Survivors' Children by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns,. PhD

January 2014

      A man can’t sleep at night. He’s tired all day, sometimes dropping asleep in conversation, but when night comes he can’t lie down and relax. He’s all wound up. I knew his mother was German-born and his father was English. That’s all.  Some time later I met them both and learnt that his mother was Jewish and her father took the family to Crimea for safety, but not before three bombs landed in their house and didn’t go off. The sleepless man’s father, I discovered, had been sent alone to Australia before the rest of the family followed. Since he was still a child, he was taken to a children’s home in a city here. There he waited three years before his family came to collect him. Both mother and father of the sleepless man were children experiencing huge upheavals: one knowing of bombs not exploding and an escape to the Crimea, the other wrenched from family and sent to an children’s home in a foreign country, wondering, wondering when he would safe with his family again. 

      What have his parents’ experience got to do with the sleepless man? Before I respond to that, I’ll present another couple of  scenarios.

      A little girl is in boarding school in Russia. She and all the people around her are starving. Yes, her mind is fed with languages (she knew five), art, dance, theatre, science, discovery. Her stomach gnaws at her like the rat that chews at her shoes beside her bed. She is rescued by her step-mother and sent to Australia with her brother.  She meets and marries two men. One beats her, and she escapes from him. The other is charming, suave, a bit remote, but very intelligent. They have children. The youngest,  a girl, doesn’t want to eat, yet she feels always hungry. The daughter develops an eating disorder that she recovers from eventually, but the issue of food always looms large for her. 

      Some people dream the fears of their parents and grandparents. When I was a child a recurring dream was of a Zeppelin airship flying over the house.  My father would not have seen these, but he had uncles who died in the trenches in World War I when the German airship, the Zeppelin was around. I guess my father was very frightened of these when he was a child, a fear I picked up somehow or other.

     Intergenerational trauma is very real. The experiences of therapists and research neurobiologists are showing the way in which many children have unconsciously adopted the symptoms of their parents and other relatives, at an almost cellular level. 

      A 2010  a Time magazine article describes how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms in second-generation survivors are being found in their behaviour and also their blood. Higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol are found in the children of survivors, and the children’s children. Until recently, it was assumed that these symptoms were essentially learned. The idea was that if you grow up with parents who can’t sleep, suffer mood swings, hypervigilance, irritability and jumpiness (symptoms of PTSD) you’re likely to become stressed and hypervigilant yourself. There is more to it, though. Neurobiological research using the study of epigenetics, where environmental factors are seen to change genes in ways that can be passed to the next generation, is identifying actual changes to genetic material among subjects whose parents were traumatized previously.

      Most studies of survivors’ children have been done with the children of Holocaust survivors, and their children’s children. The uncertainty of life, the observation of death and extreme cruelty, and sometimes the disbelief that the survivors lived when the rest of their families died, deeply affected them, both positively and negatively. Positively, by instilling into their children a deep appreciation of life and an urgency to live that life meaningfully and fully. Negatively, by, as I’ve noted, creating a hypervigilance, a jumpiness, an irritability, and sleep disorders.

      How much parents tell their children of their own trauma is reflected in how the children experience that relationship they have with their parents. If the background story is not told, or surrounded by partial mystery, the child may feel drained and disconnected from their parents. If the story overflows with too much traumatic information, then the child is overwhelmed. These feelings of disconnection or overwhelm may extend into the way the child welcomes the rest of the world.

       Either way, a child whose family background story includes extreme trauma may experience some difficulty in their development, including problems at a social level. These may manifest in later life as sleep disorders, habitual smoking, under or over eating, alcoholism, and the like. At the same time, the child may gain some very essential coping skills. It really depends on how much support is given to the survivors from family, friends, and counsellors. Intergenerational transmission of trauma can be averted through the critical intervention of  counselling and clinical hypnotherapy. As a mentor said to me once, we always have a chance to heal ourselves and our families. Healing ourselves, heals our families.

Cleaning the Flaws by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip CH Dec 2013

Dec 2013 

     I’ve been thinking about the necessary work therapists and healers in general have to do on themselves in order that projections and assumptions are avoided while working with others. It dawned on me that the work is a bit like house cleaning and then the pun struck me, it’s cleaning the flaws and not being careless about it. It’s thorough work that is required.

      This kind of  work means increasing our awareness of  not only our sense of ourselves (our believes, hopes, dreams, vulnerabilities) but what we project onto others: what things we admire in others, and what we use to condemn in others, and also those things that inadvertently jump out of  our mouths. When we engage in judging others, we most often do it as if we were not part of a relationship with that person and, as such, we project onto them very detached, very disowned shadows of ourselves. 

      The Shadow, as Jung called it, has both negative and positive qualities (two faces) and thus is found in those qualities that scream at us when another person displays it or idolize it when someone else personifies it.  When we idolize someone we are sometimes just projecting a disowned part of ourselves that we have set aside out of a false sense of modesty.  I, for instance, get quite defensive when people comment on my achievements and yet promote, somewhat idealistically, the almost glamorous achievements of others. 

      Two things happen simultaneously for me when my achievements are commented upon: I forget what I’m supposed to know and I feel ashamed. The air around me in that moment is thick with stories. It’s noticing things like that that Shadow work comes to its own, and not just for curiosity’s sake, but as a matter of necessity, particularly for those who work closely with other people.

The Shadow has other characteristics as well. As in a dream I heard recently, it lies in a metaphorical box in which something or other is leaking its contents. The box doesn’t even need to be opened for the contents to leak out. It’s like a rotten piece of fruit that, instead of drying up, is dribbling out the stuff that refuses to be ignored. The leaking Shadow comes out in displacement behaviour (like smoking, drinking, compulsive sexual encounters, excessive eating, or playing endless video games, for instance) that is contrary to our own ideas about health, morality and safety. It’s what we do when we don’t want to do something else.  When you repeat that behaviour seemingly involuntarily, it’s a sign that your Shadow is running the show.

      So it’s necessary to know what is going on in the Shadow world; to bring conscious awareness to it and give it a voice. Sometimes this Shadow work is helped by seeing another therapist, of whatever modality, to increase our awareness of our own processes so that we can be not only more present to our own purposes and needs but to achieve what is called “phenomenological bracketing” when working with others.  We need an acute sensitivity to ourselves and an acute sensitivity to the person we’re working with, and the wisdom to know the difference between us.

      Healers are at risk all the time of being only acutely aware of their patients and of not knowing where they begin and end and this is why personal work is critical. A healer, cannot afford to have the boundaries blurred too much. It is this reason, or at least part of it, that educational bodies are so strict in their requirements for practitioners. Knowing the stuff of therapy, medicine, acupuncture, herbs, or whatever, is just part of it. Knowing which belongs to me and which belongs to you is hugely necessary. The awareness of self as an instrument of healing and the awareness of self as an independent being protects us and allows us to continue doing therapeutic work for many years, without burn-out. Thus cleaning the flaws as an ordinary housekeeping job is really necessary, and like cleaning the floors in our homes, this work is something that is never done once and for all. You have to do it regularly, otherwise the muck just accumulates.

Ghost Catching with a Dress by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip Clin Hypnotherapy

Nov 2013 

      I recently watched on YouTube a very beautiful conversation among therapists and others talking on the death of mothers. The phrase ‘ghost catching with a dress’ came up in relation to finding clothing, letters, and treasured objects belonging to mothers who had died. I was very moved by the image, for I have such items from my own mother. Indeed, most of the crockery and utensils I use on a daily basis were from the cupboards of my mother. Hanging in my wardrobe is a red coat my mother made herself of the lining of officer’s coats during the war, there are gloves she made,  and there is a dress she fashioned from silk that I only very vaguely remember her wearing to a party once or twice. She was an extraordinary seamstress; a skill I entirely lack. 

     Ghost catching with a dress is, for me, the catching of glimpses of my mother’s life and story and those others I have known and loved. Glimpses sewn into the gossamer of memory – sometimes poignant and painful, sometimes sweet and tender.

      Life, death. What are these? When people talk of death, premature or after a long rich life, like my mother’s, I wonder yet again, what it all means. 

      The taking of one’s own life, throws another angle into the mix. There are many therapists who express deep concern for those who contemplate their own death, and while I too am disturbed by this, I am brought yet again to the existential place that I face on a daily basis: What of life, what of death?  I cannot see those who contemplate taking their own life as a sign of mental illness. I cannot, for the same reason that I acknowledge death as intrinsic to life and life intrinsic to death. What gets thrown up into the air like wind in fallen leaves, is the integral mystery of existence itself. I cannot sweep this knowledge, this subtle awareness I have, into a neat pile to be put discretely into the rubbish bin. This is the greatest mystery I know of. Death is not a medical problem and suicide is not a medical condition. Death is, as life is, and relationships are.

      What is caught in suicide are ghost catchers of clothes, of toys, bric a brac, books and letters; of the tears in memories, of  hearts broken, of anger, resentment, bewilderment, lots of questions unanswered. These are perhaps more poignant than even the caught ghosts of those who died a normal death. 

     I have had friends who have died by their own hand and know something of the strangeness of this. One man, I had shared a meal with only a fortnight before he gassed himself.  Was I partly to blame? I could not think so, for as the ghosts in cloth unravelled after the funeral, the threads emerged of a life of disconnect, of  feelings of alienation and lostness.  This poor friend could not speak of what he suffered and it is here that my feelings are stirred, and it is now here that I offer myself as a therapist to hear and share the burden of pain.

      Death, and life, are touched by the living in a fluid process and grief and loss are felt as those we’ve loved move into another dimension. It is not so much the death bit that shakes me, but the threads of life that are not always seen and understood; threads that need, somehow, to be shaped into a dress to catch the ghosts of real flesh and blood people in our stories, recollections, and a need for some kind of farewell. We living need to let go and yet to remember and to let go and yet to recollect. Our grief is not to be discarded mindlessly, but to be brought into the fabric of our life to enrich us and also, mysteriously, give us the courage to let go, let be that majesty that is  life.

Choosing to Smoke, or Not by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip Clin Hypnotherapy

Sept 2013 

     It isn’t good to inhale ash  and chemicals of any kind, but that said, we have the capacity to choose. Or do we? 

     Smoke tobacco, if you wish and actually enjoy it, but don’t if you smoke just because you identify yourself as a “smoker”. Smoke from choice; don’t smoke from habit. Is it, though, that simple? Before I untangle that question, I’ll just diverge a little. 

      On television relatively recently the writer, Clive James, being interviewed by Kerry O’Brien, said of stories that  it isn’t the story that is interesting, per se, but the story of the story. This resonates with me strongly for what we identify about ourselves drives much of our behaviour. Thus calling oneself a smoker, or a binge eater, or a booze artist, facilitates a routine for indulging in these follies, because we can then say, well I’m a smoker, binge eater, booze artist, and that’s what I am, as opposed to what I sometimes do. It’s a story of a story, and being so, can just as easily be changed to something else. 

      Let me be clear here, I am not a smoker, binge eater nor boozer, but I do know the making of stories about oneself. I have stories about me that drive me to some extent. I am a swimmer. As such this story is as much a story about what I do, and what I identify myself as, as a person who defines herself as “a smoker”. My story keeps me healthy, for I love swimming, but I am no more to be defined as a swimmer than as one who swims. I choose to swim and know that when I don’t swim I get irritable. Perhaps, and I feel it to be inconceivable, I could channel my love into some other pastime, but being a healthy pastime, I see no reason to. I do have other stories of stories that drive me and they aren’t healthy, but that’s another topic to be explored on another day.

Smoking isn’t a healthy pastime. It’s an indulgence in a toxic activity. Toxic and addictive, and therein lies the difficulty of what constitutes a choice. 

      Nicotine is the tobacco plant’s natural protection against being eaten by insects. It is thus an insecticide. Interestingly, though, nicotine mimics the brain’s neurotransmitter acetylcholine that controls the flow of dopamine and over 200 more neuro-chemicals. Dopamine, among other functions, stimulates the brain’s desire for satisfaction, thus nicotine, in playing a dopamine-like role, promotes a desire for more of the same, more satisfaction. It creates a craving. 

      Understanding this doesn’t completely explain it all: why do some people manage to smoke one cigarette only when they feel like it, while others smoke all day, every day? The story of the story fills out the picture, I suggest. 

      A story of a story (a person who identifies themselves as “a smoker”), establishes a neural pathway in their brain by repeating the act of smoking, and enhances the effect of nicotine in the brain, thus accentuating both the intention to smoke and to enable the effect of smoking to increase craving desires. It’s both: story of story and chemical dependence (illustrating a mind-body connection in the act of smoking) that drives the habit (apart from the social dimensions of doing what your friends do, etc).

       Others, who enjoy a smoke occasionally, but who don’t identify themselves as  a “smoker”, choose when to smoke, as opposed to smoking because they see themselves as a “smoker” (who smokes because that’s what smokers do). This is a state I prefer to encourage in clients who come to see me for clinical hypnotherapy. Yes, ideally, it would be good if they gave up smoking entirely, but why not consider the idea that it’s possible to choose to smoke just for enjoyment, as opposed to craving a smoke because of an addiction? Abstinence may, or may not, be ideal for many people, and for those who have smoked many years, such an ideal state may be difficult to attain, for the act of smoking comes with multiple social and sometimes creative situations that are less easy to drop. I know of one man who smokes as a way into conversation with women. I know another who smokes to enhance cognitive acuity (focus).  Nicotine, like dopamine which it imitates, stimulates cognitive acuity as well as craving.

      How much better it is to achieve the ability to choose what one does, as opposed to doing things just because you feel compelled to. My interest as a psychotherapist/clinical hypnotherapist is in enhancing a person’s choicefulness so that they can choose what they want, as opposed to just doing what they’ve been doing out of habit and hating themselves for it. The capacity to choose what we enjoy best of all is what makes my job wonderful. I get to see people who have chosen a life they love, freed from addictive, self-perpetuating self-destructive behaviours.  If smoking continues to be what they choose to do, then so be it. But let it be a conscious choice and not just continuing a story about a story of themselves. 

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

Talking together. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

  

Oct 2010

     The boat slid through satiny water to an infinite edge of sea to the breakers beyond. Overhead ospreys circled; whales glimpsed through laid back leapings and turtles mated far from shore. I wondered about the name “Whitsundays” (for this is where I and a colleague and friend was  last week) and I remembered:

     Whitsunday is the other name for the day of Pentecost (the 49^th day after Easter Sunday), the Christian feast when the Holy Spirit descended upon the people and gave them capacity to understand and speak many tongues, join in community, and celebrate the new church. Whitsunday, or White Sunday, is thus called,  for the white ceremonial robes of the celebrants of this feast - appropriate for the white beaches of these islands. Central to the idea of the feast is an ability of people to share things together, to talk and to have a sense of community.

      The Whitsundays are a scattering of approximately 150 handsome islands peeking through the sea between approximately 20° and 21° south latitude off the subtropical central Queensland coast. Captain James Cook found these islands in 1770 and named them ‘the Cumberland Islands’ and their passage, the  ‘Whitsunday’s Passage,’ because it was the feast of Pentecost when he sailed among them. The Aboriginal tribe, the Ngaro, however, knew and explored the richness of these islands for 8,000 years, paddling in boats made from saplings, bark and fern fronds. I imagine the Ngaro talked of many things.

 

       Though somewhat a culturally biased account of things, and I do this in deference to other cultural experiences, I am moved to write of the  elegance of this wondrous place as itself a Whitsunday experience: of a place where strangers come together, sharing their disparate experiences in the making contact with one another, and conflating this with what I experience in my clinical practice.

      It always strikes me as something of a miracle when people from diverse backgrounds can come together and get on so well. I often find myself really enjoying the presence of others so very different to me. Listening deeply, a tool of psychotherapy, isn’t just what makes contact possible, but it is part of it. Such listening situates the practitioner in a place of present-centredness as well as an exquisite awareness of  self in relation to the other person. The co-createdness of the relationship is also heeded and responded to, even played with. There is a dance-like quality to the sharing and with it, a sense of togetherness and  separateness; feeling states that are like the tense and loose states of a boat riding Whitsunday waves. 

      On the boat up north, my American psychotherapeutic friend and I encountered many people who showed a delight in talking of their lives to us. These were contacts with people we’ll probably never see again, and yet – in that short time – we came to know quite well. It felt to me that the islands were like a net thrown out, gathering people in  shared experience, yet each maintaining their unique perspective and eager to speak of this to us: a magic of commitment to conversation, a magic of community.

       I imagine that the first Christians felt their commitment to dialogue (listening, receiving, and sharing) as a palpable energy and as a means to generate and hold safe a sense of community. I feel my commitment to dialogue is likewise a means to create a safe therapeutic place where diversity of experience can be expressed without anxiety, held and released when the time is ripe; a place that is the relationship of selves who do not need to agree with each other in order to get on with the work of increasing awareness and discovering in themselves healthy freedom and new ways of being.

      People talking together are like the Whitsunday islands strung together like individual pearls in a necklace of great beauty, and like a necklace, the elements of communication are not glued, but linked by likeness and difference. So, let’s talk!

Copyright @2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell

How I use dreams in therapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. of Counselling, PhD, Dip Clin Hypnotherap

May 2013 

     Are dreams just the random by-product of rapid eye movement sleep? Is their function to fulfil our wishes? Don’t they just reflect the ordinary mundane things of everyday life expressed in bizarre form? Aren’t dreams the royal road to the unconscious? Are they ways in which the subconscious mind communicates with us? Maybe they are a self-portrayal of the health of the organism through symbolic language, or a way the organism regulates itself through imagery, sensations, and memories? There are many ideas about dreams and the function of dreaming for sure, but how can dreams be useful in therapy? This is what I wish to explore here.

     Psychoanalysts, of which I am not one, look upon dreams as keys to unlocking the unconscious mind. They go about doing this by interpreting dreams, allocating meanings to symbols apparently depicted in the dreams. Everyday objects, people and situations that arise in dreams are viewed as having psychic significance. This is useful, to a degree, but it too readily leads to the idea that everything is a symbol of something else, other than the thing itself, as well as to the notion that the thing has a greater and more universal significance than it might to the individual dreamer. The proliferation of dictionaries of dreams attest to this notion. A simple door can, in this way, be imbued with meanings irrelevant to that dreamer: vagina, opening to the temple, door to the soul, the Great Mother, door to the unknown, etc, etc. Maybe, however, it is simply a door, and maybe the dreamer’s interest is not on the door, but what is inside or outside.  

     It is the dreamer’s dream and the meaning of the dream is theirs. Interestingly, C. G. Jung (1875-1961) said virtually the same thing. He wrote ‘Never apply any theory, but always ask the patient how he feels about his dream images.’ Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures. (1935), and yet more generalizations about the meaning of dreams have come about by those reading Jung than by those caught up with Freud. Freudian analysis is less popular these days than Jungian analysis, and more books are written about Jungian perspectives on dreams than Freudian ones.

     Dreams and dreaming are wonderful resources and I use them in my own psychotherapeutic practice quite a lot. I ask my clients to record their dreams and to bring them to sessions where we can use them in the work we do together. How, though? I am sometimes asked by new clients. This question, I admit, flummoxes me sometimes, because I use dreams in many ways, and some of them very subtle. I don’t interpret them, that’s the one true thing.  

     Sometimes when a client reads a dream aloud they respond with an “aha,” suddenly understanding their problem. Sometimes they’ll say, “I don’t know what all this means,” and so we’ll explore the scenario presented. I might ask how they felt in the dream, or how they feel now while reading the dream, and we’ll explore what memories arise from that feeling, memories that can elucidate the how, why, and what of the problem they’re seeing me about. I might explore the bodily sensations the person has as we explore the dream. These tell me, and them, a lot about the feeling quality of the message of the dream, a feeling quality that can be usefully worked with, in that, or later sessions. Sometimes an image stands out and gets repeated in various forms in a night of dreams, and so I’ll ask the client to address it as though the image was a person. Sometimes, using a technique developed by a therapist mentor of mine, I’ll ask the client a series of questions in written form to respond as a personified entity representing that image or object, thus giving them a perspective that would have been very elusive otherwise. This latter technique brings into awareness the very something that has been out of consciousness, for whatever reason (fear, rejection, denial, for instance). The images of dreams may be drawn or painted, written about, or even sung to. I might ask the client to write letters to the parts of a dream that seem to have a lot of unrealized power. Or we might role play some bits of a dream.  There are other techniques I might employ, but each is tailored to the uniqueness of the person with me. All the techniques are used to bring conscious awareness to their prevailing problem, for it is here the client can begin to choose options that were previously hidden. 

      A problem is not the problem, but the beginning place of new insights, new ways of being, and positive change in that person’s life. Working with dreams fills out the psychic landscape of old conundrums and new possibilities in a really creative way. Opening to creativity is one of the greatest benefits of working with dreams, which is wonderful not only for artists but for all of us wanting a greater abundance in our lives. I find it enormously fulfilling participating in this process as clients rediscover this resource and become increasingly self confident, happy and able to leave their previous difficulties behind.

Copyright @ 2013  Dr Elizabeth McCardell

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

May 2012 

     There was a medium-sized tree in Kings Park, Perth, in which my friends and I would play. This was a commodious cypress type of tree with thick layers of branches from the top right down to ground level. 

      We’d climb to the top and throw ourselves over, relaxing into a controlled fall as each branch would catch us and drop us to the next branch, and so on to the bottom. It was wonderful. 

I can still smell in my mind’s nostrils the resinous quality of branch and twig and the stickiness that remained on the hands long after we’d gone home.  My body also retains the sensation of the slow supported fall. It is an incredible feeling, this body memory and one that has become something a metaphor for me as I look upon the subject of risk.

      Risk is a chosen action where the outcome is unknown.  Dropping from the top branch of the tree was an act of faith each time, because though we could do the fall over and over, we never quite knew whether we’d catch the branches in a safe way every time. Maybe we’d drop straight to the ground, maybe we’d be all right. Who could really know? 

     Allowing ourselves to partake of risk, allowed us to know life exquisitely. The Brazilian mystical author, Paulo Coelho describes it this way, “You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.”

      Too often we tremble at the edge of existence, too scared to choose, too scared to do anything.  So we repeat the same tired old formulas over and over, even though the circumstances that gave rise to them years ago are no longer relevant.  I’m thinking of a man who I once saw who would not take a holiday from work even though he was completely worn out, to the degree that he was physically ill. Turned out that when he was a child his father had been injured in a war zone and was largely bedridden until death, and mother wasn’t coping. Sometimes she could help; sometimes she just took off. The only child, the boy felt he had to hold it all together. So set the pattern of never allowing himself rest – even long after that difficult childhood, even though his life situation was completely different. He now lived comfortably, with his own grown up family, and a business that employed lots of other people who could run it well without him always present. Yet he still could not let go of his anxiety, he never rested. His family were exasperated. He’d sent them on holiday regularly each year, but always stayed at home to look after the business. What if something happened when he was not there? It was ironical that he could take risks with his business, but not with this essential thing of allowing rest. It was killing him.

     As time goes on the old patterns of dealing with the world get encrusted like an old car battery that hasn’t been cleaned. Gunk just accumulates around the vital connections and we lose our wherewithal to act freshly and decisively. Just the thought of doing something new, to leap into the rich field of unknown possibilities feels constrained by a mounting list of imagined things that can go wrong. What if? 

     “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” Accompanying every act of life is the possibility of annihilation. The spectre of death is always present, a figure that brings all the more shimmer to life. 

      What if the leap ends in stars? Concussion, magic, entrance into an entranced state, paralysis, crippledom, surprise, wow!, feeling incredibly, vitally alive? What if the leap is beautifully supported all the way to the ground, like the cypress tree of my youth? Who knows! Life is risk. The very nature of life can hand out anything – and does.  Plunge into it.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell