Knowing the delicate interflow of interconnection by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Counselling, PhD

      I’ve known for decades that we are whole beings of body, mind and spirit, and I was, for a time, a member of the International Society for Integrative Psychotherapy, but, strangely, it is only now that this knowledge is dropping down deeper into my consciousness.  What I’ve said before about the interconnectedness of each part of ourselves, is feeling to me more actual.  Why should this be so, I wonder? I suspect that it is only now that I am becoming more aware of how other therapeutic modalities take such knowledge for granted and use it in a beautifully subtle way, in contrast to the heavy handed manner of those promoting self help books on the so-called “mind-body connection”. 

     The clinical hypnotherapy aspect of my work is also allowing me to see this relationship more clearly. What I write of here is more a delicate inter-flow through what we subjectively experience of ourselves in our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, our stories, and our intentions, as well as the objective manifestations of those things. In other words, we are whole beings, even when we are feeling out of sorts.

      Every psychological state has a resonance and connectedness to how it affects the body, and every physiological state shapes our emotions and thought patterns, and all may be observed by others in some form or another.  A heart attack may be felt as gripping pain, and a sense of impending doom. The darkness of depression may be felt not only as intense undefinable sadness, but also sluggishness, a profound difficulty getting moving, vertigo and a lowered blood pressure. A nicotine addiction may be felt as a craving for more of that chemical, a pleasure in rolling the cigarette and lighting it, and as desire to avoid anxiety, and a hope to fit in with one’s peers.  Anxiety may be felt in relation to certain incidences in one’s social and environmental field, and as tightness in the chest, rapid breathing and the sensation of a racing heart. In anger, blood rushes to the face, and there is an intense surge of energy to the voice and one’s thoughts go over and over the object of one’s rage. So, there is nothing in the human, and animal condition, that isn’t expressed throughout the whole organism.

      Therapeutic modalities tackle the matter of healing in many different ways, but the most successful, in my view, of these are those for whom matters of the mind, the body and spirit are not separated. 

      Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), that subtle craft and philosophy, through its practices of acupuncture, herbs, moxabustion, an qi gong,  realizes that every disorder has a mind, body, and spiritual dimension. The spirit, I am defining as intention, will, and a sense of self in relation to others and the greater environment.

      Western Medicine, is increasingly acknowledging this interconnection in many of its branches, though much of it as practiced is still mechanistic in orientation. In some circles within medicine, indeed, the mind-body connection is seen as a fluffy mystical idea. General practitioners, though, deal with the whole person and are more interested in treating the whole person. Some of my doctor friends belong to the movement known as “integrated medicine”. Such medicine is actively interested in whole self medicine.

      In the field of cardiology, for instance, there is an emerging discipline called “neurocardiology” or “behavioural cardiology”,  in other words a recognition that what is felt and what is done by a person changes matters of the heart and impacts the whole person. 

       Why I’ve chosen cardiology as my example is because it is now well established how stress and belief changes heart function, a useful illustration of mind-body entwining.  There are numerous examples of  how a psychological state affects the heart.  This has been studied extensively since about 1942 when Walter Cannon researched what he called “Voodoo Death”. Cannon suggested that episodes of sudden death were secondary to profound fear or emotion, inspired by superstitious belief. Cannon speculated that death resulted from enhanced sympathetic nervous system and adrenal responses to intense emotional stress and a belief in a power over which the victim had no control. 

This phenomenon is also found in what is popularly called “the broken heart”.  Stress and distress are correlated with abnormalities in the autonomic nervous system.  Medicine even has a name for the broken heart syndrome: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Effectively stress and distress tighten the muscles of the heart, leading to congestive heart failure and sudden death.

      Clinical hypnotherapy is a field I work in, apart from my related practice as a psychotherapist. It is here that I notice profound healing in others at a whole self level which  is contributing to my own better understanding of what it is to be human. Contrary to popular belief, hypnosis isn’t a parlour trick in which someone waves a watch in your face and puts you into a trance so that they can control you. It is, instead, a powerful way to access the mind-body-spirit connection, as it allows one to focus on specific physical, mental, and emotional issues that you may not be able to tackle in an ordinary conscious state.

      Hypnotherapy is beneficial for  your overall health as it allows you to deal with physical, mental, and emotional problems such as stress, anxiety, depression, fear, guilt, pain, weight management, and addiction. It can also lower blood pressure and stress levels and encourage you to make positive changes for a healthier lifestyle.  It is beautiful work and it’s effective.

     We are more than merely a mind, a body, and a spirit in an interconnected state; we are whole selves in which levels of consciousness, awareness, and physiological manifestation is entwined in a delicate interflow, and we live together, work together, and hope together.  This is connectedness.

In Touch with Ourselves by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

      We have a body and we are a body.  Having a body allows us to feel in our body, and being a body allows us to reach out to others and ourselves. Touch is central to being in the world and in touch with ourselves.

      The skin is the meeting-point between self and the world, but it is also that which contains all those feelings of self as similar to and yet different from others. It is critical for feeling supported and safe, and yet able to reach other to others, to touch in skin and soul.  Touch is, though,  more than the process of interaction between touch receptors in the skin and that which is touched; it is also an interplay of body exploring space and places, it is proprioceptive. Interestingly, at least for what I intend to explore in this article, the origins of the word “proprioception”, from the Latin proprius, refers to “own”, and “receptive”.  Thus, we can think of touch as starting from the point of receiving touch from ourselves.

      My purpose for exploring this subject is to reconnect the sensation of touch – our sensation of touch – with the integrity of what we as therapists encounter every day, those who are detached from that primary perception, the primacy of touch.

      It is interesting that when I revisit the literature of much somatic psychotherapy and compare it with the phenomenological literature (the literature of lived experience) I notice one fundamental difference – and this really interests me. In contrast with the phenomenology of embodiment literature, somatic psychotherapy literature only considers touch in one way: touching and being touched by someone else, or a projection of someone else in our own hand. It does not adequately notice that when we touch as a toucher, we also receive touch.  The somatic literature often too quickly interprets touch as something done to another person, or in the absence of another, as something imagined to come from someone else. There are reasons and consequences for this idea. Before I explore those, just bear with me a moment. Consider this:

If I hold my left hand with my right hand, I will have the feeling that my right hand is the subject that holds. When I feel the left hand as held, I notice that left is the subject being held.  In touching and being touched, I am the subject of the experience.  I can experience being the subject (the holder) and also the subject as one who is held. 

      Compare this to my left hand touching the leather of a chair. I can feel, as subject, my hand touching the object and I can feel the object touching my hand, as subject. When I touch my own body, though, I am only subject. My body isn’t object, there is no other.  We can certainly imagine the object as being another subject, but it is not our own subjective self. We can project onto the act of touching us an “other” entity, but this projection is something created by our minds; it is not, and cannot be, our subjective touching experience.  Some of us are really good at creating “others” in our own minds and that’s fine. The only problem comes when all experiences of self touching self are interpreted as someone else touching us.  Phantom touchers are then created and we see ourselves as we imagine others to see us.  We lose our sense of ourselves, quite literally.  The art then, and the therapy, is to reconnect our sensory perception of touch to an awareness that being touched and touching ourselves is our subjective experience. It is to draw into ourselves, the primacy of perceiving ourselves as subject, and not object.

      The consequence of seeing ourselves as objects is that we are not only confused about who and what we are as individuals, but subject to the whims and fashions and styles of other people.

My observation earlier on that there are reasons for much therapeutic literature avoiding the reciprocal truth that touching oneself is a subjective act and feeling the touch of oneself is also a subjective act. Obviously, and I guess most of us would think straight away that touching oneself is a sexual act. I used the touching of the hand very deliberately to point out that most touching oneself really isn’t sexual at all. It is the assumption that self touching is automatically sexual that points to the origin of the avoidance in the literature: religious prohibitions on the self.  The pleasure centres of the body are avoided, and sometimes mutilated, in many places in the world. We, in the West, mutilate our own perception by ignoring it. The therapeutic literature, including much somatic psychotherapy, avoid it by a leap to the pathologization, real or not, of the subjective sense of touching oneself, as though the world isn’t already pathologically disinclined to notice the ordinariness of being a subjective self.  How good it is then to simply reclaim the most basic of senses, the sensation of touch as something received by the self and given by the self.

      Restoring touch as the primal sense is becoming, I believe, increasingly necessary as more and more young people only know themselves through the lens of others, and only knowing themselves thus, to mutilate their own bodies through starvation, cutting, out of control sex practices, and so on. Only knowing yourself as an object of another is to be detached from elemental feelings of being actually here, right now, in the world, feeling able to make choices, being able to identify what this subject needs right now, as opposed to fulfilling entirely the desires of the other.

      Feel the hand touching the hand and feeling the hand being touched and knowing yourself is the beginning of being real in the world and the beginning of non-projected being for self and others.

Courage to Begin by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

April  2014

 

      Diving is a good analogy for doing things in life.  There you are under the water in a wonderland of extraordinary beauty and potential great danger.  You got there after a life-time of wanting it, and now, it’s just Wow!

      There are critical matters to be dealt with underwater: the management of breath (too fast and you’ll run out of breath in a situation that could prove fatal, or at worst, hyperventilate and get light headed), the regulation of movement (chaotic flailing and the precious coral can be broken), the maintenance of balance and depth: a synergy of inflation of  buoyancy control device (a vest you wear), of properly located weights, and movement, and the knowledge of depth.  Then there are the regular necessary observations of  air supply and the  nuances of the surrounding environment (temperature of water, currents, visibility, benign and malevolent sea creatures, objects to swim around and through, rocks and weed, and the like). All this after the minute account of all the equipment necessary to keep in perfect working order is sorted  on land, and the site selected, and the wet suit, mask, cylinders, snorkel, weight belt, torch, knife, etc donned before the dive. Critical also of the preparation for diving is knowing you are fit and healthy and have a clear brain (no recent air travel or alcohol consumption), as well as having received proper and thorough training.

      Throwing yourself ill-prepared into the water is throwing your life away. The question is, when are you ready? Admittedly, diving is a fairly extreme example of doing things and other activities in life are not quite so critical, but the failure to do them well is just disappointing, which doesn’t feel good. It’s not loss of life, but it’s loss of frisson (that tingling, pleasure-filled delight, that excitement and passion of feeling fully alive). 

      I’ve had clients who’ve stood inside their state-of-the-art studios, with stretched canvas and paints laid out ready, but have felt completely stuck and unable to begin. There have been those hovering on the edge of starting their life changing business: website up and running, but they haven’t been able to get going and attract actual clients. The new computer, brand new pens, and endless notes are all lined up, ready for the first novel, but the person cannot write a thing. Everything seems great in the imaginary realms, but to actualize it is quite another thing.

      It’s here that therapy (counselling and clinical hypnotherapy) comes to its own, for feeling stuck, paradoxically, is the point of change and my work with clients, right here at this point, shifts everything dramatically. Stuckness felt in its intensity leads to its own breakthrough, if you acknowledge it as your problem. So it’s not about waiting for inspiration, the right time, or the right amount of information, it’s having the courage to admit you’re stuck and having the courage to know the passion in your heart, and thus to dive in.

      When I examine the meaning of the word courage, and trace its etymology, I appreciate the wisdom of the word. It means listening to your heart’s core, your innermost feelings and thoughts; listening to what drives you, what is the essence of your inner strength. Knowing the passion of your unique heart, is the beginning of a project lived.

      There is something inevitable about throwing yourself into doing something, even after all the feelings of anxiety and fear have arisen, and the stuckness has been overcome.  It is like the relief that comes from entering the buoyant place of water where gravity is resolved, more or less, and the horrid burden of heavy diving equipment feels pretty well gone. There is an easeful delight in swimming in the doing of an art work, the writing of a book, the working in a field that you love. 
Now you can play. Movement is free and easy and now it is rather fun. The fear of beginning is part of stuckness and the anxiety that what you start may not be perfect, is also part of it, but knowing that you are stuck is the beginning of new things. The  courage to recognize your stuckness is part of your wonderful courage to sing out loud your heart’s core.

Returning and Re-membering by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

February 2014

 

     Snow drifted up, sideways, down, through bare birch branches, drifted to ground, thickening there. An explosion of seagulls burst upwards,  a fountain of birds: an indelible evocative sight, numinous really. 

     This is the landscape of the park opposite the Soviet built flats in which my aunt and uncle live in Tallinn, Estonia. This could have been the landscape of my mother’s early life. This could have been the landscape … but for the location. My mother was born in Pskov in Russia, of Estonian father and Russian mother. She was schooled in St Petersberg, Russia and then Tartu, not Tallinn, and then only a short time. My mother  and her brother came to Australia on a ship in the mid-1920s. They were immigrants, boat people. 

     It was Australia Day recently: when Australians celebrate with the welcoming of new Australians and the drinking of beer and explosions of fireworks. My heart was heavy and the Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie refrain just left me cold. I had only been back a week from Estonia, this land of my mother’s.  The memories and rememberings somehow didn’t sit well in barbecues, and so I stayed at home.

     Re-membering, note the way I write it, is the putting together of things half imagined, half  recalled. Re-membering joins the dots. The story, my story, is situated and relational. This story is situated in place and it is relational to circumstance, place, time, people and the teller herself. This story of my mother, and thus me – to a degree – starts in 1909 with her birth into a disputed land. Of interest to everyone, wedged between the Baltic Sea to the north and west, Latvia to the South and Russia to the East, Finland, across the bay, and Sweden, over the Baltic to the North-West; sometimes claimed by Germans, sometimes Finns, the Russians, the Swedes; Estonia, of interest because of her precious port in  the capital, Tallinn. This port is remarkable. It doesn’t freeze over, because of warm currents. It opens frozen northern Europe to the world. So this little country, with its rich cultural history, its opera, ballet, and theatre companies, its artistic and musical history, its unique language (related not to Russian, but to Finnish and Hungarian), is attractive to larger countries that want to expand their borders. In 1909, Estonia was annexed by Russia. She gained a short lived independence in 1918, but soon she was gobbled again, this time into the Soviet regime, gaining independence again in 1989. Now she is dirt poor and propped up by the economy of Sweden (a dominance of another kind). She is poor but not down and out, despite a minuscule population of only 1.42 million people and a workforce that moves beyond her boundaries into Scandinavia.

     I am always interested in clear boundaries and I now compare this with Estonia’s fight for independent and clear boundaries from others surrounding her. I feel keenly the pressing in of others desires and needs and I know – in my bones – the richness of my own space. As one of my friends describes me, I am Elizabeth of Estonia. I know  the sinews and bones, and the cries of the children, of an ancient land, as if they were my own. This  land, strewn with the moss and snow covered ice boulders of Finnish granite that twisted and turned and travelled across the frozen Baltic Sea, is unique. Granite is from the Finnish landscape; Estonia is all wetlands and sandstone – and so much of it unsettled countryside. I know  it in the very marrow of my bones, the presence of others and my own unique integrity. It is in this knowing  that the personal and the professional meld together, for this is my gift (received, lived, and given again). 

     I am, via my mother, a new Australian.  Via her, I know what I give and receive and give again, in my life and my therapeutic work. This being in me, this land of my mother’s ancestry, is me being Australian and me being present for the presence of others and present for myself. I don’t think I am all that different from others who cross the oceans to this place. 

      My story is like  snow flakes dropping, rising, drifting and bursts of birds in silent crofts of trees. My story is merely musing, really. A seeking for sense; a joining of the dots.

Survivors' Children by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns,. PhD

January 2014

      A man can’t sleep at night. He’s tired all day, sometimes dropping asleep in conversation, but when night comes he can’t lie down and relax. He’s all wound up. I knew his mother was German-born and his father was English. That’s all.  Some time later I met them both and learnt that his mother was Jewish and her father took the family to Crimea for safety, but not before three bombs landed in their house and didn’t go off. The sleepless man’s father, I discovered, had been sent alone to Australia before the rest of the family followed. Since he was still a child, he was taken to a children’s home in a city here. There he waited three years before his family came to collect him. Both mother and father of the sleepless man were children experiencing huge upheavals: one knowing of bombs not exploding and an escape to the Crimea, the other wrenched from family and sent to an children’s home in a foreign country, wondering, wondering when he would safe with his family again. 

      What have his parents’ experience got to do with the sleepless man? Before I respond to that, I’ll present another couple of  scenarios.

      A little girl is in boarding school in Russia. She and all the people around her are starving. Yes, her mind is fed with languages (she knew five), art, dance, theatre, science, discovery. Her stomach gnaws at her like the rat that chews at her shoes beside her bed. She is rescued by her step-mother and sent to Australia with her brother.  She meets and marries two men. One beats her, and she escapes from him. The other is charming, suave, a bit remote, but very intelligent. They have children. The youngest,  a girl, doesn’t want to eat, yet she feels always hungry. The daughter develops an eating disorder that she recovers from eventually, but the issue of food always looms large for her. 

      Some people dream the fears of their parents and grandparents. When I was a child a recurring dream was of a Zeppelin airship flying over the house.  My father would not have seen these, but he had uncles who died in the trenches in World War I when the German airship, the Zeppelin was around. I guess my father was very frightened of these when he was a child, a fear I picked up somehow or other.

     Intergenerational trauma is very real. The experiences of therapists and research neurobiologists are showing the way in which many children have unconsciously adopted the symptoms of their parents and other relatives, at an almost cellular level. 

      A 2010  a Time magazine article describes how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms in second-generation survivors are being found in their behaviour and also their blood. Higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol are found in the children of survivors, and the children’s children. Until recently, it was assumed that these symptoms were essentially learned. The idea was that if you grow up with parents who can’t sleep, suffer mood swings, hypervigilance, irritability and jumpiness (symptoms of PTSD) you’re likely to become stressed and hypervigilant yourself. There is more to it, though. Neurobiological research using the study of epigenetics, where environmental factors are seen to change genes in ways that can be passed to the next generation, is identifying actual changes to genetic material among subjects whose parents were traumatized previously.

      Most studies of survivors’ children have been done with the children of Holocaust survivors, and their children’s children. The uncertainty of life, the observation of death and extreme cruelty, and sometimes the disbelief that the survivors lived when the rest of their families died, deeply affected them, both positively and negatively. Positively, by instilling into their children a deep appreciation of life and an urgency to live that life meaningfully and fully. Negatively, by, as I’ve noted, creating a hypervigilance, a jumpiness, an irritability, and sleep disorders.

      How much parents tell their children of their own trauma is reflected in how the children experience that relationship they have with their parents. If the background story is not told, or surrounded by partial mystery, the child may feel drained and disconnected from their parents. If the story overflows with too much traumatic information, then the child is overwhelmed. These feelings of disconnection or overwhelm may extend into the way the child welcomes the rest of the world.

       Either way, a child whose family background story includes extreme trauma may experience some difficulty in their development, including problems at a social level. These may manifest in later life as sleep disorders, habitual smoking, under or over eating, alcoholism, and the like. At the same time, the child may gain some very essential coping skills. It really depends on how much support is given to the survivors from family, friends, and counsellors. Intergenerational transmission of trauma can be averted through the critical intervention of  counselling and clinical hypnotherapy. As a mentor said to me once, we always have a chance to heal ourselves and our families. Healing ourselves, heals our families.

Cleaning the Flaws by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip CH Dec 2013

Dec 2013 

     I’ve been thinking about the necessary work therapists and healers in general have to do on themselves in order that projections and assumptions are avoided while working with others. It dawned on me that the work is a bit like house cleaning and then the pun struck me, it’s cleaning the flaws and not being careless about it. It’s thorough work that is required.

      This kind of  work means increasing our awareness of  not only our sense of ourselves (our believes, hopes, dreams, vulnerabilities) but what we project onto others: what things we admire in others, and what we use to condemn in others, and also those things that inadvertently jump out of  our mouths. When we engage in judging others, we most often do it as if we were not part of a relationship with that person and, as such, we project onto them very detached, very disowned shadows of ourselves. 

      The Shadow, as Jung called it, has both negative and positive qualities (two faces) and thus is found in those qualities that scream at us when another person displays it or idolize it when someone else personifies it.  When we idolize someone we are sometimes just projecting a disowned part of ourselves that we have set aside out of a false sense of modesty.  I, for instance, get quite defensive when people comment on my achievements and yet promote, somewhat idealistically, the almost glamorous achievements of others. 

      Two things happen simultaneously for me when my achievements are commented upon: I forget what I’m supposed to know and I feel ashamed. The air around me in that moment is thick with stories. It’s noticing things like that that Shadow work comes to its own, and not just for curiosity’s sake, but as a matter of necessity, particularly for those who work closely with other people.

The Shadow has other characteristics as well. As in a dream I heard recently, it lies in a metaphorical box in which something or other is leaking its contents. The box doesn’t even need to be opened for the contents to leak out. It’s like a rotten piece of fruit that, instead of drying up, is dribbling out the stuff that refuses to be ignored. The leaking Shadow comes out in displacement behaviour (like smoking, drinking, compulsive sexual encounters, excessive eating, or playing endless video games, for instance) that is contrary to our own ideas about health, morality and safety. It’s what we do when we don’t want to do something else.  When you repeat that behaviour seemingly involuntarily, it’s a sign that your Shadow is running the show.

      So it’s necessary to know what is going on in the Shadow world; to bring conscious awareness to it and give it a voice. Sometimes this Shadow work is helped by seeing another therapist, of whatever modality, to increase our awareness of our own processes so that we can be not only more present to our own purposes and needs but to achieve what is called “phenomenological bracketing” when working with others.  We need an acute sensitivity to ourselves and an acute sensitivity to the person we’re working with, and the wisdom to know the difference between us.

      Healers are at risk all the time of being only acutely aware of their patients and of not knowing where they begin and end and this is why personal work is critical. A healer, cannot afford to have the boundaries blurred too much. It is this reason, or at least part of it, that educational bodies are so strict in their requirements for practitioners. Knowing the stuff of therapy, medicine, acupuncture, herbs, or whatever, is just part of it. Knowing which belongs to me and which belongs to you is hugely necessary. The awareness of self as an instrument of healing and the awareness of self as an independent being protects us and allows us to continue doing therapeutic work for many years, without burn-out. Thus cleaning the flaws as an ordinary housekeeping job is really necessary, and like cleaning the floors in our homes, this work is something that is never done once and for all. You have to do it regularly, otherwise the muck just accumulates.

Ghost Catching with a Dress by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip Clin Hypnotherapy

Nov 2013 

      I recently watched on YouTube a very beautiful conversation among therapists and others talking on the death of mothers. The phrase ‘ghost catching with a dress’ came up in relation to finding clothing, letters, and treasured objects belonging to mothers who had died. I was very moved by the image, for I have such items from my own mother. Indeed, most of the crockery and utensils I use on a daily basis were from the cupboards of my mother. Hanging in my wardrobe is a red coat my mother made herself of the lining of officer’s coats during the war, there are gloves she made,  and there is a dress she fashioned from silk that I only very vaguely remember her wearing to a party once or twice. She was an extraordinary seamstress; a skill I entirely lack. 

     Ghost catching with a dress is, for me, the catching of glimpses of my mother’s life and story and those others I have known and loved. Glimpses sewn into the gossamer of memory – sometimes poignant and painful, sometimes sweet and tender.

      Life, death. What are these? When people talk of death, premature or after a long rich life, like my mother’s, I wonder yet again, what it all means. 

      The taking of one’s own life, throws another angle into the mix. There are many therapists who express deep concern for those who contemplate their own death, and while I too am disturbed by this, I am brought yet again to the existential place that I face on a daily basis: What of life, what of death?  I cannot see those who contemplate taking their own life as a sign of mental illness. I cannot, for the same reason that I acknowledge death as intrinsic to life and life intrinsic to death. What gets thrown up into the air like wind in fallen leaves, is the integral mystery of existence itself. I cannot sweep this knowledge, this subtle awareness I have, into a neat pile to be put discretely into the rubbish bin. This is the greatest mystery I know of. Death is not a medical problem and suicide is not a medical condition. Death is, as life is, and relationships are.

      What is caught in suicide are ghost catchers of clothes, of toys, bric a brac, books and letters; of the tears in memories, of  hearts broken, of anger, resentment, bewilderment, lots of questions unanswered. These are perhaps more poignant than even the caught ghosts of those who died a normal death. 

     I have had friends who have died by their own hand and know something of the strangeness of this. One man, I had shared a meal with only a fortnight before he gassed himself.  Was I partly to blame? I could not think so, for as the ghosts in cloth unravelled after the funeral, the threads emerged of a life of disconnect, of  feelings of alienation and lostness.  This poor friend could not speak of what he suffered and it is here that my feelings are stirred, and it is now here that I offer myself as a therapist to hear and share the burden of pain.

      Death, and life, are touched by the living in a fluid process and grief and loss are felt as those we’ve loved move into another dimension. It is not so much the death bit that shakes me, but the threads of life that are not always seen and understood; threads that need, somehow, to be shaped into a dress to catch the ghosts of real flesh and blood people in our stories, recollections, and a need for some kind of farewell. We living need to let go and yet to remember and to let go and yet to recollect. Our grief is not to be discarded mindlessly, but to be brought into the fabric of our life to enrich us and also, mysteriously, give us the courage to let go, let be that majesty that is  life.