It's completed, or is it?

September 2017

It’s completed, or is it?   by  Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

    Every month I am faced with the problem of how to complete these articles, and it is something that I grapple with in unsureness.

     Beethoven was famously unable to finish his symphonies, and you can certainly hear that. The same closing bars are played over and over again, until, maybe in his exasperation, the piece is ended.

     Then there are writers who somehow cannot write the final paragraph, cannot finish the book and so the project gets hidden away somewhere, half remembered, half forgotten. Less dramatically, there are those whose final paragraph hangs uneasily, without proper resolution, or the words, …to be continued – which is all very well, except for those readers who don’t read any more of this author.

      Leonardo Da Vinci famously said, “A work is never finished, just abandoned.” Maybe, maybe not. Somehow I’m not quite convinced. I think a lot of projects are certainly abandoned and left unfinished and presented as such, but then there are those where final touches really do complete the work.

     I am wondering if the completion is somehow tied to its context, or to something in the object’s inherent form. This is an entirely intuitive idea and one in which I really do not know its veracity. I think to my practice of painting little birds on the seed pods of the Illawarra Flame Tree. I start with the back and wings and tail and then around the face, and then finally its eyes. It’s the eyes that set the little birds free. The glint in the eyes is the finishing act of the painting. (I swear I am somewhat of an animist.) The form of the pod defines the design character of the bird in the making, and the painting of the eyes is the final act. Bird is already bird and painting merely reveals it.

     Bird is already bird, but a written piece can only ascribe itself to the work, and the genre, as it unfolds.  There is something in the final act that gives it life, or not.

     How, though, to know that the final touches gives life and not just adds to the burden of colour? Again, I intuit this, and of course I could be wrong. If life, then something of  a death of the old and the luxuriant newness of something else.

      In trying to connect my idea to something tangible, I  keep coming back to the words of the old man, Simeon on holding the infant Jesus in his arms, described in a Bach cantata of the same name: Ich habe genug (German). It sums up for me what I’m trying to get at. Ich habe genug is variously translated as “now I have enough,” or “now I have everything,” or even interpreted as “now it is finished because it is complete”. Symbolically, the Christ birth can be seen as the ending of the old way and beginning of the new – which throws a whole different light on completion and finishing. There is a richness and a vulnerability here.

     Perhaps knowing the end is just part of the beginning. A work of art needs to be alive at the start, even as it is a departure from previous works. This means that the artist/writer has to feel connected to it, and not merely attempting to churn out something that might appeal to others but which feels uninteresting to himself.  It is very wearing to make something that doesn’t link  with the artists inner integrity: sort of akin to being part of a production line. How lovely it is, instead, to create from beginning to end something of meaningful delight.

     To begin something of a creation means slipping into the dark lake of the mind, bounded by the banks that shape it, and allowing a certain degree of chaos, confusion and doubt to be present, but to stay with it, and nurture it along, separating out the useful from the non, guided by the moon’s reflection, knowing somehow that here is a life that needs to be revealed, and fearlessly making it so.

Exploring the unconscious for the richness it contains

August 2017

by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     While considering what to write on for this month’s article, I came across some notes I made on hypnosis and dream work in depth psychology some years ago and  thought this was the beginning of a worthy something or other. I remember having the beginnings of a thought then about how both hypnosis and dream work share a very rich interior landscape. Such musings led me then to adding qualifications in clinical hypnotherapy to my counselling and psychotherapeutic training and practice.

      I first came into contact with depth psychology when I was 19, and began a ten year study immersion in the field of Jungian Analytical Psychology in both Australia and Switzerland. Since then I’ve trained in several other modalities, but I continue to mull about the unconscious and wonder, as I work, on its flexibility and capacity for fundamentally changing ordinary lives when properly nurtured and tapped into.

     The unconscious mind is a strange place of figures, and feelings, and sliding doors of perceptions that throw up, in the cracks of our existence, meanings that eluded us previously. Here is a kind of trance-scape that is really interesting not only theoretically but also experientially. This I know from my own inner work, as well as academic study. Here is the space where a richness of half known things are found to be much greater than originally thought. It’s sort of like a Tardis, where the interior is vastly bigger that what appears on the outside.

     I remember when I was a child playing a game that involved only traversing the cracks in the pavement on the street where I lived. This often required leaping around gazelle-like to avoid the plain old pavement with no cracks. It required focus, agility, and – at the same time – something of a relaxed stance. This focused-relaxed attitude is likewise what is required to be engaged in by both therapist and client alike in dream work and hypnosis. In order to move beyond the obvious, we have to connect gently to the subtle in order to know better the landscape of our minds.  Hypnosis provides a useful training for that, as does the work done in a counselling psychotherapy. Both take the natural aptitude most of us have for entering this focused-relaxed state and enhances it so that fundamental change can take place.

     None of this magical nor out of the ordinary; indeed most, if not all, of us already know what it feels like. We watch movies, we read books, we write, we listen and play music, we paint or gaze at an art work, we run, cycle, swim, or just wander around gardens or streets and shops in a present, and yet drifting away type of state. We do not lose control, just we do not lose control with hypnosis nor exploring our inner life in therapy, and no one can do things to us that we do not want. We can move in and out of this state at will.

     In therapy and hypnosis there is safety in the  meeting of minds, a rapport, and it is this mutuality that builds not only trust but a deepening of shared therapeutic experience where change happens.

      I particularly like working with people who, till now, have felt stuck in repetitive habits, negative ways of thinking, and bogged down with worry, anxiety, and a sense of unfulfillment. The artist, the writer, the musician facing the perpetual  blank canvas, or page or unliberating musical silence are perfect candidates for hypnosis and/or the depth psychology of dream work. I know this not only from working with such people, but through my own experiences facing similar sorts of things. There is a great beauty in the release of such blockages and the making of art, the release of iterative habit, and repetitive thought processes. This, by way, is felt as much by me as my clients. I enjoy my work and I bow my head humbly to the courage of those who journey with me.

Self Care

July 2017

Self Care by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I care about you. How often have we who care, heard this said to us? I suspect, not often enough. And yet hearing it is medicine for the soul. It is pretty hard working in the caring professions (nurses, doctors, paramedics, counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, vets, etc) without receiving some gentleness and care words, or even just someone to hear what we have to say. We tend to push on doing what we feel we must do, even when we begin showing signs of compassion fatigue, or its more chronic form, vicarious traumatization, which is the cumulative effect of an a more than empathic engagement with our client’s traumatic material to the point of feeling really hurt ourselves. We sometimes care a bit too much and for too long. Empathy is our greatest asset as well as possibly our greatest liability.

      Compassion fatigue may not become chronic and may not bleed into feelings of vicarious traumatisation and may not eventuate ultimately in burnout, if we ask for help early and practice necessary self care. Burnout is literally a feeling of running on empty. It is characterized by exhaustion, depersonalization (which is disengagement or detachment from the world around us) and lessened feeling of self efficacy.

     Compassion fatigue is like a sort of catching of the other person’s emotions as we might catch their flu infections and in this vulnerable state we risk over-identifying with them and may seek to rescue or protect them beyond the calling of our jobs, on the one hand, or avoid them altogether (thus not doing our job properly). Absenteeism, low morale, job dissatisfaction, depression, nightmares, intrusive imagery, irritability, difficulty forming intimate relationships, high levels of stress, and, sometimes, substance abuse are all signs of empathy gone to the point of profound fatigue.

     I’ve known a few people (counsellors, doctors, paramedics, etc) who have chronically over cared to the point of vicarious traumatization  and, actually, burnout. These are people who pushed themselves just too far to the next client in need (and maybe they forgot they are human), without a break, without asking for help, without practicing any self care at all. Their capacity to do their job just wasn’t there anymore. Now some cannot work at all, while others have pushed on still and now teach their profession. The lecturer in trauma counselling at  the University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, where I did my Master of Counselling degree  those several years ago showed all the signs of burnout. He was so strung out that he lived on a diet of Coca-Cola and black coffee and cigarettes, despite recent major heart surgery. He talked fast. without intonation, without engagement with us, like a dead man talking.

     We do not need to get to the point of overload. We can learn to manage our work-after work life so that we do not succumb to compassion fatigue and the more intransigent vicarious traumatization and burnout. One of the ways is to seek counselling not only when we are feeling fragile, but as a regular component of our working life.  This shouldn’t be seen as a luxury, but as a necessity.  Getting counselling, or the longer term psychotherapy, is entering a safe place where what is said isn’t disclosed to anyone. This is a confidential space where strategies for coping are learned, but more than this, here is somewhere to simply say the things that need to be said and be heard by someone, like myself, who cares.

     Work-related stress in high empathy occupations has a physical impact on us as well as an emotional impact and self care therefore needs to  have a physical component as well. Cardio exercise, swimming, qi gong, yoga, dance, music making, and a nutritious clean diet are good. Practicing the quiet of meditation, mindful contemplation, slow walking in nature, gardening, massages and smelling flowers may nourish us.

     Let us not forget ourselves in the caring dynamic. Caring for others, needs to begin with self care. In this way, we can maintain throughout our working lives, the sense of purpose that got us into the caring professions in the first place.

Paper delivered to clinicians 22nd June 2017

Elizabeth McCardell, June 2017

Exploring an approach to restoring reciprocity in the relationship of therapist and patient in depressed patients with blunted facial expressiveness

     In therapy there is not me and not you, but us, as Neville Symington put it.

     In here there is usually connection, contact and relationship. And when you look at a therapeutic pair (as through a one way mirror, or on a video) you can see a kind of dance, where mirroring of movement and facial expression and phrase sharing takes place.

     The body is a sensitive “sounding-board” in which every emotion reverberates both within and between us, at least in the normal course of an encounter, as William James put it (1884). Emotions are literally e-motions, that is, a movement between what is felt and displayed and what is visible in expression (Fuchs and Koch, 2014). Between people, there is in the facial, gestural and postural expression of a feeling a bodily resonance that feeds back into the feeling itself, but which also induces processes of interaffectivity: my expression is affected by your expression which affects my expression, and so forth. Thus I experience the kinetics and intensity of your emotions through my own bodily kinaesthesia and sensation. 

     Merleau-Ponty (1962) describes  it this way,

     “The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the       reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and the intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person's intentions inhabited my body and mine his”.

     I can best illustrate this using the möbius strip. There is here a chiasm of reciprocity

     The möbius strip, that mathematical morphological idea that describes a two dimensional surface , a loop with a single twist, where surface A, when followed around becomes surface B, also beautifully describes, symbolically, the therapeutic relationship: not you, not me, but us. There is here not two surfaces, but one expressed two ways.

     I often use the möbius strip as a model to illustrate the nature of reciprocity, as it provides a useful and graphic account of the chiasm of relationships. In what I am exploring here is something that is poorly understood and needs, I think, much more work.

     Right now, I’ll do something I did in my doctoral thesis (2001. Then, as now, I shall attempt an examination of an embodied account of reciprocity by resorting to its study by an examination of absence, by what is not there, in order to better comprehend what might be there.

     With the PhD thesis, I wanted to examine the cognitive and non-cognitive realm of relationships within self, self-others, and self-environment, and so  I employed a method used by astronomers whereby the existence of as yet unseen cosmic entities is theorized to exist by the behaviour of surrounding cosmic entities. It’s a method that then allowed me to discover, to a degree things like memory, perception of time,  interconnections of behaviour and culture, relationship of body movement and intention, etc, through the examination of neurological disorders of Tourettes, Parkinsons Disease, Asperger’s . Absence helped point to presence. 

     As then, so now, I am moved to attempt to know more of human reciprocity in the therapeutic encounter by noticing what happens when the other person presents as somehow unengaged in that dance of reciprocity. I shall use the flatness of facial expression and its accompanying detachment and feelings of joylessness as the sign of this.

     Blunted affect, or as it sometimes called, anhedonia (where there is no felt pleasure in life: passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of zest), can be found in a range of psychiatric conditions including mood disorders, schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder, and so on, as well as the influence of long term use of some antidepressants.

     The lack of felt pleasure is manifest in facial expression, slowed down body movement, and unengaged posture. Coupled with these signs is a growing felt sense of isolation and detachment from the lives of other people. The reciprocity between people is lacking. The “us-ness” is impoverished.

     I shall only speak about clinical depression as the kind of clients I most see are those with depression. 

     My personal reactions to the client with blunted affect are thrown into a certain degree of confusion. I am not as able to respond to the person in front of me, because many of the familiar cues are absent. The give and take of mirroring, as the dance of interaction is blunted. What is happening and how can I move this along somehow?

     I am remembering here of Jarrah, a 33 year old woman I saw for 6 weekly sessions last year. Jarrah’s mother rang me to make an appointment for Jarrah. She said her daughter has anxiety, depression and OCD. I asked then to speak to Jarrah about times and dates. Jarrah enthusiastically responded and so we organized a time for the first session.

     Jarrah presented with that familiar waxy look and lack of motility in the give and take of my relationship with her. She described feeling isolated, and dead inside. She would smile as an actor might, without engagement of herself and me, and which I felt repelled by, without fully understanding why. 

     Jarrah was 33, a reluctant mother and one where her deep depression began when she became pregnant while traveling overseas.  Her own mother had been severely traumatized by her Dutch parents who were absent much of the time during the war and by their war-time experiences. For her anxiety, Jarrah’s mother took valium. Her father was similarly damaged by his post-war family life in Holland and is now alcoholic and living alone. Jarrah, growing up with anxious parents, was fundamentally deprived of a sound and secure attachment with her primary caregiver, that is her mother. Whenever Jarrah sought comfort from her mother, Mum gave her valium. This continued throughout life. Jarrah wanted closeness, but her mother pushed her away and medicalized her need.

    Jarrah is single and lives on her own and with her young son. Her 9 year old son spends a lot of time being mothered by his father’s mother. Her son seems to be getting reasonable and stable support with the grandmother.

    

     I asked Jarrah what her obsessive compulsive disorder looked like. Interestingly it consisted of checking her body when she was dressing and also checking her body when preparing food in the kitchen. She avoided the kitchen because it became extremely tedious having to check her body repeatedly. I was curious about whether Jarrah had thoughts of suiciding in the presence of kitchen knives, but did not ask this directly. It seemed that suicidal thoughts were not there. It was the iterative nature of the OCD that was the problem. Checking her body repeatedly was like not having much connection with being embodied; like having a concept of a body without any intrinsic knowing of being bodied.

     What was it like for me being with Jarrah and her feelings of anhedonia? How was it for me to sit with a woman who was so unengaged at an embodied level, in the therapeutic conversation, with someone not in emotional affective exchange? Frankly, it was hard.  I found my mind wandering and theorizing and staying engaged was quite hard work. It was as though the centre was not holding, as Yeats puts it. I felt in my body somehow set adrift.

     And so I theorized some kind of healing and I suspect now, at least, that my desire for a solution may well have lacked sensitivity and understanding given the nature of my patient’s long standing problems. I felt also a bit pressured by the sense that I didn’t have much time to work with her.

     During the 3^rd session I suggested she resume swimming (she had been a competitive swimmer), doing yoga and dance (activities she loves). I proposed these to her to loosen her body and get moving. The explanation I gave her was about endorphins, and the like, but I knew from my doctoral work that there is more going on than just simply moving. There is patterning and mirroring and shaping that impels reciprocity between people and it is this that healing takes place.

    By the 5^th session, Jarrah presented as more engaged and her facial movement of affectivity was more noticeable.  There was more mirroring between us, her facial muscles were relaxed and there was little evidence of the false smile of theatre, and the dialogue between us was more fluid and natural than previously.

     Unfortunately, her  medicalized “story” of depression of her life, reinforced by her mother, kicked in once again and on the 6^th and final session, Jarrah said she couldn’t afford to come any more and her mother said she needed to resume seeing her psychiatrist, and so that’s what she would do.

     I sometimes see Jarrah on the streets of Lismore. She has her waxy complexion and her stilted smile back again, which is quite disheartening.

------

     In most social encounters there are two cycles of embodied affectivity which become intertwined, thus continuously modifying each subject's approach and response. This complex process may be regarded as the bodily basis of empathy and social understanding: a dance where each person feels connected to the other. This happens very quickly and happens to connect each person  also to the perceptions of themselves. There is a feedback loop happening here.

     When a person doesn’t feel connected, there is, along with a constriction, a rigidity, a sort of missing tension-flow modulation, a numbness, an affective depersonalization.  The deeply depressed are no longer capable of being moved and affected by things, situations or other persons. They complain of indifference, a “feeling of not feeling” and of not being able to sympathize with anyone anymore.  They  feel disconnected from the world and they lose their participation in the interaffective space that we normally share with  others.

     In  a  rather splendid book by Jonathan Cole (1999), called About Face where he writes of a  condition called the möbius syndrome, Cole captures first person accounts of what it feels like not to be engaged in the dance of reciprocity.

     Named after Paul Julius Möbius, a German neurologist, in 1888 and not the möbius strip it permits a neat coalescence of ideas surrounding that give and take of reciprocity.

     The Möbius Syndrome is a rare neurological disorder characterized by weakness or palsy of multiple cranial nerves. This means the fluidity and flexibility of facial expression is absent.  It is an extreme condition, for sure, but what is expressed by those with the condition tells us a lot about what might be happening with the deeply depressed client.

     People with möbius syndrome feel disengaged and unable to read the emotions of others. As a patient of Cole puts it, “Mostly I think I exist in my sub-conscious or preconscious mind,” but [I do not feel real as an embodied self.] In other words the very capacity to be responsive to the other is permitting a theory of mind that is more than an idea or concept of one’s own mind and the minds of others. It is a theory of mind that requires a psycho-socio engagement, and not merely an abstract thought. I’m intrigued by this and wonder if a self-other disembodied self is possibly like being in a trance state.

     I’ll leave that out there, and return to the thesis of engagement: a not you, a not me, but an us.

     Feelings and emotions enliven us, but when they are cut off from experience a whole range of  embodied processes are reduced, and as they are reduced so the person enters a state of isolation.  The greater the sense of isolation, the greater the break in possible reciprocity  between self and therapist and other relationships.

     Intrinsic to intercorporeality and thus relationality is having a sense of agency and thus being able to respond to the other person. When this capacity to respond is diminished and meaningful encounter is less present then we need to find ways to reconnect ourselves and those we work with.

     I suggested to Jarrah swimming, yoga and dance because these are activities that gives her pleasure. I do not think that these activities would be universally useful and that reconnecting affectivity would have to be tailored to the individual. I do not, also suggest that these activities need to be done in the psychotherapeutic session, but are more usefully to be used as homework.

     What may be valuable is an aware embodied shaping of what is said in the session. I don’t mean phony modelling of facial expression, or words, or anything as obtrusive as this, but  bringing a deeper understanding of what an embodied reciprocity looks like in the therapeutic encounter and somehow bringing this knowledge into some concrete form within the therapeutic encounter, in session. Neuro-linguistic programming uses this idea in the conscious therapeutic use of identifying how a patient operates in the world: kinaesthetically, auditorily,  and visually. NLP is, unfortunately frequently rather clumsily done, and is a bit too obvious for my liking.

     The us of the therapeutic encounter is a fertile ground that needs much more understanding in terms of process, and in terms of a process that can become more than description to a therapeutic tool in itself. This is in here an indwelling of the deep structure of a more than linguistic exchange and an exploration of healing at the heart of a depth psychology of embodiment.

References

Cole, Jonathan (1999) About Face, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

James, W. (1884). What is an emotion? Mind 9, 188–205. doi: 10.1093/mind/os-IX.34.188

Fuchs, Thomas and Sabine C. Koch (2014) Embodied affectivity: on moving and being moved, Hypothesis and Theory Article, published 06 June 2014, fsyg-05-00508.pdf

McCardell, Elizabeth Eve (2001) Catching the Ball: Constructing the Reciprocity of Embodiment,  PhD thesis, Murdoch University, Western Australia.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). The Phenomenology of Perception. New York, NY: Humanities Press.

Thinking about Human Reciprocity

June 2017

      There is a rare neurological disorder known as the möbius syndrome which is characterized by a facial weakness whereby those with the possibly genetic condition cannot smile, frown, purse the lips, raise the eyebrows, or close the eyelids. There are other bodily abnormalities as well, but the facial ones are more relevant to what I want to explore here. The lack of facial mobility gives the impression of a blankness of presence.

     The condition is named after Paul Julius Möbius, a neurologist who first described the syndrome in 1888.  Having a blankness of presence is confusing to other people, because in most human interactions there is a reciprocal dance of mirrored expression and when one person isn’t responding to the dance, the other has nothing much to go on, and communication breaks down.

     A similar state of affairs sometimes occurs in severe clinical depression and schizophrenia and other such conditions, and also as an unfortunate consequence of  long term use of taking certain antidepressants and antipsychotics. But there is more going on here than a flattening of facial expression (a sort of pastiness, a dullness of facial mobility), there is also a coupling of blunted affect where the person isn’t feeling very much about anything or anyone, coupled with a dulled vocal range.  As with the people suffering with the möbius syndrome, they have a profound sense of social isolation, and  not much of  a sense of other people having their own realities, except as an abstract idea. This is easy to understand because it is in  the act of mutual responsivity that there is a reciprocity which connects us.  In that mobile engagement there is a you and an I and an us.

     We respond to each other, we share our thoughts, and to some extent, our feelings, but we get many of our cues about what is being shared by what we are seeing, as well as hearing, concerning the other person. When in the presence of a person not very readable, we have little to go on, so communication breaks down and as this happens the unreadable feels  more and more excluded.

     Interestingly, or I find it so, at the same time in history as the identification of the  möbius syndrome (actually 30 years previously, in 1858) a mathematician and astronomer named Ferdinand Möbius came up a mathematical morphological figure that describes a looped surface with one continual side. This figure is known as the möbius strip, named after him. It is a loop with a single twist to it, so that when you follow surface A all around you end up on surface B. In other words the usual two apparent surfaces of  a loop, when followed around turns out to be a single surface. 

     The graphic artist, M. C. Escher (1898-1972) endlessly played with the möbius strip in drawing apparently impossible stairs and buildings where up becomes down, and so forth. Continuous looping is used in industry, in recording tapes, in knitting, and other places. It’s a really useful idea, and a beautiful one. You’d think, almost, that the möbius strip and the syndrome came out of the same idea, except for the fact that they were described by actual people, sharing the same surname. Both, though, are very useful in provide a metaphor for connection and conversation and the consequence of breakdown to the interconnection. Surface A (you) and Surface B (I) become us when both of us have the means to actively engage in connection. The problem of healing the other, and self, in order to vivify connection then becomes crucial, and finding a way for this to happen becomes essential. The therapeutic conversation is a very good place to start this. As we know, really, healing starts in the presence of an active listener and one trained to move beyond the level of appearances. 

      You could say, the point of meeting then allows you to be responsive to me and me responsive to you and thus awakening feelings of inner aliveness and reconnection to one’s own self as a member of a community.

The Dark Red Coat

May 2017

     Thirty years ago I bought a dark red cashmere coat, the coat to end all coats, the last coat I would ever buy – or so I told myself. I wore it confidently for about eight years, and then largely stopped wearing it altogether. It travelled with me across Europe, for sure, and re-emerged every now and again for concerts and outdoor wanderings. It went with me from house to house to house and across the country from my hometown of Perth, WA, to here.

     In truth, though, it wasn’t a final, last purchase of a lifetime, coat. I’ve bought two other coats since.  Dark red, almost maroon in colour, the woollen coat was big and long and lined and had 80s style shoulder pads. I almost disappeared into it. I looked pale and wane, and contrary to the stereotype of pale and wane, I didn’t look particularly interesting. And so it hung in my wardrobe for years gradually developing a status much bigger than its actual coat-dom. It morphed into the coat I would wear in my mind’s eye as a bag lady living on the streets, with all my bags gathered around me and all my leggings and tee shirts worn at once, and everything else hoarded in a shopping trolley, just in case. A coat, I thought, that would serve as blanket, concealer of worldly goods, and tent, if need be. Or even a coat I could trade for the comfort of a bed and a good night’s sleep. Even when I came to realize the bag lady thing wasn’t going to happen, the coat remained a symbol of my fear of letting go, letting be, and allowing my future to express itself, how ever it wished. And I hung on to this dark red coat and my dark imaginings.

     Then came the massive floods of Lismore where many people lost everything. I didn’t. I live up in Lismore Heights, elevated here on the caldera ridge above the town. My water tank filled, my garden grew and blossomed and my trees took on a new flush of growth. People mowed their lawns, and tidied up and we tried to get on with ordinary life, but none of us have been able to (our hearts will not let us), for down in the town was, and still is in some places, devastation. It’s there in the brown dust, and the smell of nasty mustiness hangs like a pall over the town. It’s there on the faces of the people, exhausted by the effort of making right again something that very nearly finished them off. It’s there, in all things.

     People gathered from far and near to help clean the town and clear the water destroyed belongings of businesses and homes. Truckloads of clothing and other essentials came and were distributed. The greatness of spirit was manifest. Yes, there was also looting and stealing and other nastiness, but mostly a wonderful nourishing supportive presence came to be here.

     I listened to the accounts of the townsfolk, knowing that active listening and being heard is the first step to validation (an “it’s ok”) and  healing. Being heard is like being loved. Hearing requires not anticipating, not putting words into the mouths of others, not being distracted by things around us, not planning a response, not judging and not giving advice. It is just being present with the other person. Listening and being present is most important as right now there is exhaustion and a high likelihood of post-traumatic stress disorder settling in.  I suggest we all find someone to listen to us, for we need to speak.

As for the dark red coat, I gathered it, with blankets, shoes, and clothing and gave it away.

Double Play

April 2017

Double Play  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     The  doubling up of forms and scents and sounds in the  natural world, like thyme that smells of oranges and lemons, or chocolate flavoured mint plants, or lizards that go around looking like pieces of wood, or lyre birds that sing the song of dogs, is beautiful and intriguing.

     Then there is the phenomenon of simulacra, or pareidolia (when the mind responds to a stimulus by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists) as in, for instance, seeing Jesus in a piece of toast or dragons in clouds. Again, fascinating, and a tool a sculptor might employ when gazing at a block of stone. Rodin said he could already see the figure in the stone and his job was simply to release it.

     Then there is doubling of experience that we call synchronicity. A term coined by the analytical psychologist, Carl Jung, synchronicity is used to describe meaningful coincidence; a coincidence that seems to have greater purpose than some random act.

     In recent time I have experienced many instances of this phenomenon. I shall only mention two here, though.

     Last week I attended a peer group meeting of various kinds of therapists (psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists/counsellors, social workers and nurse practitioners), something I regularly do. One of us presented a paper and in it had named one of the people in her case histories after the Greek goddess, Artemis (goddess of the moon,  of hunting, mistress of animals and wildthings,  childbirth, and the focus of the archer); an intriguing figure. Just yesterday, one of my clients speaks of Artemis, a goddess she is close to. How often does this happen? Pretty rarely, in my experience. Artemis symbolized for both women a longing for focus, for being her own person, exploring her own purpose, and not compromising herself in any way. This is a particularly feminine style of focus, not weak, not yielding, but strong and centred and one I am keen to promote among my female clients.

     Of course, in these conversation, because of the nature of me, my mind also leapt into thinking of the plant genus Artemesia, of which the silvery fronds of  mugwort, wormwood and sagebush belong. Mugwort is dried and then burnt in  moxa in Traditional Chinese Medicine, to focus heat on particular parts of the body: an arrow treatment that Artemis would be proud.

     Another piece of synchronicity happened recently.  Earlier in the year, my brother handed me a pile of stuff for the book my deceased architect father wanted published on his professional life, a book largely already written, but needing humanizing a bit. I’d been procrastinating, hugely, and then, out of the blue, I received an email from a member of a committee in Canberra responsible for naming streets and public places wanting permission to use my father’s name for a street in a new Canberra suburb. It was suggested that I write a summary of my father’s career. This meant reading his stuff, and doing some of the research I had avoided doing for ages, and getting it down in print.  I might add that my father has been dead 10 years so this coincidence of events is odd.

     The more I read of the nature of synchronicity the less I understand it. It is tempting to say that these coincidences are not random, and that they are connected somehow on some psychic plane, but to do so is to enter very murky waters. I suggest that our propensity for connecting things and making meaning of them is the key. They would be random events if we didn’t join the dots, as it were, and make an account of them that fits our psychological situation. This is a meaning making process and it is one that enriches our world, bringing understanding of our own processes, and a certain delight in the interrelatedness of living together in a world that seems to like double play.