubbed down by vibrations to the patterns forming below. The mandalas are of heavenly architectural buildings representing the dimensions of ourselves. When the “buildings” are made, they are sung over, and then scraped up into a vase and walked down to a river or the sea to be scattered to the beyond. Each act is the letting go of any idea of holding to the unchanged, for all is change, all is flux.

      There is something very beautiful in change. The little plant, now growing strongly, forms buds and then, in the miracle of silence, exquisite white flowers come forth: white blossoms with spots of green and a faint perfume. It is a pretty flower, the snowdrop, but so are we as revelations of beings in the process of becoming.

    Let’s not be frightened of change. We cannot control every aspect of our lives, and neither is there any benefit in attempting to do so. We can simply acknowledge that the changes that we become aware of have been happening anyway outside our consciousness. It is implicit in the nature of being itself. We cannot control the essence of life because it pulses through us. We are like snowdrop bulbs making flowers in the making of new futures.

 

Being Careful What One Says in Therapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

July 2022

 I’ve always thought a really good conferences paper would be to present an examination of what not to say in the psychotherapeutic session.  You can really ruin a perfectly good hour by careless talk, and other dodgy contributions. You need to be mindful of your responsibility to prepare the client to re-enter the ordinary world as well as nurture their ongoing healing beyond the hourly session. This means gently disengaging them from the thickness, as it were, of any emotionally charged material through conversation about everyday things. I might, thus, talk about how beautiful the sun feels after really cold, chilly days, or something like that.

 The therapeutic hour has a rich density about it. It is bounded by a greeting at the beginning to a see you next session at the end. In between, though, there is a contained conversation that is therapeutic and driven by the therapeutic capacity to hold the space safely, with confidentiality. It is, as I’ve said, thick and rich, for it is quite unlike any other conversation any of us will have out in the rest of the world.

 Erving Polster wrote a significant book that, in one flash several years ago, gave me an understanding of therapy that I really didn’t have before. His book, From the Radical Centre, The Heart of Gestalt Therapy (2000), had encaptulated, in one sentence something that I’d only intuited, but not articulated. He wrote, in so many words, that therapy is the space between a deep hypnotic trance and a light hypnotic trance and that the continuation of the therapeutic work needs to not only nurture what is learned in that rich space, but not damage it. This accelerated my understanding enormously and, as an offshoot, encouraged me to do a Diploma of Clinical Hypnotherapy on top of my existing Master of Counselling degree. It brought a mindfulness to the doing of therapy and thus a more careful consideration about the words (and actions) I use before, during and around the point of concluding a session. It also delivered greater thoughtfulness about what therapy actually is, something that I continue to mull on umpteen years later.

 How we conduct ourselves as therapists really matters. In this article I am focussing on the words we speak, but our actions can damage this relationship.  Talking about oneself too much (a little is therapeutically useful), boundary violations (for example, sexual advances, unnecessary touching, and associated invasive speech), and just plain thoughtless chatter, all have the capacity to absolutely destroy the therapeutic relationship. Right conduct is essential for the containment of the therapeutic experience and a sense that what is learned in that session may be carried on beyond the hour to the rest of the client’s life.

 So, what words might one sensibly not say?  Direct reference to a presenting problem right at the end of the session when in the process of saying goodbye is unhelpful: not least in bringing the client’s attention again to the thing that they are fighting against, making it seductively more attractive. We all know how thoughts about the thing we are trying to give up become like sirens singing to sailors: come hither and taste the forbidden potion. I remember doing periods of fasting and having difficulty because I was preoccupied with the idea of fasting. Abstinence became an obstacle rather than an absence.

 “I guess you won’t want to smoke/drink/play the pokies, doubt yourself anymore,” puts to mind a focus on the thing that you don’t want your mind thinking about. The less one sys about the presenting problem the better right at the end of a session.

 What needs to happen here is a gentle re-introduction to ordinary life, and so I talk about such things as  the weather, or suggest my client has a good cup of something enjoyable,  a hot fragrant bath, a wander around a garden, a visit with friends, or settle down with a good book. The absence of focus on the thing troubling them is the whole point. Healing happens at an unconscious level from the therapeutic work and beyond.