The Dance of Focus and Relaxation in Hypnosis

December 2015

The Dance of Focus and Relaxation in Hypnosis by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I remember, years ago, studying qi gong and being taken by the rhythm of yin and yang. In this Chinese practice, each strong movement is followed by a gentle one and every movement comes from a state of relaxation and focus, with a strong sense of balance and harmony and a centre point felt within.  I realized that this pattern was very powerful and set about employing in everything I do. It is there in my counselling and it is there in my clinical hypnotherapy work. As a conscious practice, I discovered that I don’t get tired when working with someone.  Enter the dance of challenge, support, challenge, support and it flows.

     What comes to mind right now is that wonderful scene in the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” where fighting goes on in a field of swaying bamboo. Each action is followed by an allowing, a swaying, a challenge, a swaying, challenge and a block, and a swaying; it’s hypnotic and very beautiful.

     The rhythm of relaxation and focus is similar to what occurs in exercises of mindfulness. This is very relevant for clinical hypnotherapy, as certain mindfulness techniques are employed in hypnosis. Mindfulness might be identified as putting a focus on what’s happening right now. After all, when

you’re in the moment you’re not ruminating about  the past, not in the future, not caught up in memories, nor thinking about  other things, judging anything, or making decisions about anything.  You are noticing what you’ve overlooked before and in bringing such awareness to mind, you are reprogramming yourself, or even repriming yourself, to noticing things (solutions, delights, insights) that you had previously been unconscious of.

     Mindfulness is a tool, but so is hypnosis. You can use mindfulness in meditational practices and your purpose there might be enlightenment. Using mindfulness in hypnosis (and counselling, for that matter), however, and the purpose is much more ordinary. You are doing it to dispel problem thinking. This is a solution focused exercise.

     Fundamental to both mindfulness for meditation and mindfulness for therapy is that it provides a means of dissociating oneself from everything extraneous to what is brought to one’s attention by your own choice and guided suggestions of the hypnotherapist; suggestions which I invite you to ignore, if you wish. The process of offering choice is critical for a person to feel they are not being manipulated (and I’m certainly uninterested in manipulating anybody) and for them to choose which course of action sits best with them. Choices made like this are most enduring and likely to be employed later on in ordinary life.

     Dissociation is a very useful, and very human, ability. It allows us to focus on whatever we are choosing to do, like, say, sewing a piece of tapestry and ignoring the lawn mowing going on next door.  Focus is a tool of awareness. If we lack focus it is hard to do, or change anything. The act of being mindful narrows down what we are experiencing and thus allows us to identify what is important to us and gives us the skills to go for it.

     Hypnosis is a relaxed and yet focussed state. I invariably tell my clients this at the start of a hypnosis session. I often tie this observation to the very act and awareness  of breathing: an inhalation is an inspiration and an exhalation naturally an act of letting go and feeling the wonderful spread of a deeply relaxed state. When we are inspired we can achieve  much, when we let go of  the problems that we used to have,  we can allow ourselves to feel nourished and supported. Both become a dance of yin and yang and a dance that sustains us throughout life.

Fear Itself

Fear Itself  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I remember 30 or so years ago having developed a fear of heights. I’m not sure of the reason for it, but it had become quite apparent that my fear was getting in the way of doing the kind of things I really enjoyed, like climbing sea walls and up and over rocks in order to get to special swimming holes. I thought to myself, I must overcome this. So I set  to break the phobia.

      I challenged myself. I travelled to the tops of buildings and stood on balconies. I could feel myself  nearly losing balance, nearly teetering over. Nearly, but not.

     At the time, I worked in a tall building that, disconcertingly, had a glass lift in the middle of the place that took you from floor to floor in full view of everything. People could look in and people could look out. It was scary. Until my decision to break my fear, I used to ride it standing dead centre with my eyes closed. Afterwards, I’d stand exactly at the edge facing outwards and allow myself to go deep into the experience, immerse myself in it, and ride that elevator.

     This immersion therapy worked and I came eventually to really enjoy the experience of near flight by going to the heart of fear itself. There are kinder therapies around though, and hypnotherapy is one. Rather than exposing someone to the den of the lion of fear, the subject of fear is contextualized as part of ordinary, every day experience and it thus loses its ferocity.

     Fear is a useful survival tool and gives us the means to avoid situations that could be life threatening. Fear causes a flooding of the whole body of useful adrenaline and cortisol that allows us to get away from danger. It’s when the danger is not to the body, but to our emotional state that fear can turn into a psychological phobia. It’s then problems arise and it can cripple us.

    There is a very rare genetic problem, called Urbach-Wiethe disease. Sufferers don’t experience any fear at all, or so it is thought. There is a certain degree of evidence to suggest that some forms of fear may be experienced by these people.

Fear is processed in the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain, as well as other emotions. In people with Urbach-Wiethe disease this part of the brain is calcified over, hardens, and shrivels up, and doesn’t function for fear, even though sufferers have normal cognitive function and can experience feelings of joy, happiness and sadness.  A sense of fear, though, can be induced been getting subjects to breath high concentrations of carbon dioxide, as a recent study has shown. The feelings of suffocation and panic were similar in both the control group and those with amygdala damage. It seems life is much simpler than brain physiology indicates, at least at a very basic level.

     The word fear is intrinsic to the English language.  In Old English, it was faer, in Middle English  it was fere, and meant a sense of sudden danger. It came to mean “to terrify and frighten”. A phobia is “an irrational fear, horror, aversion.” The word phobia comes from the Greek phobeo, “terror, fear, panic”. Phobos is the name of one of the moons of Mars. It is also the name of one the twins born to the Greek God Ares (God of War) and Aphrodite (Goddess of Love). Phobos (fear) was twin to Deimos (terror). I find mythology very interesting because here is a kind of psychological awareness of how it is with us humans; semi-aware parts of ourselves are personified into gods, goddesses and demi gods.  Here in war, in fear, love is met, and here is something more than mere survival. In this juncture profound change to a life lived, thus far, is possible.

     Continuing this line of investigation, the word phobeo contains within itself a mysticism, a reverence for something not yet known, something intimated, a mystery, respect, a sense of awe. It sort of reveals itself in Phoebe, daughter of the sky (Uranus) and the earth (Gaia) She is a Titan Goddess of Radiance and Brightness, and a  prophetess at the Oracle of Delphi. She foretells many changes, many hopes and dreams.

    A fear that seems to cripple can be a sign that a war is going on within and a life that brings delight isn’t yet being lived. People come, often bringing more than a fear. They sometimes bring depression and generalized anxiety. There is, in anxiety, a tremendous amount of energy; and energy that can release huge and fundamental changes.

From fear comes the possibility of real and  enduring shifts in perspective. From the darkness of fear, comes this lightsome being of light, so feeling and identifying fear is the beginning of some pretty fundamental change in a person’s life. It’s a very good place to start: from fear itself.

Hypnotherapy: entering the zone

   October 2015

Hypnotherapy: entering the zone   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     I’m currently participating in an online international conference on using hypnosis in the treatment of depression. We listen or watch or read several presentations, ask questions, attend coaching calls where we talk about cases, theories and approaches, and ask more  questions. I’m gathering, expanding, deepening my understanding of things, which only helps those I work with, and also layers on more dimensions to the work I do, which is very satisfying. I am thus moved to write more about hypnotherapy and how it works, because I think such knowledge is invaluable.

     Hypnotherapy, or hypnosis as the Americans call it, is nothing like the hypnosis dished up to audiences attending the latest stage show. It, or I, cannot make a person do anything they have no desire to do, and what’s more, what happens in a session doesn’t involve giving up your conscious awareness nor handing over the control of you to me. This is anathema to the healing principles of any good therapy. Change comes from within  you, from your conscious and non conscious processes. Hypnotherapy is a therapy of change.

     Hypnotherapy provides a wonderful context for moving beyond problems a person might have. The dynamic of a problem is a seemingly endless looping, around and around, with the same thing going over and over in your head, something that doesn’t seem to be solvable just by thinking about it. Indeed, the repeated thoughts, or habits, or whatever it is that dominates a person’s life creates a sort of inflexible space from which escape seems practically impossible. Hypnotherapy can help move a person out of this inflexible space and into fluidity and a certain joyfulness.

     Hypnotherapy facilitates, in a relaxed and yet aware state our mood, freeing and amplifying positive mood states, as well as giving us access to ways of  more flexible thinking and feeling in the future. Hypnotherapy is thus both a present and future oriented treatment. What might be honed in on during a session can become tools for what happens tomorrow, next week, and the rest of your life.

     There are several components of a hypnotherapeutic session. One is dissociation, while another is association, while a third is suggestion, and others. In the dissociative state the person doesn’t know how to produce hypnotic phenomena (eg creating an analgesia) by deliberate means, but can produce the desired effect with no awareness of how she did so. These processes are typically described as latent, or unconscious, and they point to the enormous resources we have at our disposal, though we generally don’t know we have them.  Think here of amazing stories of people finding in themselves enormous strength when faced with catastrophic events and getting out of these situations alive. In association, connections are made between apparently unrelated skills and experiences, connecting the dots, as it were, so that moving forward makes sense.  Suggestion is the added idea offered to the client to ameliorate change in their take on their life. It might be, say, for giving up smoking, that the cigarette tastes disgusting, like a rubbish bin, and that you have no desire to keep it in your mouth a moment longer but rip it out, crush it underfoot, and throw it away. Dissociation, association and suggestion already shift the way you think about things, and introduce into the mix, knowledges you didn’t realize you had.

     When you enter the relaxed and yet focused state that is the hypnotic trance, many things become possible. Changes are already happening to move a person out of the fixed state of a problem so that things can be better managed or removed altogether. The kind of problems beautifully worked on cover: pain management, anaesthesia, anxiety and panic attacks, depression, low self esteem, social anxiety and poor coping skills, problem solving skills, artistic and athletic skills, eating problems, sleeping problems, smoking, increasing mindfulness and relaxation, etc.

     A series of hypnotherapy sessions provides a zone, for experiential and behavioural change and entering into the zone is a pleasant experience: it’s safe, secure, comfortable, and usually easy.  I have a special chair that extends to a soft, supportive, wonderful couch. I call it the magic chair, for it is a tool in the furniture of change. Each session is tailored to each person and I do not use scripts, so I am present with you every inch of the way. You are unique and I work from where you are and what engages you, for engagement is the cornerstone of hypnotherapy. This is the context of learning, this is the zone.

Depression and Treatment

September 2015.

Depression  and Treatment by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

Depression is diagnosed as feeling sad or blue for two or more weeks. It is characterised by two things: self blame and rumination (thoughts that go round and round and round your head). Both paralyse decision making skills, feelings of well being, and the ability to move on in one’s life.

Depression, which is essentially a fear-based response to events, relationships and psycho-physiological conditions, can lead to dropping out of society, losing one’s job, ceasing to create, developing heart disease, over-eating, under-eating, smoking, chronic resentment against self and world, smoking and other addictive habits. Major depression is a growing concern, world wide. The World Health Organization identifies it as the fourth most significant cause of disability in the world.

So what is depression? There are many views on this, many perspectives and it rather depends on how you see the world. Contributing factors include biology: genetics (though no depressed gene has been located), biochemical contributions (serotinin, a breakdown in the auto-immune response, etc), health, exercise, and diet. There are the psychological factors: your individual temperament, coping style, attributional style (that is, how you view what happens to you in different circumstances), your personal history, and so on. And the social factors: the quality of your relationships, the culture in which you live, isolation, and so on. Depression is contextual in the sense that it arises in response to something. Interestingly, it seems to have a capacity to be spread (witness the proliferation of deeply depressed adolescents through online sharing of gothic thoughts and cutting). In other words, there are many contributors to whether a person becomes depressed or not.

Childhood experiences, including the quality of support you’ve experienced from your care givers, modeling and what you’ve learned from your family as to how they cope with loss and adversity may  contribute to the likelihood of having depression, but not necessarily. What’s more important is how a person responds ongoing processes, how they use information, how they form relationships, and how they interpret  the meaning of things that happen to them. Socialization continues throughout life and our coping skills are also being developed throughout life. This means we can learn not to follow a pattern that we used in previous times to manage life’s situations.

Treatment of depression ranges from medication, electroconvulsive therapy, diet, exercise and psychotherapy. A single-pronged approach is not likely to work, and doesn’t in many cases. Treating those diagnosed with depression with anti-depressants such as serotonin-reuptake inhibitors is often believed by patients to be sufficient, but, one, anti-depressants don’t work for everybody (they just don’t work in the way researchers thought they would) and the problems that exacerbated  the condition in the first place are still there.

Some interesting research is going on in Leiden, The Netherlands, on the thesis that depression is an inflammatory problem and the use of probiotics seems to have the effect of lessening the inflammation in the body. Probiotics have been found to cut down the propensity for rumination.

Exercise fills the body-mind with good endorphine hormones and feeling good clears the depression away. It’s hard getting oneself motivated, however. The use of hypnotherapy at this level is very useful, as it is on other levels as well.

Psychotherapies that concentrate on present issues are found to be more effective than those that go back over old stuff. This is because certain psychodynamic therapies work using rumination, and rumination, as I’ve indicated, is a characteristic of depression. So a therapy (eg cognitive behavioral, interpersonal and hypnotherapy) that refocuses on what takes a person out of their problem story is more likely to be successful here in changing things.

A metaphor might help. Imagine someone walking through the bush for the first time. This is like thinking about something in a novel way. If, for whatever reason, the person goes that exact same way the next day, and the day after that and the day after that, the pathway gets worn down: old patterns are repeated, negative thought patterns are reiterated, neural circuits become circular, and it’s really difficult to leave the pathway because it has created such a crevasse in the landscape that getting out is now really hard. The walker has sort of forgotten how to walk innovatively. Hypnotherapy can change that, using – possibly – this, or another tailor-made visualization. The creation of a means out of depression needs to be as individual as the person suffering depression. The reason for their depression is as unique to them as their remedy. The remedy, I think, should be holistic, but first and foremost, supported by a therapist who understands the interconnection of all these processes.

Magic Potions, Hypnotherapy and Memory

August 2015

Magic Potions, Hypnotherapy and Memory  by Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     Sometimes, but thankfully not often, I see a client bounding down my stairs to my consulting room starry eyed and full of expectation that I will hypnotize them and they will remember something or other from their distant past.  I say to them, first, I’ve run out of magic potion and secondly, neither memory nor hypnosis operates like that.

     I know of a therapist who keeps a drawer full of beautiful wands, and I’m quite disposed to getting one because they’re rather fun. They are, though, utterly useless for clinical hypnotherapy.  This is not magic the thing we do. It is inspired and intuitive science, but science nevertheless. In other words, there is a huge body of sound, peer reviewed, research and literature on the subject of hypnosis and memory. Our repertoire does not include wands, potions, and incantations.

     Memory is not a photographic cache from which one can miraculously extract this and that. It is context dependent and co-emergent with situation, time, space, and people involved. It is not possible to drag out a memory that you’ve actually never remembered.

     During the 90s there was a fad for using therapy, particularly hypnotherapy to tap “repressed” memories. This idea is based on the belief that all symptoms are based on past experiences, forgetting that we make meaning of our world in a continual, here and now, process that isn’t locked in the past but is continually reinforced by the way we see ourselves. Symptoms are accessible to our present state of mind, and changeable so we don’t need to dig out old photographs of our past in order to get well.

     Age regression hypnosis has sometimes been used by some very unscrupulous people to crack open what was at best misguided, but worse, dangerous to health, family cohesion and mental stability; in other words, not therapeutic at all. In the latter part of the 90s newspapers, magazines and courtrooms were full of accounts of  “remembered” Satanic rituals and rapes with demonic weaponry, or visitations and medical experiments by aliens. But these so-called memories were mostly implanted in the minds of the patient and the therapists, who did this false memory retrieval work, developed a following of who claimed to have very similar “memories”. The problem was, and is, that these so-called “memories”, or “confabulations” felt genuine, even though they were not anything historically based, nor possible.

     For instance, I had this idea that I saw Zeppelin airships flying over Nedlands, the Perth suburb I grew up in. Zeppelins were invented in the latter years of the 19^th/early 20^th century and used in the First World War. There is absolutely no way I could’ve seen such a thing when growing up in the 50s and 60s, though my feelings of anxiety and terror were real. I can only surmise that I dreamt it. My father had a book on balloons, and my imaginative self loved looking at that.

     Trauma specialists note that things aren’t forgotten; they may be blocked from full consciousness, but the very presence of symptoms such as nightmares, trigger responses, agitation, etc shows how the trauma is remembered: in the physicality of our being. Uncovering memories are not found to be all that useful in the healing process. The brain does us a service in blocking out the extremely unpleasant. Such memories may very rarely emerge later, but in the meantime we have an amnesia for the particulars of the event for a reason (our mental well being), while retaining a global knowledge of the trauma.

     We may remember bits and pieces of something that happened a long time ago, but it is not possible to corroborate such memories for the  truth of the matter. Hypnosis does not reveal truth, just like a magic potion cannot be a truth serum. We do not have any means to locate in the here and now something that happened a long time ago.  Hypnosis can only work with symptoms and change how we see and feel those and thereby free ourselves from them.

     I am not in the business of confabulating a person’s history.  I am only interested in helping a person feel more whole and better about themselves, whether this is giving up smoking, restoring a better diet, better sleep, a much more relaxed sense of well being, less pain, happier relationships, more confidence,  etc.  I don’t put ideas into a person’s head, I merely use the images, words, and thinking style presented to me. I endeavour to keep what I say clean and untampered with from my own way of seeing the world. I am literally using what they have given me in ways to change negative patterns of thought, addictions, recursive thinking, etc. Curiously, and this was told to me  by my teachers when I first started working as a therapist, a patient gives you much of what you need to work therapeutically with them. Quite often the solution is found in the first sentence. It’s there to be incorporated in a healing process. Hypnotherapy, counselling and psychotherapy are all very good at working with what is present now and allows the patient to move more confidently forward without being held prisoner to the past.

Love, Jealousy, and Danger

July 2015

Love,  Jealousy, and Danger  by  Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

A couple have come together, finally, after many years yearning for this very thing. Their love is raw and tangible. They can’t keep their hands to themselves, and are caressing the other’s hands, lips, knees. One of them, though, has bouts of terrible jealousy and it is for this reason they have come to see me for counselling. 

It is often popularly assumed that jealousy is a sign of deep love, but is actually isn’t.  When people are feeling secure in the love relationship and in themselves (and this is the crucial point), jealous feelings don’t arise. Jealousy is associated with low self esteem, a tendency to be anxious and moody, feelings of insecurity, fear of being socially isolated, not feeling adequate in the relationship, clingy, and feeling the partner will leave them for another person. Summed up, jealousy is positively correlated with neuroticism.

It’s hard for the other person to realize this about their loved  partner, particularly when the jealous one is accusing them of all kinds of infidelities: she glanced at another man, he helped a woman carry her groceries, she greeted her work colleague on the street (she must be having an affair with him), he wrote an email to his female student and labelled it “private”, and so on.

It takes time for the non-jealous one to realize the level of insecurity the other has and that it isn’t anything he or she is doing, but rather that the problem rests almost entirely with their partner. They’re the ones who need to learn to relax into the love relationship and not respond in their old way, according to the scripts they learned while growing up. Jealousy has its root in insecure attachments formed with their primary caregiver (who maybe their mother, but not always). The primary caregiver wasn’t emotionally available much of the time and when they were emotionally present, it was beautiful. And so, they crave the security, warmth and sense of one-ness in relationships that might, perhaps, repair the childhood they never had.

Feelings of jealousy are the responsibility of the person having them. If they don’t take responsibility for their own feelings but try to seize control, absolute control, of the other person, then the whole relationship becomes a danger zone.

It might start out innocently enough. The rather awkward John sees, and falls in love with the elegant Amy who attracts everyone. John is smitten. He begins to make sure that he is always at every event Amy is likely to be. He then sends her flowers. She is flattered and thanks him, but is not particularly interested. He woos her and she, a little bit reluctantly, goes along with it. They become a couple.

He starts leaving notes at her door, and begins stalking her. She is never left alone, he asks her where she has been all the time, and she is getting really scared and angry. She makes sure she is never alone, and starts to invite other friends to escort her to events. This enrages John. She comes home one day to a hundred red roses on the doorstep. She is horrified and dumps them in the rubbish bin outside her house – an act seen by John. He flies into a rage, confronts her and beats her up, while claiming it is she who is hurting him.

Thus desire turns from wanting to be with her, to jealousy, and vigilance and then violence. The roses, a symbol of love, becomes for him a sign of his undying love. She is just disgusted and throws them away. He feels more than merely rejected; he is feeling brutalized. He never realized her actual individuality nor the possibility that she didn’t wholeheartedly welcome his presence, ever.

His brutalization could well have resulted in her death, and rather frighteningly frequently does. This is not a sign of love, but a delusion and jealousy is not a sign of loving closeness, but a desire to control the feelings of anxiety that arise in human encounters and relationships.

I’ve noted above that there is a strong correlation between jealousy and neuroticism. Studies have found that the higher the level of emotional instability and the arising of such unpleasant emotions as anger, anxiety, and depression, the more a person is prone to jealousy. The desire to fuse with the other person is very strong and every act of theirs that seems to snub the jealous one undermines his/her self esteem.

A relationship based on jealousy is an insecure relationship and one that really requires healing. Love, in its committed and freely entered into form, can begin to heal the people involved, but this work requires active and responsible owning of negative feelings. It is at this point that working with a counselor can really help repair the relationship, or, if this is not possible, release the pair into their separate lives.

 E.E.McCardell copyright

Unbinding through Metaphor

 2015

Unbinding through metaphor  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     In 1997 I was in Nanjing in China to give a paper at a conference on aging in the 21^st century, and to do a special acupuncture course. We had a holiday as well, travelling outside Nanjing to Wuxi and Shanghai, which was wonderful. It was autumn and the trees were changing colour. Mists rose across the valleys and over the great Yangtze River and settled in the little hollows between houses. I noticed that some of the little trees in the parks and along the streets were bound in rope, apparently to shape them so as to represent the perfection of Tao (which is supposedly a philosophy of change). It struck me then, as it does every time I think about it, that forcing nature to follow our conception of nature’s way is nonsense. Nature does her thing, whether or not it fits with how we philosophize her to be.

      Binding young trees is akin to binding women’s feet and though the latter is no longer seen as legitimate practice, the former is accepted blindly. This got me thinking, what else do we accept blindly and turn into an artefact that goes against nature? Millions of things go against nature, where the principle is antithetical to change. Our very capacity for making our lives miserable is one of them. Addictions, bad habits, anxiety and feelings of hopelessness are bound up states, needing to be unbound.

      Metaphor, by its very nature, unbinds when given the chance to. The etymology of metaphor is interesting. From the  Greek, meta-forein means “to bring beyond”, to express something that is “beyond” an immediate logical understanding on the emotional and imaginative dimension. It is a figure of speech which makes an implicit, implied or hidden comparison between two things or objects that are not apparently similar at all, but which have some characteristics common between them.

      Metaphor takes us beyond mere words to an understanding beyond the beyond. It is like a door opening to a different level of being, health and hope. This is a literal truth.

      Metaphors change the way our brains work. Neurological studies in recent years have shown that when an imaginative image is evoked the part of the brain getting a sense of the image is sparked. For example, take the metaphor, “the woman had a velvety voice” and the brain’s sensory cortex is roused, but to the words, “the woman had a nice voice,” there is no special activity there. To the words, “wine dark sea” the part of the brain concerned with taste and smell are activated, but “the sea was deep” doesn’t. The metaphorical phrase, “hacking like an old steam train” (as long time smokers tend to do) kicks off the auditory centres of the brain. “Hanging by the skin of its teeth,” evokes the proprioceptive receptors in the brain (responsible for allowing us to know the sense of our body in space), whereas “nearly falling off” doesn’t.  And so on. These are mere words on a page, mere black lines and dots and lots of white space, but nevertheless evoke so much more. The capacity of humans to experience way beyond the immediate is extraordinary, an extraordinariness that can take us much further than we sometimes think.

      So metaphors not only beautifully lubricate our engagement with thoughts, ideas and a capacity to share experiences, they also embody that engagement for us in order to know the meaning of something with our whole selves, and, further allow us to let go of preconceived ideas about ourselves, and let change happen.

     Knowing something beyond the mere bone-bare description of them is why metaphors are an extremely effective tool in psychotherapy and, more particularly, in clinical hypnotherapy. In the state of hypnosis, which is a relaxed yet focussed one, the mind is open to experience, or not (and the choice is always with the client), the shifting perceptions that effectively undo the fixed ideas the person has about themselves. A lot of psychological problems and pain syndromes are iterative, in the sense that the person experiencing  them feels that the problems are just going over and over and over in their heads. Using metaphor, that takes the mind and experiencing body beyond the logical space that the problem occupies into a landscape of multiple possibilities frees the person wonderfully. Thus the artfulness of metaphor has a splendid healing capacity.

     The Tao of the human landscape can be fluid, flexible, adaptive and open to whatever life throws up: unbound and rather exciting.

Remembering

 May 2015.

Remembering   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

      By the time you read this I would have returned from a short holiday in Perth, catching up with friends and snorkelling off Rottnest Island, and generally having a relaxing time. When I began planning this holiday it didn’t really occur to me that the lives of some of my friends are in the process of being turned upside down due to serious illness,  surgery, professorial sabbatical, home renovations, and the problems of looking after elderly parents who sometimes don’t even recognize them. My focus had been on the promise of fun. I forgot  that we are all are getting older, moving into more mature years and leaving behind the mindstuff of youth.  And so, I got to mulling, once again, about life and decay of memory. The death thing, well that’s something else.

      It so happens that two of my favourite authors are becoming very reflective in a similar way, not that I am at all in their situation.  The neurologist, Oliver Sacks now faces death from a terminal cancer of the liver.  The psychiatrist, Irvin Yalom is just plain old. Both, though, have recently published what are probably their last books. Yalom is a wonderful existential therapist who has written novels and books on his case studies, as well as teaching tomes, one of which was a text book we used when I was at university. Sacks has entertained and instructed us through his work using  neurological case studies, opening the doors to self reflexive writings about what being human is like at a whole range of levels, from disability to enhanced perceptual experiences using music and medications.

      How these two authors are writing these days shows two deep thinkers dropping down to a heart-felt place of reflection. There is a tangible difference in their writings from earlier times. At times in the past, they were a bit didactic and sometimes somewhat full of themselves, but now they are assuredly authoritative and humble, transparently so. I like this, even though it is disarming.

     I’ve been noticing the passage of time quite a bit recently in those around me. The comfort of knowing a person and them knowing me with equal facility, has been shaken somewhat.  One person I spoke with recently had forgotten who I am, even though I’d been in communication with him over a period of months. It’s a bit like picking up an object you thought was going to be heavy, but suddenly you find it surprisingly light and your expectations about it are totally mismatched so that you practically drop it. Or, another analogy: it’s like returning home but no-one remembers who you are anymore.  It’s the stuff of nightmares.

      In this spirit  of discomfort, I began reading Yalom’s latest (last?) book, Creatures of a Day and other tales of psychotherapy, having  a sense that I would, and would not, fully understand what he meant by the title, and so it happened this way.

      Yalom quotes Marcus Aurelius’  (120-180 AD) The Meditations, with the words,  “All of us are creatures of a day: the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral – both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything, and the time is at hand when all have forgotten you.”  Unfortunately, disquieting and haunting though these words are, the slippage of cognitive decline is gradual. There are small forgettings, small deficits, small, but increasing decays, so that though it looks like nothing is happening/ has happened, things are happening, and wishing it weren’t so, doesn’t change that. There is a wrench from the familiar to the unknown, and this is what I’m finding now among the friends of my generation.

      I find this slippage of the memory  capabilities of others uncomfortable and out of kilter with my own experience because my own memory is very good, and actually getting better, the more I practice remembering my clients’ histories.

It is like seeing  deer standing on a slippery embankment: slipping, inexorably into cognitive oblivion, while feeling alert in myself, present and younger than my actual years.

     Seize the day, o creature, I want to say. Drink deeply of it, dive into it, celebrate it, re-member it, and quiver at the momentous unknowness of being for who knows what is next. Who knows who will forget.

The Pain of Being Shunned

The Pain of Being Shunned  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

     Being rejected by your group is literally painful. Studies have shown that the same part of the brain that indicates physical pain, lights up when a person is shunned. It hurts.

     Being ostracized, which is an extreme form of bullying, discrimination, stigmatization, betrayal, and interpersonal rejection, means your connection and communication with the group of people you were formerly a member of  has been broken. You are actually excommunicated.

     We are social animals, like other primates, wolves, and lions, and belonging to a group really matters. In the group, we receive affirmation and support and feelings of being trusted, and through these, come to know who we are. The surge of  interest in social media and the taking of “selfies” highlights this most clearly. 

     Just as we are acutely responsive to how other people perceive, evaluate, and feel about us, so we respond accordingly. If we feel others are disinterested, disapproving, or rejecting, we feel acute pain (physical and emotional), vulnerable, wanting to be cared for, angry and dejected. Long term ostracism can result in feelings of total alienation, depression, and helplessness, and sometimes the person seeks refuge in drugs, alcohol, and occasionally sexual promiscuity.

     I’ve had clients who have known the pain of exclusion so intensely that they have never been able to “enter” society at all: forever standing on the outside looking in. Some have been at the point of giving up. 

     These feelings attracted negative reactions from other people in various forms: disinterest, criticism, prejudice, avoidance, rejection, betrayal, stigmatization, ostracism, neglect, abandonment, abuse, bullying, and a variety of minor slights and snubs, which perpetuates the cycle of separation and alienation.

     People react differently to being ostracized.  Some will try harder to be included, by mimicking, complying, obeying orders, and cooperating with prevailing groups. I have a friend who was badly bullied throughout his school years and to cope with this, he became an avid football groupie in a way few of his contemporaries did.

     Some people who were ostracized as children, now engage in hero worship and imitation of sportsman, film stars, and pop singers; some even having radical plastic surgery to look like them.

Some respond with extreme aggression and so extremist groups begin to look very attractive. I fully expect, by the way, that some of the asylum-seeking children interred in detention centres who are feeling cut-off from society, alienated, and ostracized, will, on their release, join extremist groups and release their rage against us  (and I can’t blame them).

     Some who are rejected by groups, feel the pain, for sure, but they are much less affected. Being excluded and reacting depends on pre-existing levels of self esteem and perceived self worth and this is contributed to by the level of support a person has received from infancy onwards. Low self esteem is associated with inconsistent or absent support from primary caregivers (mothers, fathers, and others), as attachment theory suggests. How this manifests is complex and embraces the cognitive, emotional, motivational and behavioral. 

     If we believe in ourselves, then being ejected from a group isn’t going to have enduring effects.

Group membership, and this is a membership of any kind of group (official and non-official) is something we social animals need.  Having a sense of belonging means, to a degree, conformity to a group’s ethic; an ethic that few in the group will break, or even question. Questioning and awareness about how the group operates is valuable. It is surely better to understand how something works than be a mere cog in its working. Such knowledge can bring greater flexibility to the group and allow a greater diversity among its members.

     Groups need to communicate. The greater the level of communication within the group, the more responsibility, caring and camaraderie group members feel for one another. When there is little actual communication between members, and where the members are largely anonymous, the so-called group becomes a hotbed of rudeness, crudeness, and cruelty (as many internet message boards illustrate).

      So, what can a person who feels rejected by a group/society do? How can they re-enter community? Support groups of the ostracized really help. Such groups build group identity and provide wonderful individual and interpersonal support. They can be initiated by anyone. 

     Support from friends, counsellors and other people, can also help build a person’s damaged self esteem and self worth. I’m finding that using clinical hypnotherapy is a powerful tool in re-establishing a patient as a person that matters. When someone feels worthy they can more easily form relationships and gather friends around them, sharing, laughing, caring, and this is what a group has the capacity to be.

Creating

Creating  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

The page is blank and I’m wondering how to begin. I’ve been walking around for days thinking about what to write, and then it dawned on me this is the very thing that needed to be said: that the page is blank and I know that the doing of the thing is literally the doing of it. Staring at the page and hoping that something gets written is useless. And so I write this.

Wondering what and how to say it is a common as muck problem for all people who engage in creative acts. There is always a blank page, or canvas, or raw materials.  The tools of the artist-writer, of brush, palette knife, pencil, pen,  pastels, paint, chisel, keyboard can be in tip-top shape (and they are intrinsically lovely, I think), but they’re useless until a mark is made.

We had a game as children where one of us made a mark on a piece of paper and then another of us had to draw something that the mark evoked, and then the next person had to draw something that the mark and the other person’s drawing evoked in them, and so, very soon the whole paper was a mass of drawings. The complete effect was beautiful. It is in the doing that a thing is made.

The creative act depends a lot on being alive and open to possibilities, which is the meaning of receptivity. To hold oneself alive to whatever comes along is not waiting for something random to grab one’s attention; it’s  surrounding oneself with various materials, people, ideas and contexts that nurture and stimulate interaction and a desire to participate in a seed of an idea. Receptivity doesn’t depend on a time frame, but permits access to a creation at any and all points of our engagement. 

This last statement is a crucial one, as it implies that any beginning is a useful one. Any mark on the page is the start of a creation. 

Of course, this is not to say that there are not other factors that get in the way of creating something. The stories we’ve been told about ourselves, the difficulties that we’ve had growing up, the traumas we’ve experienced, and so on have a huge bearing on the making of something new (all of which may be successfully addressed in counselling and hypnotherapy).  I’ve known this rather well in my own life, but over the last month have experienced these apparent barriers more keenly. 

Nearly a month ago I began a 30-day challenge to write for 10 minutes a day and post it on an internet site designed just for this: to get writers writing.  Just doing the thing has thrown up a barrage of resistances. Many days have passed when I’ve left the writing till nearly midnight, but then when actually  writing it hasn’t been hard. So, what is all that about? Why the dragging of feet?

Writing has quite a history for me. I started out a terrible writer in all ways.  My handwriting was practically unreadable and because even I couldn’t read it, my written expression was garbled.  I had been taught to write with my right hand, but I was (am) left-handed, so I actually couldn’t control my pen for a very long time.  It was embarrassing and I didn’t want to do anything with a pen. That changed when I was sixteen and starting to prepare for my matriculation exams in order to get into university. Until then I really was un-grabbed (if that’s a word) by the essay questions given to us.  Here,  suddenly was a question that set me on fire. It was an English Literature question on the poetic uses of language in everyday life. I wrote and wrote and wrote all night and submitted it the next day. My teacher was surprised, for until that point, I was a mediocre student. She gave me a distinction, but said she wanted to tutor me and teach me to handwrite again. So began intensive training both in handwriting and essay construction, a learning process that continues today.

The greater control of my right hand paralleled the greater control of composition and a greater ease of expression. I’m extremely grateful for this help I received. It changed everything. I was finally free to pursue the learning I wanted. That’s my story.  I realize there are many other accounts of difficulties that get in the way of present day creativity.

Resistance to creativity can be broken through  simply by making a mark on the paper and elaborating on it.  Combining this with such tools as journaling and counseling eases up the creator’s block. It’s powerful stuff, just this doing business.

Transformative Power of Rage

Transformative Power of Rage   by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

That someone is very attractive – too attractive. We want to get close to him or her, but….  they are kind of dangerous: really handsome, beautiful even, but too hot to handle. They are the life of the party, popping pills, drinking straight from bottles. Spirits of the party. We want to get close, really close, but… it’s like moving in with a handsome sleek lion. Are we nuts?

Somehow or other, we wake up the next day in bed with this gorgeous stranger,  and then the next morning, and next thing you know, we are a couple. It is outrageous, this connection we have. He, or she (this is not a gender specific story), is too wild; his devil-may-care attitude flings us this way and that. It’s like being taunted by a tornado. Thrilling, for sure, and addictive. Yes, he uses too many drugs, some legal (he doctor shops), some illegal (he shops with the guy across the street), and smokes and drinks. He’ll settle down, we think, once the relationship becomes more stable.  We clean up the vomit on the bedroom floor, silently throw out the bottles with the empty packets of pills, we wash his clothes and the sheets and spray room fresheners around; we are good partners, never complaining, and to all intents and purposes, we are no different from everybody else. The fact that we are angry, so incredibly angry doesn’t come into it.

Time goes by and we’ve heard the story before, quite a few times now.  (S)He’ll change; it’ll never happen again; he’s on the straight and narrow and he loves us. Life seems good, maybe. His sleek gorgeous looks are fading. There’s a bit of a paunch and a stray blood vessel appearing on his nose. He is quite attractive, still, in a sort of moth-eaten old leonine way. We say so, he goes out to celebrate and we don’t see him all day. We use this time to angrily clean the house, attend to the business of finding him a job and we secure an interview for him, because he lost the last one through turning up to work drunk. We wait, and wait, feeling like we are about to implode.  He turns up the day after tomorrow, though it is a Tuesday and he has an interview at 10am. He is incoherent, dirty and still very very drunk. There is no way he can attend, so we ring the workplace and say he has come down with the flu.

Some label our place in this relational pattern as codependent. This is a term that doesn’t quite sit well for me, and some others. Essentially codependency is enabling the other person to maintain an addictive life-style.  I don’t like the term because it ignores too much, and it pathologizes what is actually a complicated process.

One of the early theorists on this subject, Robert Subby said in the 1980s, that codependency is “an emotional, psychological and behavioural condition that develops as a result of an individual’s prolonged exposure to, and practice of, a set of oppressive rules – rules which prevent the open expression of feeling as well as the direct discussion of personal and interpersonal problems.”  This “set of oppressive rules” are cultural and family scripts, such as “you are a wife now, your role is to look after your man without complaint”. Other factors may be at work as well, such as, guilt, a desire to be loved and supported (and supporting the partner is a way to achieve that, so the thinking goes), a desire to have the relationship our parents didn’t have, a hope for comfort that somehow never eventuates.

The term codependency has many descriptions. Some have seen it as the denial or repression of the real self, forgetting that the self is not  a thing, but a process, and is always relational to the social and economic realities of our lives.  Some have described codependency as a self esteem issue. It may well be this at one level, but more critically, it is a sense of being locked into a relationship that seemed to have so much promise, but has become endlessly unfulfilling. The primary issue in this relationship is that is less an individual problem than something that is occurring between two (or more) people.

There is nothing wrong, nor pathological, with wanting a loving relationship. It is a basic and necessary human need.  The problem, as I see it, lies with the belief that it is good to forgive another person’s appalling behaviour, always. But it isn’t, particularly when it impacts on one’s own emotional stability, and that of other family members, especially children. It isn’t good to subsume our own needs endlessly for those of an abusive other. It may be nice to visit the lion in his den, but it isn’t a safe place to bring up children, nor a place for ordinary everyday happiness.

Be angry. Rage. Be the rage. This is the point, the fulcrum, that seems to be overlooked in codependency literature. Here, in the rage, is where transformation can take place. Here, in the trembling of anger, is where therapy is most effective and life takes a new course. Here in the rage is a relationship with the self and thus it is the point where the relationship with the other person can be broken, or healed, which ever we choose. There is nothing calm about rage, but it is a gift of incredible energy that can shift everything stuck and voiceless. Finding its direction, though, is the skill to be learned and it is a skill to shape the rest of our lives.

Being in a Sea of Ambiguity

Being in a Sea of Ambiguity by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

I, and a tour boat of travellers, was snorkelling off Julian Rocks, Byron Bay, the day before Christmas. Around us were literally hundreds of fish, many kinds, many colours, many sizes. I saw a couple of green turtles, several practically translucent jelly fish, and two rays. Some of the other snorkelers saw a leopard shark; I didn’t. I did see, in one fleeting moment, the fish grow frightened, but they resumed their relaxed manner quickly. It was like a ripple effect: from full faced gentle swimming to a rapid streak and then full faced gentle swimming again. Whatever it was, it was a momentary threat.

I was gathered up into the schools and could observe the behaviour of each type of fish. There were the small orange bottom feeders, the sleek mid-swimmers, and the sociable upper dwellers. These social ones swam around me closely. I watched one of them apparently feed from a jelly fish: mouth inside the jelly cup, but neither seemingly getting hurt.

It was choppy that day, but the sea was glass-like and visibility went down at least eight meters with no loss of vision. It was fantastic.

In the sea, a place I love most of all, almost anything can happen. We humans, after all, are merely visitors here. It is an ambiguous  massive space.

Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation, an inexactness. Snorkelling in the sea is quintessentially being present in the mysterium tremendum, that is, in an overwhelming mystery, where some things are identifiable and understood, but mostly just ever felt. I find this space extraordinarily calming and sometimes offers an incredible sense of one-ness with everything, but I am aware that there are many for whom the sea is utterly terrifying. Sharks, millions of them, fill the space of their imaginations. The terror of a shark-populated mind gets in the way of ordinary life and sometimes manifests as anxiety and depression.

Anxiety and depression may be described as disorders of focus, as Michael Yapko puts it.  The focus is put on what’s wrong rather than what’s right; what has caused them pain rather than what has helped them. Sufferers  get locked into a sort of mouse-wheel of hideous thoughts: round and round and round, and it’s torture for them.  This is where psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy really helps. Both reintroduce, through focussed attention, ambiguity in a safe environment, and thus a greater flexibility and willingness to experience a wide range of feelings and thoughts and connections. If something has terrified anxiety and/or depressed people and caused them to get stuck in their fear, being gently supported, perhaps a little bit rocked, in a sea of guided ambiguity allows for the possibility of healing. This is a healing that isn’t imposed, but arises from a person’s own resources; resources that had hitherto been submerged under iterative thoughts. 

A few years ago I toyed with the idea of offering water therapy. That is, taking a client into the sea and being with them as they encountered their fears, offering them an entré into relaxation and choicefulness in an environment that cannot ever be fully known. I still like that idea, but maybe my insurance company wouldn’t cover it. Some hypnotherapy sessions, anyway, have this quality anyway, at least this is what is sometimes reported to me by my clients.

A hypnotherapy session begins usually by inviting the client to close their eyes and start to focus on themselves: sensations (skin touching the leather of the chair, softness, supportiveness, etc), perceptions (the sound of my water fountain - little whirring pump and water splashing, faint tinkling of bells, a car going by, wind, thoughts, the sensation of breath, rising up of imaginary ideas, noticing what happens when images are evoked, and so on. From this focussed place I can then introduce ideas of how misinterpretations can occur and then reorient the person to other ways of seeing.

Depressed and anxious people tend to see ambiguity in negative ways, but actually ambiguity merely offers a multitude of possibilities and, like the sea and the rest of life, we can learn to not fight it, but let go and relax – with awareness -into what we choose to focus on and act with acuity and right-mindedness, doing whatever it is that helps us deal with whatever life offers us.