Walking in the sandals of another by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

June 2019

     Today I received a beautiful foot massage with sandalwood oil and, in my usual meander of mullings, I got to thinking about the words sandal and wood and how they evoked in me a vision of walking through the woods in brown leather sandals, and then from that vision an idea for this article on how it feels to walk in the shoes of another. I’ve chosen to write of these shoes as sandals, because there is a certain innocent simplicity in the wearing of the latter and I quite like that.

     I have been lucky to have had a few mentors in my life who have shared with me their skills, insights, and knowledge in a lovely generosity of spirit.  They have, effectively laid down a path  in their walking, which is a very Buddhist idea. In this way, they  have also shown me how to be a human being and to mentor others without fanfare. For these things I am profoundly grateful.

     But taking the image further, from making a pathway for me to walk safely following them, to  inviting me to wear their shoes, well that takes a lot more risk on their part.

     One of my mentors, a university teacher of mine, nurtured my interest in the subject of Jungian psychology beyond the call of duty and, when I was in third year of my first degree, he asked me to be a tutor for second year students just while he was on leave. That was a big thing for me. Here the pathway was not just cleared for me, but I had to wear his metaphorical shoes. It was scary for the 21 year old me, but I made the shoes my own and really haven’t looked back.

     Some shoes, some expectations, seem impossible to put on and if they are squeezed into, feel intolerable. Such shoes do not, cannot, fit. If a parent or a teacher or someone with authority expects us to walk their way without compromise, and without any recognition that we are not designed for that level of engagement, then we can have years of guilt, shame and feelings of inadequacy. This scenario is quite common in our society. The macho father demanding his sensitive son work in his cut-throat world of commerce or the soldier wanting his child to be a fellow warrior, the intellectual mother demanding her physically talented daughter, skilled in carpentry, become a fellow academic, the mathematically gifted teacher demanding a favourite pupil give up dancing for accountancy, and so on. Extreme mismatches make for great misery. Some people who have felt forced into occupations and lifestyles suffer enormously with depression and suicidal thoughts. They’ve internalized the expectations of others and turned against themselves, causing inner collapse. It is part of my work as a psychotherapist to ease off the ill-fitting shoes of mismatched expectations and provide support and encouragement as the client finds their own comfortable shoes to walk in. Comfort (from the Latin, to strengthen greatly), after all, doesn’t mean giving in to laziness, but to finding one’s own inner strength and feeling good in the world.

     The shoes we want to wear need to fit us and to make the journey through life relatively comfortable. A good mentor knows this and chooses his or her apprentice according to their leaning towards the lessons the mentor wants to pass on.

     Sometimes the shoes are sandals and like the sandals worn by the person wandering through the woods, there is an easefulness of being. Just as the essential oil of sandalwood calms, balances, grounds, clears the mind, so the wearing of the footwear bestowed by the mentor needs to be calming, balancing, grounding and clearing. The wearer of this footwear treads lightly but purposefully. It is clear the walker knows where she/he is going.

Speaking up in intimate relationships by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 May 2019

     There is a meme doing the rounds at the moment that I think is exactly right particularly where relationships are concerned, that is. It reads, “Be careful what you tolerate, you are teaching people how to treat you.”

     Unless you speak up and say what is bothering you, others will think you agree with them, or at least don’t really care, because otherwise, how would they know.  A lot of gaslighting begins here. The gaslighted tolerates quite a bit of abuse for a variety of reasons including the idea that the abuser is aware, without us telling them, that their actions are having a bad effect on us. The thing is, most of the time they are not aware.

      By repeatedly not speaking up, a person can get really confused by the seeming lack of empathy coming at them from others and in this confusion they can feel a deluge of contradictory responses to them, such that they don’t know themselves anymore. This give a clue to where a person is at emotionally. I see a number of people in this disempowered mindspace who are experiencing interior collapse, without knowing where to start to regain their sense of self. The other person blithely continues this line of unexamined abuse for they don’t have a gauge of the us.

     The belief that others sort of know us without being told is a hang over from early childhood when the child thinks the world revolves around them and that everyone shares the same mindspace as themselves. This is classical magical thinking.  Magical thinking assumes that there is a causal link between one's inner, personal experience and the external physical world, and that other people automatically know what  the child is thinking, hoping for, wishing for. I suspect that a lot of adults harbor some beliefs of this kind. It is, interestingly, in intimate relationships where the magical thinking of childhood tends to reemerge. For it is in such relationships we often expect the other person to know us more than perhaps they do, and when they don’t, we get a shock.

     Magical  thinking is implicit in the idea of romantic love, something writ large in popular culture.  There we have ideas of how it is to be in love, where heart and soul are shared, where there are not two, but one, where there is a sacred unity in love making and where we are destined to be together. I am not saying that this kind of experience doesn’t happen; what I am saying is that such an experience isn’t present all the time, and shouldn’t be.

     Too much gets assumed, consumed, presumed, when we expect a closeness that is unexamined. It is in the unexamined that abuse is free to occur, and often does. It is in the unexamined and unspoken that one or the other of us can assert a control over what they deem suitable or unsuitable for us: clothes they want us to wear, music they don’t want us listening to, members of the family that they expect us to not associate with, whole philosophies of life that they assume we are not interested in.

     A sense of being together is important, but also important is a sense of remaining an individual capable of speaking up when required.  When we, as individuals, speak up we give permission for ourselves to be different people and also allow the other person their uniqueness. They are not us, and we are not them. How nice it is to be recognized and loved for ourselves, and not merely as a projection of our first caregiver (usually our mother). Our adult relationships need to be different from  our parental ones. This differentiation, this separation, is the beginning of the positive state of being caste out of an Edenesque unconsciousness to an individuated self.

     Consciousness requires us to examine and speak of our individual truths and lives.  When we speak from our unique place we define ourselves and we literally shape how others treat us.  And we, in knowing ourselves differently, can speak increasingly with confidence and authenticity.

Thinking Beyond Stone by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

March 2019

     Many years ago, sometime in the mid 1970s I was in Zurich, Switzerland sitting in an interview with the head of the Jung Institute talking about things. I was querying a fundamental doctrine of Jungian psychotherapy and the man said my question showed the emergence of the shadow of my father. I thought to myself, “bull,” but politely smiled and stayed silent. This one instance ultimately gathered enough steam for me not to stay a Jungian. They were not open to examination and questions.

     Last week, in a peer group gathering after hearing a lecture on an aspect of Freudian psychoanalysis, I once again piped up expressing my doubt about something said as an apparently irrefutable fact by the lecturer. I said then that I’m still thinking about the matter at hand and that I’m unwilling to accept the explanation given, unexamined. Interestingly, the guy running the group told me, in a roundabout way, that my question demonstrated some developmental anomaly in my psyche. Again, I thought to myself, “bull,” but didn’t saying anything in reply. I did say, I sense there is more to be thought about here, that we need to examine this thing further and maybe it’ll take twenty or so years to do that, but let’s do it. The idea that there is only ever one answer, a thing set in stone, is just lazy and not terribly useful.  It’s sort of like saying, as it used to be thought, that fire obviously has a substance called phlogiston and everybody who is anybody knows this. Phlogiston, they said, is contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion. For a very long time, this was the “scientific” explanation of what fire is, and people accepted it, and many people stopped thinking about it. In the late 18^th century, freer thinkers came to understand fire very differently. Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, release heat, light, and various reaction products. There is no phlogiston.

    A teacher of mine once said of me, I have a bull dog personality and won’t let go, unless I am satisfied.  No amount of persuasion, no amount of appeal to a “higher” authority will move me, as I am more interested in the fluidity of possibilities than apparent certainty. This is all very nice, but too often I find myself on the outer because of this, acquiring “diagnoses” along the way!

     The laziness in  accepting something because a person in authority has said so is giving up one’s personal agency as a thinker and that means getting stuck in stone, in my view.

     Fritz Perls, a founder of Gestalt Therapy, coined the term “introjection” to describe the unexamined, undigested, swallowed whole foreign bodies (ideas) taken in uncritically from the caretakers (mother, father, school teachers, church ministers, social media) of our lives. Quite often these introjects are consumed like this because of the pressure of fashion, tradition, shame and fear about being different, and direct coercion. Usually the introjects are contradictory and the person spends agonizing hours trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. The noise from introjects consist of “should should”, leaving little room for developing one’s own personality. Interestingly too, where a person is dominated by introjects they also have a lot of digestive issues. They literally cannot digest what has been fed them, everything sticks in the craw (nothing goes down, nothing nourishes). Quite often, as soon as introjects are identified and known as coming from elsewhere, their tummy troubles ease up. Identifying introjects is one very important function of counselling. In each counselling session we work together on identifying what is yours, what came from your parents and other caregivers,  whose ideas about this and that have you swallowed whole, and why, and getting to think beneath the stone to the soft earth and water below where all of us are free to examine whatever it is we wish without taking on board another person’s dogma and doctrine for our own creative life.

     Beyond the certainty of stone is a fluidity of being open to multiple ways of seeing and a freedom of being.

Diving down by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

February 2019

     I’ve ordered a full length, upper and lower body rashy for snorkelling and diving purposes. It had to be bought online because I couldn’t find anyone locally who sells them. I have a wetsuit for scuba, but find it cumbersome and too warm for comfort for shallow dives and hovering around on the surface of water. This purchase comes hard on the heels of my January birthday and the confirmation to self that, beside the work I do as a psychotherapist, snorkelling and diving are my favourite activities, along with music, and I want to do a lot more of those.

     As I muse upon these things, I am reminded again of an account told to me by my diving instructor from ten years ago, which in turn triggers a realization that what occurred in that incident, exposes the nature of dreams in a curiously similar fashion, though without the same conditions.  

     My diving instructor and his girlfriend did a dive in the Truk (Chuuk) Lagoon in Micronesia and the girlfriend suffered nitrogen narcosis (also called the “martini effect”) where she lost her entire memory of the dive. Nitrogen narcosis is a temporary condition caused by the effect of gases breathed in under pressure. She couldn’t recall anything of the dive at all. Then one day, eight months later, she said she’d had a dream and she related everything they’d seen together on the Truk dive. Her memory of the dive had returned.

     To me, this account shows the stratospheres of the mind and the usefulness of dreams in bringing knowledge that is not readily accessible by ordinary means but which can be useful in ordinary and therapeutic life.

     I usually ask my clients about their dreams, not only because they prove useful tools in the therapy itself, but they allow me entrance into the unconscious of the person, and their inner truth. (As I write this, I am entranced by the word “en-trance” and its seductive suggestion that the dream draws us both in to a trance state, which feels just about right.)

     Dream interpretation should arise from the dreamer, and not be imposed by dictionaries of dream interpretation, nor from the therapist. The image of a snake may have nothing to do with sexuality, even though a dictionary might say otherwise. It might suggest, or not, the healing powers of injury and suffering, as the symbol of the entwined snakes on the staff, the caduceus (the staff of Hermes), or anything else more relevant for the dreamer.

“The dream,” as Jung puts it, “shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.” (1934)

     I reveal myself when I write of diving down as entering the unconscious, but that interpretation would mean nothing to someone who does not dive or who has no associations in this way. My way of thinking is not universal, and likewise for you.

     Because I both dive and interpret dreams and because I’ve made the association myself, diving down is rich and redolent with meaning for me. Because I operate this way, I’m attracted to certain therapeutic ideas over other ones that speak to me. I am attracted to psychodynamic psychotherapy, and always have been. My first training was in Jungian psychology in the 1970s.  C. G. Jung’s ideas resonated with me and so I engage with him, and others similarly inclined, and continue to think and learn and mull and dive.

     I have colleagues who do not work with dreams at all and see no point in them, seeing the dream as silly and absurd. To those I say, why would we dream, if not to have this as a resource for possible discovery? We all dream and there are  inklings of meaning to be had in exploring them. But, whatever each of us seeks, so that should be the point of any counselling. I seek the healing of the whole person, and so diving is what I do.