Laying Down a Path in Walking by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

April 2025

Every morning I swim in the ocean, mostly doing backstroke so I can gaze at the sky and watch the clouds and the occasional bird or plane. The other day I bumped into a fellow (obviously I can’t see where I’m going) and his comment made me laugh. He said, you are going forwards yet backwards at the same time. Forwards and backwards simultaneously. It got me thinking.  As a metaphor for my daily life, this is as true for backstroke, as for life. As I go about my day, I reflect on where I’ve been = at the same time. Travelling forward each day, and reflecting on it,  wends a path in the process of making it and it is through the doing of it that I’m making sense of the world around me.

I’ve been mulling about this sort of thing for years. We think we are making decisions before we actually make them; we like to believe we plan our moves, but – as the Buddhists say, “we lay down our path in walking,” in living it. Our decisions are not made beforehand in a sort of clinical architectural office, but in the process of engagement, of everyday enactment.

This is not to say that any systematic organized strategy for going forward can’thelp, but it works because it utilizes earlier knowledge/skills. It is extraordinarily difficult to choose to do something we have no experience in.  I would have practically no clue in how to fix a car, for instance. I don’t have much of a knowledge base in this regard.

I’m reminded of a high school friend who used to spend all her time working out study programmes, rather than actually reading and writing her required school work. She never got around to doing the work because she really didn’t know how to do it, not having a background in the subject at all, and not having the wisdom to start learning either. You can’t start from nothing; you have to build up a knowledge base in order to move forward.

 Encountering the next experience is an evolutionary one: just as choices are made according to what has gone on before, so the remembered experience fleshes out the next one. The accumulation of experiences, recognized as such, makes for a rich life. Just thinking for a moment how horrible it would be to lose one’s memory: for the process of remembering to be replaced by dismembering. The richness of the present moment would be replaced by confusion. The anchor to knowing where you are is lost.

 I watched a short video of a woman with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease talking about her lived experiences. She, interestingly, said that she could make sense of the world when the light was on, but couldn’t grapple with any of it in  semi-darkness. If she dropped a newspaper while the light was on, she could pick it up, but in the semi-dark, though she would trip over the paper repeatedly, she didn’t have the wherewithal to stoop down and remove the paper from the floor. Her sight was her anchor to useful enaction in her world.  Jonathan Cole’s book Pride and a Daily Marathon describes how a man who had lost his bodily awareness through acute illness could only move if he could see where his limbs were in relation to the ground. Cole is an English neurophysiologist who remains intrigued by how bodily awareness, movement, memory and a sense of ‘I’ interact. Disconnecting parts of an otherwise ongoing interactive process amounts to dis-membering memory and confusion reigns.

 Yes, we lay down a path in walking, but for the richness of that experience to be felt, we need to remember what has gone before and – at the same time – know our bodies as we move forward. The whole thing together is wonderfully rich and enjoyable.

 Therapy is the art of drawing all these experiences together into an exciting whole so that we can use our pre-existing knowledge to explore new places in our lives. I note that I’m available to do counselling online. My email address is dr_mccardell@yahoo.com

 

 

Remembering and Creating Memories by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

March 2022

    A friend of mine remembers when he was a little child, his mother talking about the croaking frog they were hearing that morning and then being taken outside to look at it. It was huge, gigantic, massive, the size of a small elephant.

     I remember a Zeppelin airship flying over our house, even though they ceased to fly decades before I was born and they didn’t fly in Australia at all.

   Someone I know has an apparent memory of having sex with his mother. Maybe this actually happened, or maybe it didn’t. Gathering the evidence around such a memory requires much more than relying on a memory reconstruction. It requires close examination of the behaviour of actual people and circumstances and possible situations. Again, maybe it happened, but maybe it didn’t. What is important here is knowing that memory is not to be relied upon as a complete and authentic record of past possible events.

   Memory is not a useful tool for determining actual history and so any technique for digging out possible memories can’t be relied upon as the sole means of determining truth – which is why I refuse to pretend to do any so called repressed memory work using hypnosis. I do not want to participate in the making of  false memories. It is significant that hypnosis came into disrepute over this very thing. Once upon a time hypnosis was used to “prove” the authenticity of an event and used in a court of law as evidence. This was until sufficient research had been done to discredit the supposed revelation of repressed memories through this method, unfortunately dragging down with it, the whole reputation of hypnosis as useful adjunct in psychotherapy. Very fortunately, hypnotherapy is returning to being recognized as useful in psychotherapy for other purposes, and not as an excavator of the past.

     We are creating memories all the time in an attempt to make sense of our life. Memories, as I’ve said already, are not necessarily a record of past situations. Sometimes they are a way to explain things that are poorly comprehended in the first place. A little child sees things, as all little beings do, from a small person’s perspective. They are little in a big world. Grasping at meaning from a perspective that is really limited requires piecing together bits of information from around them. Some of these bits of information could be things half heard and barely understood (like the story of the frog), things seen in books and on screen, some could come from other experiences, and so on. My apparent Zeppelin sighting I realize now came from a book on dirigibles and balloons that my father used to read to us melded into recurring dreams I had and reconstituted as an actual event. The situation of being little, of course, is actually true for all of us as we endeavour to negotiate the complexities of the vast world we live in. At least, though, we adults are generally better able to sort out what is probable and what isn’t – although maybe I’m too optimistic here, given the extraordinary rise in conspiracy theories.

      The less information we have, the less we have to test the authenticity of something and the more likely we are to incorporate the flimsily known into what we think we know, creating a world view replete with false memories. This is essentially the way cults operate: the known world is deliberately limited to a tight and restrictive community. Before long, the most vulnerable among the group start remembering abuses that may, or may not, have actually occurred and so cling to the group more and more.

    Everything needs to be tested. Nothing should be believed simply because someone has said if you remember it, that it happened. Maybe it did; maybe it didn’t. A memory can be changed, rethought, examined, played with, measured with the feeling status of things, but not relied upon to be necessarily a strict re-membering (re-putting together) of the past. Gather as much information you can and test your memory. In the end, though, maybe your reconstruction is real, but maybe it isn’t.

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

 May 2015.

      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.