Doing God and Adam: contact and mindfulness by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Dec 2009

     A few years ago I spontaneously devised a game where a friend and I, with fingers extended, reach across to touch the other’s finger, reminiscent of God and Adam in Michaelangelo’s famous painting found in the Vatican. An electric contact is made with an accompanying zzzzzzz.  We then break into much laughter.

     I like this game greatly (known among my friends as “doing a God and Adam”). To me it sums up the exciting quality of contact, and not just human contact. There is electricity in the contact between humans and other animals and humans and plants and the rest of the earth, when excitement and interest is there. 

     Recently friends and I swam with seals off Carnac Island in Cockburn Sound off Rockingham in Western Australia – an incredibly beautiful place with pristine waters and white sands. Though there we did not actual touch the seals in a physical sense, we were wonderfully energized in meeting the other.

     I also met a shell as I dived down through surging water, my fingers not quite close enough at first, but with an extra kick, I touched, grasped, and plucked it from the sea floor. This was a gift for a friend.  The shell’s sharp salty smell a sweet reminder of her days on the West Coast’s beaches.

     It is likewise wonderful dropping down the streets of cities, like Sydney, meeting a surge of people as they come up the other way; of making contact with a smile with people I don’t know; of chance meetings with the like minded in book shops or cafés.

      Or the contact of meeting eye to eye with a green tree frog found under a tarpaulin in my backyard, or hearing a bird reiterating my laughter, or the deep swish of the wind in the trees as I, too, realize something new. Or the touching of an ancient melody caught for a moment on my lips.

     Contact is extraordinary.  Here we are, entities apparently separate, coming together in maybe a short time, and meeting and sharing and parting. It is this rich encounter that excites me when I greet each client. Indeed, it is the promise of such rich encounter that I look forward to when I wake up each day.

     In contact, though, there is something even more powerful than the delight of connecting. In contact we can move into new levels of consciousness with ourselves, one  another and the deep ecology of the environment. This requires mindfully being  present and watching without attachment to what arises for us in our bodies, our breath, and the passing parade of our thoughts.  When we are  profoundly present for another person our presence  shifts the other’s conscious experience from their pain-body (as Eckhart Tolle describes it) to a gentler state of being.

     Staying in contact within ourselves is much harder. When we are afraid we want to escape from it; when we are angry we want to lash out; when we are embarrassed we want to end our embarrassment, and so on.  These inner feelings generally have deleterious effects on our ways with others and our world. Dumping onto others what we experience as   suffering within ourselves is no solution (wars are made of this). We do need to acknowledge and   make full contact with it within ourselves: to know its edges, the stories that arise and the habitual responses that surround it, as well as all those grumbly reactions and irritations that we feel in response to it. In staying in contact with the feelings we normally try to dispel we actually have new capacities, new insights, and new ways of responding. The intensity lifts. It doesn’t generally happen quickly, though.  I have found that this method of mindful contact with the suffering I’ve known throughout my life is often intensely uncomfortable, interesting in a curious way, but difficult nonetheless. I also know, at least for myself, it is necessary in order that I be truly who I am. It is a method of mindfulness I encourage my clients to explore.

     Contact is electric and when combined with mindfulness practice fundamental shifts in awareness and new insights and ways of engaging with others becomes real and alive. We become alive, playful and ready to engage  wholly with those about us, even the small green tree frog in our garden and the swish of the wind in the trees.

Brain Plasticity and Continuing to Heal by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

July 2012

     In the bad old days, it was thought the brain grew during childhood, stopped changing in any way, then began a process of decaying, declining, and dementia-fying. In those days the brain was viewed as a bit of  beautiful meat, essentially, and incapable of forming new neural pathways. The current sport of brain gym exercises was not thought useful, even relevant. You were born with an x amount of intelligence and you could be educated, but you couldn’t change your destiny – so it was thought. If you got schizophrenia, you got something that damaged your brain and a damaged brain is what you had. If you had obsessive compulsive disorder, you had ocd. That was it. If you got post traumatic stress disorder, you could be treated with medication, but that was it. Counselling, the talking cure, was thought not to be effective in the treatment of these conditions, except for offering care and support.

     That old model of an inflexible brain has gone by the wayside. We are now seeing the brain as a plastic organ (plastic in the sense of  fluid,  flexible and changeable, not the plastic of tuppeware!) where grey  matter may shrink or thicken and neural connections are forged, refined or weakened and severed in response to new encounters or habits repeated or activities not practiced. This is a physical process that is expressed physically, functionally, and chemically throughout life.

     Brain or neuro-plasticity, as a way of viewing the brain, excitingly and finally takes account of the whole human being in body, experience, and psychological state, for functionality is seen as not only being a result of brain process but a contributer to brain physiology and its processes, as a reciprocal process.  Each time we learn a new skill, like playing an instrument, or crocheting, or plastering, or enhancing pre-existing skills, like writing, or cooking, or singing, we forge new neural pathways in our brain which changes how we do things and how we experience them, sensorially and in our thoughts, in other aspects of our lives. It is in this two-way process that effective treatments are being found for the supposed intractable conditions described above, and for slowing the rate of dementia. Individuals exercising their brain through puzzles and learning new skills is also extremely valuable. Treatments are now utilizing many of the techniques developed and found useful by psychotherapists and counselors. Techniques we developed from an interest in the interface between lived experience and story telling, as well as more hard-core symptom control.

     Acute trauma counsellors, for instance, often use the method of asking the distressed person to tell and retell, in detail, what happened to them, while sitting warmly and comfortably and supported by the counsellor.  Likewise, when the acute trauma continues to be experienced years after the first event becomes chronic (when the neural pathways in the parts of the brain iteratively repeat the course taken before), the therapist  uses the same method with their client. We ask the client to tell and retell in as much detail as possible what happened to them and what feelings arise in them as they give account of  the original traumatic event. In the process of telling the story (I use this word advisedly for I do not wish to imply a fictional account at all; this is real stuff), and retelling it, an interesting capacity arises: a sense of being a witness to the experience, which – over time – lessens its effects on the psyche and felt experience.

     It is interesting that neuroscientists have recently found that getting a person with post-traumatic stress disorder to write down and retell over and over, the traumatic event, in minute detail, and increasing, in this mindfulness exercise, what they call the impartial spectator effect (the witness) changes brain physiology.  The use of magnetic resonance imaging show a shift from neural pathways used over and over (the post-traumatic stress disorder brain) to vital new activity in the person’s brain. The shift to a capacity to look impartially upon a previous torment frees us physically, emotionally, chemically, and psychologically to experience life entirely differently. All thanks to a plastic brain.

     Healing, real healing from a psychological wound is possible  - at a deeply, neurophysiological level, at a functional level, and at the heart of lived experience.  Little, it appears, is fixed. Fluidity of being, a creativity of being, and an awareness of being, integrally intermingle in the healing that continues.

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.

Finding order in chaos. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     Does anyone remember the child’s game of fiddlesticks? You held in your hand a collection of different coloured sticks (mine were plastic), let them go, and then chose one to lift out of the small piece of chaos each stick until all were removed from the pile. If I remember correctly, you chose all sticks of the same colour, until these were removed. There might also have been a component of the game where each colour was worth more or fewer points than the others. It was a game of skill.

     I have clients who come in to see me, overwhelmed with choices: where to go now, which course to take, how to quell an all embracing anxiety about the multiplicity of things.  They’d reached a point of stuckness; a sense that no choice is possible among the many choices. At the heart of this is a knowing that there many many possibilities, an excitement that beckons, but a tremendous anxiety usually concerning the “rightness” of a decision about to be made.

     Like a game of fiddlesticks you can fiddle around putting off making a decision, or you can deliberately pick up a stick and lever off each stick one at a time methodically, noting as you do, what is more important to you, and what can be cleared away without too much thought. It is usually no more complicated than this. A life is a long time (though, of course, how long, few actually know). In a life it is possible (and happens practically always) to take many “wrong” turns before you realize what it is that really matters to you and what it is that you decide to devote the rest of your time to.

     Anxiety in the face of making a decision is a peculiar admixture of emotions. There is a surge of excitement and a sense of confusion; there is sometimes gut pain, often sweating, a tingling, a rootlessness, a feeling that your heart has dropped to your feet, and an idea that you cannot make a move, because at the edge of it all is a sense that you are near annihilation. Anxiety in bits and pieces is quite normal and a part of life. It is when you feel anxious all the time and when it gets in the way of doing what needs to be done that maybe a call to a therapist is a good idea.

     Anxiety is the “fear and trembling” before a new encounter. It comes to the fore when we challenge our old self-world relationship and doing things in the same old way. Feeling anxious, though, when identified positively as an excitement rather than negatively as a disorder, has the wonderful power of changing how we are in the world, of allowing us to embrace life more fully.

     Artists know well anxiety and a sense of being in chaos. They choose to occupy the “anxious space” for although feelings of insecurity, over sensitivity, and abandonment come with the deal, as it were, they embrace the “divine madness” for the extraordinary charge that comes with creation. Creation, as the Old Testament book of Genesis in the Bible describes it, is a process of separating from chaos (‘the earth was without form and void’), night and day, darkness and light. This process, though, cannot be forced: it is necessary to listen to the movements within. This does not mean that you wait until the spirit moves you, but that you respond to the often inchoate “voices” within, and slowly or swiftly as is required create by a process of separation, this from that, that from this till what you have made excites you.

     Anxiety is embraced by artists and can be likewise an energetic source that others can draw upon in the course of daily life.

     If I take one course of action, will I have to abandon all the others?  Yes, but just for now.

     The art and skill of fiddlesticks is to attend fully to each stick as you lever it up and add it to your pile of possibilities beside you. In sorting through the chaos an art of life that excites you becomes clearer. Sometimes this is just plain and rather dull old work; sometimes your heart soars with elation. Choosing is a skill that can be learned and anxiety can be a useful tool in getting you started.

99% of the population aren’t coping perfectly well. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

April  2010

     I’ve sometimes heard it said that since 99% of the population don’t need therapy, what’s wrong with the woossy 1%?  Maybe the numbers are wrong, but the gist of this idea is also missing the mark. The trouble is vast numbers of people in Australia, particularly rural Australia, aren’t coping particularly well. Many use alcohol and/or drugs to mask their emotional difficulties, while others turn to gambling, food, and sex to conceal how they actually feel about themselves.

     Underneath exhibitions of self-abuse there lies vulnerable people feeling they have no one to talk to.  Family and friends often do not have the patience nor the skills to hear someone out, so feeling bruised, grief stricken, confused, in deep emotional pain, they play dangerously with their lives.

     The trouble is, the feelings don’t go away. They may be hidden temporarily, but they pop out when a person least expects it.  These feelings are not always symptoms of a mental illness or mood disorder, like depression or anxiety, but profound distress.  Grief, for instance, can so disturb a person that it feels like there is no possibility of an end to it. Grief can be feelings of loss of a loved one through death (human or animal), loss of a relationship, loss of a job or a familiar lifestyle (experiences of prison can be absolutely devastating to a person’s equilibrium), loss of health and well being (say, through cancer or motor neuron disease), loss of competency and memory (in dementias like Alzheimer’s), feelings of loss when a parent or friend or child acquires a dementia (and this condition is not confined to the elderly) – they look familiar, but they are not ‘all there’; grief has many forms and feeling it does not describe mental illness.  Capacity to experience grief makes us intensely human, though we now know that other animals know grief well.  Movies of elephants grieving over the death of a much-loved member of an elephant clan show this. The capacity to grieve is part of the capacity to love.

     We cannot snap out of feelings we have and denying these feelings exist in our waking life, while over drinking, eating (or refusing to eat), engaging in high risk sexual activity, driving too fast, or whatever, does nothing for the distress that arises at night, alone.

     Counselling, or its longer duration counterpart, psychotherapy, can help restore  a sense of balance within ourselves. It can introduce a sense that we have the capacity to choose from many options in life, rather than go with the stuff we formerly thought was our boring old lot in life. It can invigorate us; bring excitement, even joy to our lives.  Counselling can break through procrastination and artistic blocks, so writing, painting, dancing and music making become not only possible but wonderfully accessible. Counselling is a very useful tool in bringing mindfulness to whatever we do, think, and feel, so that we are not seemingly controlled by other people, habits, and old self stories that get in the way of living authentically.

     Counselling is good, but a holistic approach to working through emotional pain, depression, anxiety, confusion, loss, etc. is best of all. I actively encourage my clients to exercise: walk, swim, run, play sport; to eat a balanced diet (and not over indulge); to take their medicine (as prescribed by their doctor, or alternative health specialist) and cut down the use of alcohol and non-prescribed drugs; to explore ideas in books, talks, the internet, and meetings; to take time out with walks in the forests, massages, spa baths, for instance; and to keep a journal, writing down (or drawing) their dreams, and observations of their encounters in everyday life. Counselling is most effective when it is part of a whole self health plan. When viewed in this way, there is nothing woosy about it. If   1% of the population get to enjoy it, then how lucky are they! The alternative for many people is  a small, ugly, and repetitious life  alleviated (controlled?) by substance abuse and dangerous behaviour. Life is too short for that. How much lovelier to be able to accept what is inevitable, celebrate what is choiceful, and manifest a richer, more abundant presence in the world.

At the Edge

Dec 2010

     When the tears of a lost relationship, or any significant loss at all, exposes the ancient edge of existence, the place of unanswerable questions, we know the edge of meaning/meaninglessness has been reached. It is like teetering on the last rock before the yawning black abyss. We look down and feel engulfed in the inexplicable. What is the meaning of life? Where do we go from here?

     I know this edge very well, and know when my clients are there too. This is the edge of existence as we know it; the familiar is no more.

     What now? We cannot go back, and going forward is stepping off the edge into the unknown. I cannot write, “unknown vastness” for I do not know its size, or if it even can be measured. It’s “possibility,” it’s “potential,” yes, but how, why, what?

     When the edge is known, and I suspect we have all experienced this at various times, we can certainly draw back, grab a beer, turn up the radio, or follow each excruciating filament of our own fear to apprehend the nature of our own despair and see what possibilities arise.  This is a scary place. Is this apprehension a stepping off into space? Yes, I believe it is.

     Some people have faith, some have trust, some have other philosophical beliefs or religious stories about this walking into abyss. For myself, this is the time not to take refuge in ideas, nor engage in fabricating happy endings before the work is actually done.  It is too easy to imagine the fulfilment of a hero’s journey, but such imaginings have a hollow ring, like when you tap a plastic version of a grail cup. The actual work must take place, and I value working with people as they begin or continue that profound work.

     The trouble with our over enriched cultural environs is that we know much about happy endings, and heroic journeys, and mythical places, but don’t well know the hard work that is required for even for the stories to exist.  It is ultimately ineffective to half-heartedly do a bit of this abyss apprehension work, keeping in mind all the while a vision of finding the grail. No, the work is in facing full on the gaping horrifying mouth of the abyss: going in there, terror-filled, and not knowing what next. Grail quests are mere stories; the unknowing is real.

     I have seen among my clients those who have short circuited the actual work. A tell-tale sign  is a tendency to verbalize a fantasy place, or to draw a happy fantasy situation where opposites are miraculously cojoined – all the while demonstrating an out-of-sortness with their immediate experience of being here, now and in relationship with me. The journey, or dark night  of the soul, or leaping the abyss cannot be fabricated.

     The risk, as I write this, is that the language and imagery of the Grail quest and that of St. John of the Cross’ “dark night of the soul,” or even the “abyss” will be substituted for what actual encounters of the edge a person has. This is an existential place essential unique for each person who finds themselves there, when the familiar veils of  life are wrenched down.

     The fear of falling is great and it is natural to want to cling to anything, anybody, any activity that is around, and yet, such are distractions to the work of apprehension.  St John of the Cross, Spanish mystic and monk of the 16^th century, writes of detaching oneself from the things of the world, but he also writes that doing this aligns oneself closer to God. I suggest, instead, to take the  psychic plunge (not physically) without religious or ideological support and enter into unknowing; experience that and see what happens for you. There is potential, possibility, excitement, discovery, a new way of being (or not at all); there is the unknown.

On Knowing the Essence of the Other by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Jan 2011

     Call it empathy, call it emotional compassion, call it ‘putting yourself in the other person’s shoes,’ call it what you will; at the heart of the matter it is knowing the essence of the other. It is  recognizing the realness of the humanity, in its complexity, of the other person in their flesh and blood.

     We are not born having empathy, for it is something we usually grow into.  As little children we start to recognize what another person is feeling from cues such as facial expressions, laughter, or crying, and how they might be responding from various contexts or situations, like cutting a finger. At first we may experience the distress of the other person as our own distress  (their tears are our own) – which can be overwhelming, but then we develop something called reflective empathy where we gradually learn how to helpfully deal with the suffering of others. This reflective empathy may eventually develop into altruistic behaviour. Altruistic behaviour is where you act for the benefit of another person, without necessarily seeing their discomfort first.

     So what does this word empathy actually mean, and is it adequate in its present form? Does it actually connote a much deeper interrelational process?

The word empathy is a relatively recent concoction combining two Greek roots, pathetos referring to “suffering” and the prefix em referring to “in”. As such, the whole word means “in-suffering”.  The dictionary defines it as ‘mental entering into the feeling or spirit of a person or thing’ as well as an ‘appreciative perception or understanding’.  But is it merely mental? It is useful to dig deeper into the origins of the word.

     The term empathy was coined by Titchener in 1909 to serve as a translation to the German word einfühlung, which had been appropriated by a man named Lipps in 1903, to be applied in a psychological context. Einfühlung was originally used in the study of aesthetics to describe the way in which observers are able to project themselves into a work of art or a thing of beauty. To know the grain of the art work within the body of the perceiver. The Greek word aisthetikos meaning "sensitive, perceptive," from aisthanesthai "to perceive (by the senses or by the mind) is origin of aesthetics. So the origins of both words, empathy and aesthetics, are far from being understood as arising from wholly mental processes.

     Unfortunately, as with the drift of the study of aesthetics to an elitist value-driven critical study of the beautiful, so the word empathy has moved from the realm of sense-perception, of knowing in your bones, to a moral cognitive one. No longer concerned with our participation in another’s sufferance as part of a matter of knowing the essence of the other, the term has come to mean anything from an imagined feeling with the other person to a communicated by parallel-felt distress. Thus a group I’ve come across known as “Laws of Attraction” adherents can say that as empathy is a mental activity,  taking on the negative emotions of others is a harmful practice because you are attracting those same negative circumstances into your own life. Better, they say, to empathize with people who have what you want!!! There goes any consideration of the needs of others and any reason whatsoever for working towards a more equable world, and here comes a totally selfish way of being, where all work is for the satisfaction of ourselves. The spiritual dimension of empathy, which is what I know as “knowing the essence of another”, has been abandoned by these “Law of Attraction” crowd, for the pursuit of self gratification.

     Choosing not to be empathic and not knowing how to be are two different things. It is possible to learn how another person feels. In my clinical practice when something of this nature comes up, I might get them (M.) to “put on the shoes” of the other person they are not “getting” and speak the words the other person might say, using “I” words (swapping roles around).  For example, “I can’t seem to make sense of M.,” “I feel M. is missing me; she’s not feeling my pain.” “M. just wants things all her way…”  Something often happens, a sparkle of recognition occurs. A small bit of awareness of the other person twinkles into being and broadens and shifts the whole feeling situation and changes the way they interact with this other person.

     Knowing the essence of the other is a deep process. It is much more lovely than a mere cognitive acknowledgement of another’s being. It is a whole body, mind, spirit, sharing that allows us to not only acknowledge the rights of others to their unique experiences, but puts us firmly into being here on earth ourselves in inter-relationship with them. Knowing the essence of another is being with them in a vital, sensitive way; it is being here-now with zing and being in community with the capacity for interactive sharing.