Overcoming fear through focused body movement by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

September 2019  

     In Germany in the 1920s to the 40s some very innovative work was going on that traversed psychotherapy and body work. Dancers, gymnasts, massage therapists and other body workers were in conversation with psychoanalysts and psychologists (including C. G. Jung) and these conversations were the seed to recognizing that no psychological problem exists without a bodily response and no psychological/emotional problem exists outside a bodily experience. It is curious, therefore, that the two forms of therapy then went off in separate directions. Psychotherapy started to think of itself as entirely to do with the mind and social domain, and physical work as having nothing much to do with feelings and thoughts. Both had got caught up in a mechanical way of doing things. I’m talking mainstream here; alternative modalities didn’t lose track of the whole embodied self.

     It is interesting that the severe anxiety response particularly in post-traumatic stress disorder is being our entré into more holistic approaches to healing. Anxiety is a fear response, a flight-freeze-fight response that stirs up adrenalin, causes cortisol levels to soar, saturates the blood with higher levels of glucose and more white blood cells, hyperventilation, saturates the mind with recurring thoughts and imaginings, stirs stomach discomfort, gives us a dry mouth, makes us feel we can’t escape,  etc. Imagine being in a sustained fear response lasting days, maybe years. Fear is crippling, and those consumed by it tend not to venture far.

     In the 80s a Tai Chi practitioner friend was involved in a study with a group of elderly people with a fear of falling, Many had already fallen several times and broken bones. My friend was hired to teach the group some simple Tai Chi exercises. The more they exercised in this flowing fluid way, the less fear was experienced. Fear of falling, and interestingly, other fears went away.

     Exercise is good, but I think there is more to what was going on here.  I have two main thoughts on the matter. Focused body movement matters.  Tai Chi is a mindful, focussed form of exercise. Mindfulness is now a tool in psychotherapy. When you are aware of what you’re doing, your thoughts are no longer on your anxiety.

     My other thought is that mindful physical exercise expands our perceptual strengths and capacities. Most of us have a dominant sensory perception, where the less dominant ones are not paid much attention.  When one perception shapes a person’s experience in a fairly exclusive way, negotiating the greater world can be compromised. Think of someone who practically exclusively gets around using just what they can see as a means of knowing what is there and how it must feel to meet the unseen, unexpected whatever. It would be scary.

     We usually talk of only five sensations: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, but there is another: proprioception. Proprioception, also known as kinaesthetic sense, is the sense of self body movement and position in relation to space and other things. Developing proprioception can be very beneficial for people who have an over developed sense of sight (maybe they spend all day on their phones). When fear arises from encountering the unknown (which is always there) – eg not being able to see into a dark room – having a strong body knowing, that is, a better proprioceptive sense, can give greater security, because presences and absences can often be felt actually in the body. You don’t have to see everything to feel secure.

     Focussed exercises, like those in the martial arts, where you are aware of your own sense of balance, your core fulcrum, as it were, the slowness or speed of your body movement, the grace of an arm, perhaps an unsteadiness of a leg, your breath, your sweat, expand your sense of safety and confident engagement in the world. It’s also great fun.

     As one of the early German body practitioners who worked alongside a psychotherapist, said, the therapeutic work is speeded up when patients do both focussed body work and psychotherapy. I encourage my clients in the pursuit of both for their healing.

 

I had a young client some years ago with multiple anxieties: fear of dark places, fear of spiders, fear of falling, etc etc. What I suggested to him was to take up a martial art, which he did and his fears disappeared. He now works as a firefighter. Powerful stuff, this reconnection with the body. 

Sending Love Songs for Connection by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., Ph

August 2019

     We all walk in the memory footsteps of those who came before us. In a family, a child is born from a relationship that may or may not have been loving, from parents who may or may not have known love from their parents – perhaps through war or separation – but who may, perhaps, have sought some love from their newborn. The need is reciprocal. There has been, somewhere, a deep desire for connection and if it hasn’t been met, we continue seeking it. This is true in families and the greater community.

     Connection is the medium through which we are held, nurtured, fed and, hopefully nourished from the time of our birth in all that we are. Without it, we suffer, and suffer enormously throughout life.

    The best connection is a sustained one so that when we as little children prepare to explore the greater world, we know that we can return whenever we like. This connection confirms to us that we are free to return to our caregiver’s arms or go off and play somewhere. When connection is intermittent, or worse, absent, leaving is hard and returning can be even harder. A child who never quite knows if their caregiver will be there or not, can never quite feel safe and secure with their caregivers, other people, or even, themselves. A child who feels unsafe is an anxious one; one who is hungry for sustained connection. This is true for a child and for all of us. Being met, greeted, hugged, listened to, played with, accepted are the requirements of us social animals throughout our lives.

     Scared children grow up without any sustained sense of security and safety and  they will tend to continue to seek security somehow, and can become addicted to it.  Some turn to alcohol, glue and petrol sniffing, some turn to other drugs and/or sex that help them forget their pain, some have serial relationships with other people who offer them unsafe sanctuary (though quite often with a price), some pursue power and money as ends in themselves, some clamber after danger for the thrill of it all and the satisfaction of a post-endorphin fix, and some reject other people entirely – going off on their own because seeking connection with others is just far too hard.

     We are social beings and, without other members of a group that we can connect to, we struggle.

     Johann Hari, a journalist who writes about mental health issues and addiction, has proposed that instead of asking those with addictions, “What’s wrong with you?” instead  ask, “What happened to you,” to open up where the pain has stemmed from, how it is being felt, who “missed” you when you needed them and who is here who can be with you now. It’s in here that healing can at least begin to happen, and it is not just their healing that will happen, but ours as well. We are all affected by an act of outcasting someone else. The sickness of exclusion damages all of us. We begin dividing the human race into us and them and refuse to listen to other experiences of being, becoming instead paranoid and selfish.

     When we ask “What’s wrong with you?” we put the blame on the individual and we treat them as though they are bad, crazy or just odd. Effectively we excommunicate them from the safety and security of our communities, which is exactly the act that made them seek their addictive behaviours in the first place. Hari puts it beautifully, 'For 100 years now, we have been singing war songs about people with addiction problems...We should've been singing love songs to them all along.' Love songs include and reconnects us in acts of caring communication and connection. Let’s  ask, “What happened to you?” and celebrating the homecoming, with music.

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

 July 2019

 

Last year Kathleen, a friend I knew over 30 years ago, emailed me out of the blue and we started conversing. I wondered why she wanted to talk with me, given we’d parted ways such a long time ago. I kept asking her if she was well, but she was evasive and never responded to that question. I noticed over time that her messages were getting shorter and shorter and her words increasingly precise, and I felt more strongly that something was going on healthwise. She wanted to talk about theology, which 30 years ago I was very interested in, but now not particularly. I tried, somewhat lacklusterly, but really I didn’t have sufficient time to shape my ideas, given that my work is now psychotherapeutic. She began sharing her published theological writings where her ideas were practically inscribed in stone and she really wasn’t open to other considerations. What had been once a much more fluid mind, had become quite conservative. Last month, Kathleen’s daughter told me she’d died. I was not surprised. Her frailty was there in her syntax.

     I emailed David, a friend from years ago who I knew had been in contact with Kathleen to tell him of her death. They were both in their mid-80s, and quite a bit older than me. He then asked if I would like the missives he’d been sending her. I, being polite and a bit curious, said yes. Big mistake. The thrice daily missives were pure paranoia: on the hoards of foreign invasion, on the Chinese spying in our bedrooms, on the evils of this and that, etc etc. No mention of the health of the earth or other things that interest me, so I requested he send no more articles. There really are other things to think about, or not, and to enjoy.

     I got to wondering why David and Kathleen had felt it necessary to send me material at all. Did they fear I needed saving, was this some kind of end of life mission to set me on the “right” path, or something else.  

     My own parents were not disposed to convert me to anything at the last pip. My mother, in her 90s, was not inclined to lead me to the “right” way; she herself had lost interest even in the things that motivated her in previous years: meditation, yoga, and the wisdom of the East. Her concerns were immediate, in the delight of birds, dew on brightly coloured leaves, sunshine and clouds, oh, and iced coffee. My father, who died one month short of 101, in his way, had become a sweet lovely old man who’d left his politics of ethics and strict architectural laws behind. All he wanted to do in his extreme old age was have Walt Whitman poems (Leaves of Grass) read to him and to listen to sublime music.

     A dear friend and colleague is currently grappling with the effects of chemotherapy on a cancer he is treating and we both have decided that what matters to each of us is exquisite music and the transparency of the heart in connection with others and the lively earth. Connection is the thing that makes meaning and gives sense to life itself. It’s certainly the thing that drives me in my psychotherapeutic work, and life in general.

    A desire for reconnection is why my elderly friends reached out to me. It wasn’t to convert me to anything; they sought to connect with me. Without connection there is loneliness and depression, an implosion of emptiness, and the elderly, among others, too often lack enough real connection. Some people  become polite and circumspect, so as not to disturb the elderly, forgetting that realness is what connection is all about. I’m not sure I was particularly accommodating in reaching out to Kathleen. I did try, but I got caught up with the content of her writing and not enough for the fundament of connection. I think at least now I understand how to connect with David. Not through his missives, but just in listening to his drive towards reconnection.

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.