The One Who Manipulates the Gaslight by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

September 2018

     I recently watched the 1944 remake of the mystery-thriller Gaslight about a man who tries to send his wife mad by constantly distorting her reality and suggesting that her experiences are false. Things go missing: a picture on the wall comes and goes, a cameo brooch goes missing, there are bumps and bangs, and the gaslight flickers apparently without reason. Her husband controls her, while apparently loving her, in order to keep her “safe”. As the film rolls on we see this abusive, self-centred shifty narcissist take things, hide them, cut her off from family, undermine her, while threatening her with the visitation of doctors to have her diagnosed insane, in order to find and steal some rare rubies. But, like the flickering gaslight, this woman has some awareness that something is out of kilter, but what?

     Gaslighting is a popular term of a co-dependent dysfunctional relationship, not a diagnostic one. It is a relationship that may occur in partnerships, cults, even countries, where the gaslighter attempts to control the sense of reality of the other person, or people.

     Quite a lot has now been identified regarding the cues to look for in a gaslighting scenario and how it feels to  be gaslighted, but little is known about those who gaslight. This is what I intend to explore here. In the next month’s article, I’ll explore the gaslighters strategies for keeping the gaslighted under thumb.

     The gaslighted is anxious regarding the shifting realities, she doesn’t know if she’s loved or not because her abuser turns assurances on an off (I’m using “she” even though anyone can be the victim), she feels unsafe, yet told things to the contrary. She may experience digestive problems (something in the relationship  cannot be swallowed), her skin becomes itchy and dry almost like a protective layer to the turmoil of un-understood occurrences, she cramps up, she can’t sleep, etc.

     We all need safety and security, and somewhere we can be accepted as we are. The gaslighter disrupts all this. Why, though, does he do it?  The more insecure the gaslighted becomes, the more she clings to him, and that is his gain. He likes it that his partner needs him because he needs her to need him to feel validated. In this most vulnerable place, he (this is not gender specific) plays with her neediness: treating her occasionally with mildness and even superficial kindness or remorse, to give the gaslighted false hope. In these circumstances, the victim might think: “Maybe he’s really not that bad,” “Maybe things are going to get better,” or “Maybe I’ll stay, things are looking up,” but the gaslighted should not believe any of it.

     Gaslighters have an insatiable need to control others because of a deep-seated anxiety of abandonment. Maybe one of his parents used their child as a weapon against the other parent, all the while saying something like, “If you love me, you’ll hate your other father/mother,” where love is endlessly conditional. For an protected child growing up, there are few options but to go along with this.

     Things are 100% right or 100% wrong, for authoritarian gaslighters. They seek to control, dominate, and take advantage of another individual, or a group, or even an entire society. By maintaining and intensifying an incessant stream of lies and coercions, the gaslighter keeps the gaslighted in a constant state of insecurity, doubt, and fear. The gaslighter can then exploit their victims at will, for the augmentation of their power and personal esteem.

   All gaslighters think they are not the problem and everyone else is. Gaslighters are practically impossible to get into therapy. If they do attend, it is to tell the therapist that their partner is the problem and if the therapist insists, then, apparently, the therapist is incompetent. In other words, they have no capacity for self-reflection, and if that relationship finishes, the gaslighter will move on to someone new. For the gaslighted, their only real option is to be free and find their own feet in the world and for potential partners to be vigilant about what’s happening from the start.

I am Elizabeth of Estonia. by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

February 2014

      Snow drifted up, sideways, down, through bare birch branches, drifted to ground, thickening there. An explosion of seagulls burst upwards,  a fountain of birds: an indelible evocative sight, numinous really.

     This is the landscape of the park opposite the Soviet built flats in which my aunt and uncle live in Tallinn, Estonia. This could have been the landscape of my mother’s early life. This could have been the landscape … but for the location. My mother was born in Pskov in Russia, of Estonian father and Russian mother. She was schooled in St Petersberg, Russia and then Tartu, not Tallinn, and then only a short time. My mother  and her brother came to Australia on a ship in the mid-1920s. They were immigrants, boat people.

     It was Australia Day recently: when Australians celebrate with the welcoming of new Australians and the drinking of beer and explosions of fireworks. My heart was heavy and the Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie refrain just left me cold. I had only been back a week from Estonia, this land of my mother’s.  The memories and rememberings somehow didn’t sit well in barbecues, and so I stayed at home.

     Re-membering, note the way I write it, is the putting together of things half imagined, half  recalled. Re-membering joins the dots. The story, my story, is situated and relational. This story is situated in place and it is relational to circumstance, place, time, people and the teller herself. This story of my mother, and thus me – to a degree – starts in 1909 with her birth into a disputed land. Of interest to everyone, wedged between the Baltic Sea to the north and west, Latvia to the South and Russia to the East, Finland, across the bay, and Sweden, over the Baltic to the North-West; sometimes claimed by Germans, sometimes Finns, the Russians, the Swedes; Estonia, of interest because of her precious port in  the capital, Tallinn. This port is remarkable. It doesn’t freeze over, because of warm currents. It opens frozen northern Europe to the world. So this little country, with its rich cultural history, its opera, ballet, and theatre companies, its artistic and musical history, its unique language (related not to Russian, but to Finnish and Hungarian), is attractive to larger countries that want to expand their borders. In 1909, Estonia was annexed by Russia. She gained a short lived independence in 1918, but soon she was gobbled again, this time into the Soviet regime, gaining independence again in 1989. Now she is dirt poor and propped up by the economy of Sweden (a dominance of another kind). She is poor but not down and out, despite a minuscule population of only 1.42 million people and a workforce that moves beyond her boundaries into Scandinavia.

     I am always interested in clear boundaries and I now compare this with Estonia’s fight for independent and clear boundaries from others surrounding her. I feel keenly the pressing in of others desires and needs and I know – in my bones – the richness of my own space. As one of my friends describes me, I am Elizabeth of Estonia. I know  the sinews and bones, and the cries of the children, of an ancient land, as if they were my own. This  land, strewn with the moss and snow covered ice boulders of Finnish granite that twisted and turned and travelled across the frozen Baltic Sea, is unique. Granite is from the Finnish landscape; Estonia is all wetlands and sandstone – and so much of it unsettled countryside. I know  it in the very marrow of my bones, the presence of others and my own unique integrity. It is in this knowing  that the personal and the professional meld together, for this is my gift (received, lived, and given again).

     I am, via my mother, a new Australian.  Via her, I know what I give and receive and give again, in my life and my therapeutic work. This being in me, this land of my mother’s ancestry, is me being Australian and me being present for the presence of others and present for myself. I don’t think I am all that different from others who cross the oceans to this place.

     My story is like  snow flakes dropping, rising, drifting and bursts of birds in silent crofts of trees. My story is merely musing, really. A seeking for sense; a joining of the dots.

It’s not all in the mind by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Sept 2013

     Here I am wondering how to write this article and wondering what and how it is I am able to wonder anything at all. I know I want to write about the mind and the body, somehow, but how do I proceed? In common language “the mind” is usually used to refer to the thinking-feeling “I”,  that which allows us to be aware of the world and our experiences, the agent of oneself that is apparently separable from the body.   I’m not satisfied with that, because it doesn’t actually say anything. It’s sort like saying, as I read recently, that experiences, including near death experiences, are just experiences. What are experiences? What is the mind? I’m particularly unsatisfied with the idea that the mind is separable from the body. Who has a mind without the agency to produce it? A human mind cannot be conflated to divine consciousness, even if we think of  the human mind as a part of divine consciousness.

I am also unable to concede the popular notion that everything is all in the mind, because this feels inherently unsatisfactory. It feels to me like I would have to agree that my mind “cooks up” all existence, and I cannot buy that. Fortunately, I’m in good company.

     In Buddhism, all phenomena (subjective and objective) are  said to be dependent upon causes and conditions where nothing arises uncaused.  Every cause has a previous cause, a previous context, and situation, so that every phenomenon arises from previous phenomenon. It is interesting that such a perspective sits well with modern Western psychological thought and that it contrasts with our earlier philosophic tradition. The latter had a far more mystical idea about the nature of mind, the psyche. The psyche was seen as a sort of conflation of the soul and thought that was  somehow independent of everything material,  a sort of spiritual ether. Contemporary psychology, and Buddhism, sees the mind as inherently relational, and thus not independent of anything, nor ethereal.

     The mind, seen relationally, arises in a dependent way upon both internal and external things. Pain, for example, is thus not all in the mind as much  mind itself is not a creation of itself. We are responsive, relational beings.  There really is an outside world, and there is a relationship we have with it. This relationship is incredibly complex and entwined. If this was not so, we would not be able to share our experiences with one another, nor with other sentient beings. I note here that there is certainly a school of Buddhist thought that declares the material world as nothing but a projection of our minds, but this is not shared by other schools of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama, for one, considers it more ‘coherent’ (in his words) that there is a reality that consists of both the subjective mind and objective objects in the material world.

     The relational dependence of the mind upon inner and outer realities is what Buddhists call the philosophy of ‘dependent origination’ in which there is a continuum and complexity of attributions. We are thus able to say, we are made of star dust; we are continuous in substance with the rain and the oceans; we join with our ancestors as we tread this earth – mystical phrases that house actualities. The basic elements that make the universe make our bodies and our brain, that give form and language to our minds (the archetypes of divine potters that contrive bodies and give them breath, has something essentially true to say here).

     Our intentions, our will, our activities in the world thus matters incredibly, for these have a real bearing on all else in our subjective and objective lives. This how, what, and whether: the how we live our lives, what thoughts we think, how we manifest those thoughts, whether we are generous towards others and ourselves, and so on, is where  psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy comes to their own. The changes and choices we make really do change our relationships with ourselves, one another and our physical environment, and the matter of our own brains (brain plasticity). The mind truly is a relational state of being. A change at the level of mind, changes fundamentally everything because the mind is not separate. Life really isn’t all in the mind, for the mind is merely an integral part of  it.

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.