An Uncommon Therapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns, PhD

November 2018

     Uncommon Therapy, the Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, is the title of a book  by Jay Haley on the strategies and practices of Erickson, the father of modern hypnotherapy.  Fundamental to how Erickson worked was just getting to know how the patient thought and interacted in their world, their potential, the things that mattered to them and then utilizing this knowledge in therapy. For him, the patient was unique, first and foremost. He said that the therapist needs to be flexible conceptually and behaviourally to respect, respond, or redirect the patient’s potential to the full benefit of themselves.

     A lot of therapeutic practices are driven by theory and preconceived classifications and notions of what good therapy should be so the perspectives of the therapist tends to dominate where the therapy goes.  I’m thinking here of certain aspects of psychoanalysis, or the medical model and increasingly the health insurance model that utilizes psychiatric classifications of mood and behavioural problems as set entities, or the idea that mere symptom control is sufficient in every situation, or that therapy needs to be swift and superficial all the times, etc. For some  practitioners of these one-size-fits-all therapies, an alternative model based on the fact that each case, each person, is unique tends to be seen as bizarre.

     Erickson (1901-1980), an American psychiatrist and psychotherapist, went elsewhere. He chose a therapeutic approach particular to the individuality of the person before him and worked that way. Unique people require unique therapeutic approaches that utilize their uniqueness and we are all unique. This took the form of traditional sessions in his consulting room, or he insisted a client climb a particular Arizonian peak or visit a botanic garden, or he invited his patient to watch television at a set time each day with his family (shock, horror), or to work in his garden, or home visits, and so on. This was very much uncommon therapy. It was flexible, it listened to the hang-ups, the foibles, the strengths, the frailties, the needs as well as the non-needs of each person and utilized them.  But before doing therapy of this kind, Erickson needed to be with the person’s experience, to listen, to question, to get a feel for the person.

     It is interesting that, in a desire to practically bottle Erickson’s presence and approach, numerous of his followers tried to pin what he did down to a formulation of his style and personality to be imitated by others, as though this was even possible. Erickson, like you, like me, was unique. He lived according to himself. He could not hear tonality in speech and music was dead to him, he was colour blind (able to see only the colour purple), he had been crippled by polio and post-polio syndrome in his 50s, he was talented, flawed, obstinate, highly intelligent, dogged, frail, methodical, practical, scientific even. What he did was listen to what people said and how they said it, he interacted with them (and the therapeutic relationship is critical to effective work), he supported, he created safety, he held back from getting in the way of good therapy and he did what was required. But not always. He sometimes missed the mark, just like all therapists.

     His was an uncommon therapy. He used a more traditional hypnotic induction techniques in his work, but not always. Sometimes he just did an ordinary act differently in order to get a person out of their conditioned, trancelike way of thinking. Sometimes he just talked of ordinary things a patient loved to do, like growing tomatoes that had the effect of reconnecting the person to other parts of their lives and thus initiating their psychological healing. In other words, Erickson played with the known and the unknown and thus stimulated change.

     I like Erickson’s thinking and the freedom he has brought to me through his writing and my contact with therapists trained by him to work according to the me-ness of me, and not as a tired imitation of him, or anybody else. This is what drives me: to meet with my patients where they are and where I am in these unchartered waters of an uncommon therapy and work there effectively.

A Sociology of Gaslighting by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

October 2018

     In September’s issue of the Nimbin Good Times, I wrote of  why gaslighters gaslight. In this article I explore the subject a little deeper in order to understand how and why a person may acquiesce to being gaslighted.  

     Gaslighting is a popular term used to describe a co-dependent dysfunctional relationship where the gaslighter attempts to control the sense of reality of the other person so that they come to doubt their sanity. Gaslighting is abuse, plain and simple, but its existence is bound to a cultural way of thinking about male/female differences.

     A gaslighter does what he, or she wants (gaslighters can be either gender, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m using “he”) as strategy is an attempt to silence the other person, to belittle her, and thus to prove his idea of male superiority (superior, dominant, more intelligent, more rational, or whatever).

     Women are often conditioned to collaborate and empathize and this makes her want to appease her partner when he pulls the “superiority” card. She’ll embark on a sort of iterative mouse wheel of explaining, complaining, crying, begging, pleading, etc. which reinforces his belief in his supposed rational superiority.

     Gaslighting is a major obstacle to forming a healthy sexual relationship. It’s hard for women, for anyone really to maintain an interest in sex when their sense of safety is destroyed. It is not uncommon for a woman’s body to simply stop responding and, at that point, for the man to start forcing her into sex that hurts. I say to the gaslighted, listen to your body, your body knows something is wrong. Get out and find your own life again.

     Sociologically, an  examination of gaslighting reveals a lot of social conditioning and cultural beliefs about what it means to be male or female. That baggage contains ideas that have little to do with actual biological differences, a fact revealed when softer men are described in feminine terms. The language surrounding male-femaleness says a lot. You’ll hear in there the idea that women are weaker than men, that their opinions are irrelevant, that her wants are not legitimate nor should be listened to, etc.

     Gaslighting is thought control and it’s done by the gaslighter to avoid feeling vulnerable and open to emotional pain, to avoid feeling “feminine”. It is significant that with this closed-heartedness comes lack of empathy and, quite often, cruelty to self, others, and animals. Gaslighters are frequently hard-nosed, no nonsense, driven men who fight tooth and nail to get what they want. They are resistant to change, narcissistic, and often, sociopathic, and cannot bear the idea of a relationship based on mutual respect, intimacy and equality.

     Traditionally, many of us in the West are brought up to believe that women’s role is to make men happy. Again, I’m not just referring to actual women, but the idea that in a relationship of any kind there has to be a strong, rational masculine person and a weak, irrational feminine one who clings to the man of the house for her very life. Women who identify more strongly with this paradigm often stay in a gaslighting relationship because they don’t know what else to do, how else to be. He has the financial stability, she has never learned to manage her finances. He has the house, she will be homeless on her own. He says he loves her, while telling her she is worthless. Maybe it isn’t all bad, and so she stays – to risk her own sense of reality, her own sanity.

      And so the light flickers, goes out, comes back on, flickers again. Nothing is safe, nothing is predictable, and she doesn’t know herself anymore. Maybe if she gave up everything that she is, he’ll truly love her, maybe not.

     Fortunately many in this weakened position do get enough clues to see what is being done to them and how they agree to it, at some level, and they get out. This is the beauty of the power of information about gaslighting. We can now see it for what it is and reclaim our own identity, our own truth, and be gaslighted no longer.

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.