Care goes both ways by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

July 2020

     It’s nice being warm. Too much of my life I’ve had the silly idea that I have to be brave, brave enough to bear the cold, and as I think on this, I realize that with that idea came a tendency not to discard things, just in case I’ll need them later on. How are these two ideas connected, I wonder?

     My mother was Russian-Estonian and half my family are Russian-Estonian, with a tendency to hoard and hold things close to ourselves as though to protect against the cold, all the while bravely putting on a firm resolve to walk hard against the iciness in light clothing. I saw it in my Estonian aunt and my cousins a few years ago on a visit my brother and I did to that part of the world in their winter. They all had that glint in the eye of resolve.

     I watched them put their walking clothes on and it seemed to me that they were not really dressed for snow and ice – and it was freezing out there, but out we’d go, and begin walking, fast. We walked in the snow fields, past the ski jumps; we hurried past the kindly lit, and probably warm, cabins; we just kept on walking. I, in a very familiar way, held in my shivers, and just sought to keep up.

     So here I sit now, snug in new trackie pants and in awe of warm legs. Who would’ve thought! Interestingly, but not so much, in light of my growing awareness, this comes amidst a house clearing where boxes of things and papers have been cast into bins and given away. The family psyche is getting a clean out.

     How many other familiarly held ideas do we have, behaviours, cultural ideas, just the stuff we traditionally do, that take years of shedding? It’s a useful exercise doing what I’m doing now, writing down the little bursts of insight. I had never put together the two ideas described above, till now, sitting, as I am, feeling cozy and warm.

    I’ve written frequently about the importance of connections with one another for good mental health, but now I want to talk about the importance of connecting with oneself. Doing this is ultimately caring for oneself. Christianity only gives lip service to this in the phrase, ‘Love thy neighbour as thy self’, because they also talk a lot about selfless giving. Buddhism, on the other hand, recognizes that the idea of compassion includes oneself in the act of having compassion towards others. Loving is giving and receiving at once in a crux of connection.

      What do I mean ‘connecting with oneself’? Aren’t we ourselves whatever we do? This is true, we are ourselves whatever we do, but much of what we do is out of awareness and we frequently react to certain things, things other people say, or situations, with feral aggression and blind self-hatred.  If we are going to be kind to ourselves, we’ll need to understand ourselves better and be less reactive. Me, being cold in winter, and quietly and interiorly shivering is me not being sufficiently conscious of the indoctrination of my family-borne idea that suffering is good and natural. I am not the suffering of impoverished Russia and downtrodden Estonia, I deserve warmth.

     Connecting fully to oneself is emerging through the fog of disconnection and being able to choose wisely who else to connect with. Again, this is something I am still learning about and in learning, I am better able to pick my causes as well as my connections.

     Many people think that looking after oneself is selfish and uncaring towards others. Nothing could be further from the truth. Self-care is not egocentric, it is simply looking after oneself as we would care for another loved person or animal. Self-care recognizes that any love we have for another is really the same as the love we give ourselves. When St. Francis called his body, Brother Ass, this was not to beat himself up, but to nurture the beast that he knew he was. We need taking care of and when we look after ourselves, we are better able to care for others. Care goes both ways.

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

July 2015

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

Love and Differentiated Intimacy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 
April 2013 

     I’ve been thinking quite a bit about couple relationships recently. Why do some work really well, and why do some fail miserably? I know only a handful of couples that continue to flourish. Others are couples no longer, but single people reeling from lots of pain, anguish, fear, and disharmony. What’s going on here?  Is it magic, or is there something else at work?

 

     I’ve written previously about intimacy as a fundamental drive borne in all animals and present from birth. Now I want to take my thinking to another level. I want to explore it in terms of something beyond closeness where two people remain separate but somehow together, thus the title of this article.

     Intimacy, I need to be clear about, is not about sex, though sex may and may not be part of it. 

      Intimacy, as I’ve described elsewhere, is a substantive relationship between two or more individuals of equal status. It is a deep reciprocal closeness and it is like a bridge over the silence of the universe joining people on either side.

     When we fall in love we mostly do it blindly and we tend to fall for something in the other person that is familiar to us. Now, whether this familiarity is the basis of what we may call falling for a soul mate (someone who apparently speaks to our inner core), or responding to a projection of some part of ourselves onto the other person, is a matter of interpretation, though the modus operandi is frequently the same.

     When two people are in blind love they do not see each other clearly. Each projects an image (just as movies are projected) constructed in their own minds that conceals the real face of the person they’re looking at. Of course, each person’s hormones are working overtime as well, so there is a lot of desire mixed in there with unowned expectations, needs and judgements. The other person suddenly seems to have all those admirable qualities that oneself probably has too. You may discover later that the other person really doesn’t have those admired qualities at all. In one relationship I had years ago I discovered this for myself. He was a talker, and I’d assumed a listener as well. It took awhile to realize that I’d assumed he was a listener, because I was listener. He, on the other hand, just talked.

Blind love is a theatre of projections and here what is required is to bring conscious awareness and an attitude of differentiation to the relationship, for then, only then, can true intimacy be achieved. 

     For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13, verse 12)

     We need to see clearly, cleanly, the other person; to know, even as I am known; to love, even as I am loved. For it is loving cleanly and clearly in a reciprocal way that intimacy is truly differentiated: no longer a work of projection, in a glass darkly, but fact to face.

     There seem to be very few partnerships, marriages, and other relationships that truly fulfill both people equally. What seems to happen, more often than not, is a one-sidedness where one person is fused in an emotional symbiosis with the other person, or where one person seeks another to help them heal their childhood wounds, or where one person is there to protect the other from the complexities of life.

     In fusion, that undifferentiated dissolving of self into another, one person is effectively left outside the relationship, where the other has lost her/himself. One person is needy and clingy, and the other one provides. There is no equality here. Yes, our society promotes such unbalanced relationships with the idea that the man provides and the woman, if she is a true and ideal woman (whatever that means), gives up herself and submits. Society is less supportive of this idea when it is taken to extremes and becomes just plain even kinky, where power is handed entirely to the man, and taken entirely from the woman. [Though I’m speaking of couples as male-female relationships, I include same-gender coupling here.]

      True differentiated intimacy is not for the faint hearted. It is a growth path where conflict is neither avoided nor becomes a platform for a power struggle,  but worked on realistically. The goal is aliveness, spark, and passion borne from a mutual commitment to self and the other person. It is part of a spiritual process and an owning of each person’s self worth.

To own your self worth, and not to project it elsewhere, is the key. Appreciating self worth is not egotistical, it is putting judgments and values about others back where they arise, within oneself. Ask yourself, Does what you see in others really belong to you? Is your vision clear, or clouded by what you want to see? Knowing your own self worth then allows you to see the other person more clearly, and if, all being well, love the other deeply and appreciate them more really.

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell