Knowing, but not knowing you know by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

June 2023

 On the radio the other day, a football coach was saying that he knew it was time to give up his job as soon as he asked himself the question whether to continue doing it. The question itself implied a sense of the answer, or so he thought.

 This got me thinking about the thing about asking questions as well as the kind of implicit knowledge we have about certain issues before knowing that we know.  I could never answer the question, for instance, put to me by an old mentor of mine, “Did I have any questions I wanted to ask him?” My mind always went blank. It dawned on me, as I was driving home from the beach this morning, that the reason for this was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know and for me to ask a question would be to already know what I didn’t know. I needed the language in order to ask the question, any question.

 People come to me sometimes knowing what their problem is and can easily articulate that, but mostly they come expressing a generalized sense of anxiety about what they  think they don’t know what the problem is. Knowing somehow, without knowing consciously.

There are several kinds of knowing, but broadly two types:  Explicit knowledge and Tacit knowledge. The first is the knowledge we can draw upon whenever we like, and organize according to categories (like, for instance, a plan of how to connect SCUBA equipment in preparation for a dive). Tacit knowledge is the knowledge we have that is difficult to explain; we just have a sense of knowing something (like, knowing just the right time to enter the water). Tacit knowledge increases with experience over time, whereas explicit knowledge must be added to deliberately. Some researchers also talk about Inert knowledge, which is knowing something without understanding it, and there are a number of other kinds and levels of knowledge. I intend to only talk about inert knowledge.

Clients may say, for example, that they know they should be meditating and that they know how to do it. They know that meditation will help their levels of anxiety diminish, and yet they don’t do it. This kind of statement needs be untangled. Sometimes it isn’t a case of actually knowing how meditation feels, but knowing the procedure for getting into a meditative state. Procedural knowledge is like reading a manual and knowing the steps to something, but it’s a knowledge that hasn’t been instilled into experiential and tacit knowledge. It is as though the information is there, but the embodied knowing is absent. In cases like this, I’ll often suggest walking meditation where you put your focus on the sensation of walking over grass or sand, becoming aware of the textures, the dips and rises, beneath your feet, the coolness or warmth of the air around you, the way your jacket feels on your body; in other words, getting your awareness back into bodily experience. You walk slowly, conscious of each and every step. This level of mindful practice becomes a meditation very quickly. Your focus is, and has to be, present with what you’re doing. Sitting meditations can too readily drift off into memories and other distracting thoughts.

Bringing consciousness into that which has been unrealized is a really important tool in the art of healing. Much of this inert knowledge is known but not known. Once the knowledge shifts into embodied knowing, it can alleviate much ungrounded anxiety.

Milton Erickson, a father of clinical hypnotherapy (which I practice, along with psychotherapy and counselling), said this "When someone comes to see you, they always bring their solution with them, only they don't know that they do, so have a very nice time, talking with your client, and help them to find the solution they didn't know they brought with them." It’s the art of coming to know something you know at some level, but haven’t been able to successfully access. It’s the art of using what you know to be able to ask the questions needed for finding your answers.

 

 

 

Falling on my feet by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

May 2023

As my previous articles have been documenting, I am making a conscious effort to explore the bardo, the “between spaces” in my life. I first became interested in the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo many years ago, stumbling upon it in relation to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is where the most common understanding of it is attributed. The more I studied, the more subtle I realized the idea represents. It isn’t just that state between being alive and dead, or between death and rebirth, it’s every moment, from this to this to this. It’s in here that we populate our experiences with psychological noise, much of which is quite unconscious.

The bardo is a thick space, as the writings on the matter in Tibetan Buddhism demonstrates, where figments of the imagination, of fears, of dread, of desires, of neediness, of habitual responses, of hungry ghosts loom to the surface: matters of psychological and emotional distress. Figments, nevertheless, of one’s psyche. The what, the why, the which triggers are interesting, I think. Putting one’s focus of attention on these inner fabrications is really useful in stopping habitual reactions and behaviours before they take hold and interfere with one’s life. Too much of our behaviour is unconscious conditioned responses that may, or may not, be actually terribly helpful in our day to day life. Just because this reaction is familiar to us, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate right now.  Too much of our conditioned responses give rise to high levels of anxiety, which we probably don’t need.

The exploration of my conditioned responses gave rise to the experiments I’ve been practicing on myself in recent months. I put my Lismore house on the market (it’s sold now), I set off for Western Australia without a home and stayed with friends, I travelled overseas to the Shetland Islands and swam in the freezing Atlantic (fantastic!), I returned and had to face not having anywhere to stay as  my friends needed the space for other people, and I came back really ill from a virus (not covid) picked up in one of the aeroplanes I flew in. I  contemplated sleeping in my car, airbnbs, hotels, even flying back to Lismore to stay in a friend’s flat. I was really scared. I’ve never done anything remotely as unsafe as this in my life. I’ve always been very security/safety conscious, and yet here I was potentially homeless. All the terrors of my childhood  (and nightmares) welled up in horrible forms. This was exploring the absolute edge of existence for me. And there, in the midst of all this, the settlement on my house came through and on that very same day, within minutes, I’m contacted by a relative of someone I know well saying they have a flat in Fremantle they wish to sell and that they’d be happy if I stayed there while the process of buying the unit was happening. So here I am, writing of the generosity of people, as well as my own extreme feelings of terror in a quiet, lovely home in a place I have wanted to settle all my life. Beneficence!

I have resumed daily swimming in the Indian Ocean and I can feel my body/mind recovering. I notice that the undoing of anxiety knots is happening as I recover my equilibrium. Dreaming is starting to happen again. It was as though even dreams were put on hold as I stumbled from feelings of terror to  the conjuring up of horrific what ifs.

 Interesting times, these, and interesting to me how all this has played out. This experiment on myself is useful in helping me understand better how others explore and overcome their existential terrors. We are all vulnerable  creatures on the way to healthy conscious life and bringing awareness to this process is helpful for all of us. As a therapist, I can only be effective if I too know this process inside out.

 

 

Making Connections by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 April 2023

Making Connections by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

I’ve just returned from overseas. A break between the old bit of life and what’s to come, this was meant to be a holiday, but it seemed to consist of mostly galloping from one place to the next with nice restful bits in between.

The last haul was a flight from Dublin, Ireland to Istanbul Airport (the largest in the world, and it felt like that) to Kuala Lumpur to Perth.  Yikes. About a day plus of travelling in tight sardine cans tearing through the sky and racing what seemed like kilometres to new gates in airports and I got to wondering how many people simply don’t make it, and die inside terminals to maybe be found and maybe scraped up and declared finished.. They’re not called terminals for nothing.

In amongst it all, some lovely highlights: connection with old friends in Germany and the making of new friends in The Shetland Islands. There was one day, just one, when the rain stopped, the fog lifted, and it was sunny and my two new friends and I took the plunge and swam in the freezing Atlantic. The water was crystal clear, smooth and lovely to look at, but God it was cold, very cold. All this was helped along by the fact that these two women are English medicos and, if anything untoward happened, we would look after one another. These sorts of connections are like that. They link us together gently in our humanity.

Our swim was followed by a warm car journey back to the Lerwick guest house, a shower, breakfast and laughter.

Then they went their way and I went on a minibus tour with a very knowledgeable tour operator, on my own, as in no other passengers. As I say, it was a perfect day: sunny, clear and amazingly beautiful. On that journey, I learned some of the history of the place, that the Shetlands were part of  Denmark until 1472 after they, and the Orkneys,  had been used as security for the wedding dowry of Margaret of Denmark, the future wife of King James III. As with most royal marriages, this was a political act. This was meant to be seen as a way of  uniting Denmark and Scotland, following years of disagreements about taxation of the Hebrides Islands. The reasoning was that Margaret's father Christian of Denmark had agreed to a large dowry for his daughter's wedding and pledged the islands of Orkney and Shetland as security until the dowry was paid, as he lacked the funds to pay the dowry up front. It was meant as a temporary thing, but King James refused to let go of these islands, and so they remained part of Scotland. So, there was connection of a different kind, and driven by economics rather than friendship.

It's useful to remember that The Shetlands are just under 300 kms from Scandinavia (half the distance between Lismore and Sydney). The closeness of the islands to that part of the world is reflected in the old language (a seafaring mix of Old Norse and Celtic), and now again, in the architecture, with houses painted in the gorgeous colours of red, blue, yellow, and green.

Connections, in other words, can have different meanings for different people, and not all are those that nurture gentle friendship. Some are driven by power and money and these can get conflated for many people resulting in ideas that all connections between people are driven by self interest. Such cynicism comes up with statements like, friendships between men and women can’t exist, because both are only interested in sex and reproduction, something patently silly when you come to consider other deeper connections.

No, human connection is so much more than biological or economic drives. We all need a safe foundation for exploring our own worlds and being able to share our experiences in getting to know other worldviews. This is, after all, the first base to empathic caring for others as one cares for one’s own self being. This is the glue that unites us across the world, this is the common ground for a one world life.

 

 

The Gift of Fish by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2023

Very early on Christmas morning, my friend and I went swimming at a local beach. I was doing my favourite pastime of snorkeling and, once again, noticed how few fish there were for this time of the year. There was a fisherman standing at the water’s edge with his line in the water. This concerned me because this is a marine sanctuary and there were signs up saying fishing is prohibited. As I was debating about how to tell him that he shouldn’t be fishing here, he called out to me saying his line was caught and could I release it. My interior argument intensified: do I help the fisherman, or the fish? Where does my ethical choice lie, and why? In the end I was moved to help the fisherman who was a stranger to me. This decision  came down to the warm feelings that I have for my fellow human beings, even though I will fight rigorously for the health of the ocean.

  found the line, and released the hook and swam on. On returning to the shore and while my friend and I ate our Christmas breakfast, the fisherman came up and gave me two filleted fish. Again, my age old inner conflict was brought to the surface: I love eating seafood even though I am concerned for sea life. None of this is cut and dried for me. I delight in the smells and tastes of the ocean; I luxuriate in the deliciousness of it all even while earlier I might have  been immersed in thalassic waters, but I’m worried by the way the ocean is being denuded. On this day, this Christmas day, I couldn’t say no to the gift of fish, given that the fish were already dead and it was a gift after all and contradictorily, I like eating fish.

 And so, the conundrum of being human, this human, who eats fish and other seafood even while I relish swimming among  marine life: how do I reconcile the contradictions? I don’t. I hold the two parts together in an uneasy holding pattern. Am I any different from other predators? Seems not. Should I be different? I don’t know.  I am deeply connected to the conundrum of my existence in its many manifestations. I know I do not do well on a strictly vegetarian diet (something about my seafaring  northern European genetic makeup) and I love the sea and all her inhabitants. I think of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of marine life and how she chose the sea over marrying a man she did not love and how she decides whether fisherman catch fish, or not, or whether fish eat us or not. She gives, but also takes away. She is fierce, when she needs to be, but loving and giving when she chooses it. In this way, she can be seen to explain something of the ineffable mysteries of connectedness with all living things.

If I have learned anything it is that my decisions have to come about by weighing up my choices. I have to make those choices on the basis of what is most beneficial for those involved as I see fit then, even while I can note that those choices are not clear cut, and not choices that are inflexible to other conditions. Deciding to free the fisherman’s line on Christmas day may not be the choice I make should the situation arise again. Next time it may be the marine sanctuary that is given the voice, my voice. The mystery of connectedness as I felt it that day was all about human warmth, but it need not be. Water, as a symbol, binds us all together with life all around us but it gives and takes away.

Time to Grieve by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

December 2022

 Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did a tremendous service and disservice in identifying what she saw as the stages of grief in her work with the dying. It’s unfortunate that people sometimes give themselves a hard time because they think the way they’re handling their experience is wrong in some way and this idea is sometime supported by helping professionals.  

 Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist in the 1960s, identified in her book “On Death and Dying” what she saw as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. This stage theory suggests that one moves from each stage  in an orderly way, but in reality this isn’t the case. Nevertheless, let’s pretend this isn’t so and examine what she had to say about each stage.

 Stage 1: Denial. Quite often we respond to sudden loss or change by pretending it isn’t happening. This serves a purpose in numbing our feelings and giving us time to process it. You can call it a defence mechanism, or just accept it as a natural way of dealing with loss.

 And then you move from Denial to Anger when your suppressed emotions start welling to the surface. In this anger, there is a lot of sadness, bitterness, or resentment,   hidden away under the projection of rage onto the situation, other people, or even inanimate objects.

Then, you move to Bargaining and you find yourself creating lots of “what if,” “if only,” statements.  These helps you postpone the sadness, confusion, or hurt. If you are religiously inclined you are likely to try and bargain with God to get relief from your feelings that are welling up: “I promise to be a loving daughter of God, if you will take away my pain” kind of thing.

Stage 4 describes Depression. Here there are profound feelings of despair and loss. You feel heavy, confused, foggy and really sad. You want to isolate yourself, and just feel the feelings as they dump upon you. This phase often feels like what people say about the nature of loss, that it is inevitable and that is something that must be taken care of, maybe through medication.  But, hang on, maybe there is more afoot here and maybe then is the time to talk about it all with a counsellor. 

And then, according to Kubler-Ross, you may enter Stage 5: Acceptance. Now this doesn’t mean you’ve moved beyond grief or loss, but have accepted it and have come to some understanding of what it means for you in your life. 

Now this stage theory of grief is  all very well, but, in my experience and the experiences of many other therapists, feelings of loss do not follow a clear cut pattern; rather we dip in and out of such feelings throughout life. One therapist I know who suffered tremendous personal loss when her twelve year old daughter died of a brain tumour thirty years ago, and who now works as a grief counsellor, suggests we consider another way of thinking about the process of grief. She sees the process of grieving not in a stage form but as an infinite loop where feelings of sadness arise and diminish in an accepting kind of way, and accordingly she  continues to celebrate the life of her child with each of the deceased birthdays and the day of her death.

 I acknowledge the wisdom of this infinite loop model and utilize it with my clients. I might, for instance, recommend spending thirty minutes a day giving mindful space and time to feelings of loss and sadness, suggesting to my client that it’s actually ok to feel such feelings for the rest of their life, or not, however they feel. There is no time limit on feelings of loss, and such feelings are not negative, dark entities, but part of the richness of life itself. There are no rules here, and our experiences matter. By spending just thirty minutes a day also safeguards our experiences from overwhelming us into a contained and special place. We can make this time beautiful, with flowers and candles, or not, as we wish. It’s ok to feel sad, to grief.