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

May 2021

     Some years ago I had a client who believed he was possessed by the devil. He’d been sexually abused by the Roman Catholic parish priest in England as a child and was left with what could’ve otherwise been described as panic attacks that consisted of violent shivering, at various points of his life. He interpreted the shivering as demonic possession. No amount of trying to redefine his symptoms was having any effect at all, and, frankly, I was at a loss as to where to proceed. 

     Then it struck me in the middle of the night, as it often does, that I should propose we prepare for an exorcism.  Having studied Theology and Church rubrics many years ago, I was sort of familiar with what that might look like, but the whole idea filled me with trepidation. I was suggesting something that scared me. What if this experiment went horribly wrong?

     When his next appointment came around, I put my proposal to him. He thought this was a good idea, and so we began identifying the symbolic items that might form part of an exorcism ceremony. Did we need holy water, a cross, a sacred icon? What specifically spoke to him? We went into great detail in the shaping of this ceremony, but part way through that session (the exorcism was to take place at the next appointment), my client sat up and said, “I don’t need to do this anymore. I feel good.  I feel like the devil has left me.”  I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank goodness, I thought. 

     This whole process taught me a fundamental truth, that using experimentation in the therapeutic environment is extraordinarily powerful. It’s a central truth, that experiencing something teaches us much more than merely talking about, or analysing, that something. I’d already known that talking with my client about his symptoms wasn’t changing anything. His anxiety levels remained the same. But taking the path of actually preparing for possibly a life changing event had profound effect.

    What was critical here, was to take the client’s concerns very seriously and to be prepared for entering that space, without flinching. He knew I was serious, and thus he entered the arena of his own anxiety. He owned it, and he knew I was with him where we were safe.

    Experimentation in the therapeutic space needs to be safe and secure and for the therapist to check with the client that the direction chosen feels appropriate. It should also have enough energy within itself to remain interesting to the client. There is no point attempting to go where the client has lost interest, or that the whole thing feels too massive and fills the client with fear. Gently, gently, is the principle.

     It’s sort of like adding, bit by bit, a titration of a change agent to an existing mindset, like spices to a meal, so that what was once a problem isn’t anymore. The thing about it, though, is that the outcome cannot fully be predicted. It is an experiment, after all, and some experiments fail. That’s the beauty of it, actually. It’s a risk, but it has the potential to radically change things for the client.

     Experiments, in therapy, can be much less dramatic than the one described above. It may simply consist of suggesting the client does gentle breathing exercise, or sounds a note, or starts to dance, or draws a dream, or engages in script therapy, or does some active imagination, or empty chair work, or any other manner of appropriate things, anything that brings a sense of safe supportive engagement in the here and now of experience. It is the trying of something new to see what will happen.  It is the lived experience of something that can sometimes be otherwise a little too abstract and intellectually remote to effectively integrate.

     It is a wonderful privilege for a therapist to be part of a client’s healing journey. Experimenting in that journey brings me delight, especially when I see the lifting of what was previously problematic, smoothing out into acceptance. It’s there in their whole demeanour, they’re relaxed and able to move forward comfortably.

Being Present with Another’s Traumatic Experiences by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

 

April 2021

     “Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.” Gabor Mate.

     We all react differently to things that happen to us and what can feel catastrophic to one person may not be felt that way by another. Some people just seem to ride the waves without being too much affected by what they experience. That said, we can misjudge a person’s reaction when all we see is how they are behaving.  A person showing outwards signs of distress may not be in the same degree of shock as the person who is simply sitting staring ahead in silence. The silent one may continue to feel distress many decades after the event, but still not show it. They might be experiencing sleeplessness, nightmares, panic attacks; they might resort to excessive alcohol consumption and taking drugs, or none of these things, but still give the appearance of coping perfectly well.

     I’m reminded of one of my first clients many years ago who came to me because he was feeling suicidal. He’d taken early retirement as an aircraft mechanic and a week after giving up work was suddenly inundated with memories from his time in the air force where his job was flying helicopters picking up bodies during the Vietnam war. He’d kept it ‘together’ throughout his working life after Vietnam, not showing any emotion, just pressing on, doing his job. He maintained a holding position, until he couldn’t anymore.

     The person yelling and sobbing after traumatic events may be coping better than the silent one. Yet we, in our society, judge the former as being more traumatized than the latter. Thinking here of the quick condemnation of Lindy Chamberlain on the tragedy of losing her baby to a dingo at Uluru in 1980. She showed no emotion at all and was judged as being a cold, calculating child killer, when in fact she was frozen in utter shock.

     The Perth psychologist and trauma counselling specialist Michael Tunnicliffe who taught trauma counselling in  my Master of Counselling degree explained that the crying person was already adjusting and adapting to the reality of what they have just experienced. The silent person might be numb, not feeling anything, as if the event did not happen. The silent person has got stuck, as it were, along the path to adjusting and adapting to their new reality.

     Stuckness in shock is felt bodily. Freezing in fear is what animals do (called ‘tonic immobility’), and it is a survival response, but unlike other animals, people can get stuck there.  We do this by repeating our fears in a sort of emotional loop and thus continue the frozen response. If you watch a cat encountering something frightening, they freeze, but then shake it off. Too often we humans recapitulate our fear response by overthinking it. This is where counselling comes to its own. If such a person can talk their experience through, with plenty of emotional and somatic support, then the fear response doesn’t tend to get stuck.

     Peter Levine, a pioneer in trauma therapy, (cf Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma) notes that certain things can effectively loosen the frozen response. He  might  ask the client to put one hand on their forehead and the other on their chest, or put one hand under their armpit and the other on their upper arm in a kind of self hug. Tapping your whole body or tapping just their hand also works for some people. Such movements contain feelings of panic and lessens the sense of having a hole in a person’s boundaries.

     When the sense of frozenness is old, dance, massage, gentle breathing exercises or vocalizations are  good ways of releasing seized up emotion. For immediate help, just sitting listening with the person speak whatever it is they want to say really helps. The key is, gently does it. What doesn’t help is more exposure to the same sort of traumatic event.

     Just being with a person helps give a sense of safety and containment, which is a beginning to healing.

 

 

Counselling and Psychotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

March 2021

      In wondering what to write about in my monthly articles, I listen to what’s going on around me in order to identify what I sense is what needs to be said. For my article this month, I thought I’d get back to basics and examine what counselling and psychotherapy are as well as that they try to achieve.

     Counselling is recommended for specific issues and situations, such as addiction or grief, and takes place over weeks to several months. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, explores issues in greater depth and takes account of past issues and patterns of behaviour that might be contributing to present day problems. This level of therapy takes place over a much longer period. There are many cross overs between counselling and psychotherapy, so what I shall say here, describes them both.

     In my own practice, I am always curious about a client’s past, their family history and family dynamics, relationships past and present, and when they can identify particular difficulties arising and how they dealt with them. I also want to know how well they sleep, the how and when of feelings of anxiety, moodiness, sense of calm and contentment, excitement, and so on. These give me significant clues as to how to proceed.

     So, what is the main function of counselling/psychotherapy? It is to help clients come to know their own strengths, discover what is preventing them from using those strengths, and clarify the kind of person they want to be. They are encouraged to honestly examine  their behaviour and lifestyle as well as learn how to make decisions to modify the quality of their life.

     This is collaborative work, and there are no magic solutions. The pathway for successful counselling/psychotherapy arises from the quality of the therapeutic relationship that, when it is working well, offers support and warmth as well as challenge and confrontation. The latter is sometimes really necessary if old patterns have a chance of being released.

     Contrary to certain  popular ideas, the counsellor/psychotherapist works hard. It may look as though we are just sitting there having a chat with the client. We are, on the contrary, very focussed as we listen, and draw upon our extensive studies and experience of human dynamics and behaviour; ours is a knowledge that takes account of human development, abnormal psychology, social and individual behaviour, neurology, sociology, cultural ideas, and the like. Central to what we do together is the keeping in confidentiality of what is said to us. Those of us who are very experienced have practically heard it all (or so we generally think), so the client doesn’t need to withhold anything. The greater the sense of safety, the more the client feels they are able to speak, and the therapist do their work.

     Another tool that the counsellor/psychotherapist brings to the therapeutic situation is an ability to set aside their own assumptions and beliefs. This is called epoche. It means the therapist is present in a better state of clarity, with little agenda of their own, except to encourage a great easefulness for the client. It is in order to be able to practice our profession with this clarity that it is encouraged by most training institutions that therapists receive therapy of their own.  I began my therapeutic career in the 70s when I studied Jungian psychology (even though I didn’t practice as a therapist for many years) and began serious self reflection through psychotherapy. This continued for many many years. I wrote my Master of Counselling degree dissertation on the subject of therapists who receive therapy. There I noted that such a strategy not only gives insight into one’s self, our relationships, and our style of being in the world, but served as an apprenticeship into this field. All of which makes for good therapy.

     

     Probably the most effective tool in counselling/psychotherapy is the knowledge that the therapist will tailor their work according to the individual client. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. As Jung says, there are as many therapies as there are clients. We work together in the process of your healing and are thus, as therapists, a therapeutic person.

“Hearing” Others by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

February 2021

      I’m  intrigued by the way in which we  get a sense of unseen other people through the narrative of the people talking directly with us. In literary terms, this is known as narrative empathy and it may because my first degree was a major in English Literature, that the idea fascinates me on several levels.

      A while ago, I was listening to a man describing a few ex-girlfriends and I could barely get any real sense of the personhood of these women. It dawned on me that my feelings of disquiet had a lot to do with this man’s own lack of a sense of the “otherness” of the women. If they were characters in a novel, they would be like wraiths, with no substance. We speak, after all, much as we experience.

      We fill in, with our imaginations and felt sense, what we think is going on in another person’s mind when we listen to them speak or write or otherwise depict, the object of their interest. If a person’s focus is on outward appearances, as it was with the man described above, we get very little information on what these other people are actually like. It’s sort of like flicking through a Vogue magazine where women are objectified; nothing more, nothing less.

     This man, who did not have a real sense of the subjective nature of his ex-girlfriends’ experiences, could not understand the effect his actions had on them and the not knowing caused him and, presumably them, real distress. His lack of empathy seemed to be generated by an unawareness of the subjective presence of others. This, I think, was the result of being thrust into an adult world when he was still a child. We develop much of our capacity for empathy though peer contact in a casual environment where ideas of relationship are tried and tested and tried again, and he didn’t have much of this. He was forced to grow up too quickly.

     Getting a sense of how others are feeling is a sign of emotional intelligence and it is the capacity for empathy. Not “hearing” how others are feeling means that they don’t really get a sense of what they themselves are feeling. This is not to say they have no feelings, but rather can’t identify what’s going on within themselves and in the behaviour of others and have difficulty adjusting their behaviour to make space for others’ responses. There is a clinical word for this personality trait: Alexithymia, and being a  trait, it is possible to learn, to heighten, awareness of the feelings of self and others.

     When I was studying couples counselling in my Master of Counselling course we did a lot of practice runs working with people who were not “hearing” the perspectives of the other person they were in a relationship with. We had them do a bit of play acting whereby each had to pretend to be the other person, saying the words they’d heard the other say. This simple task quickly gave each person a felt sense of the other person and a bit of an awareness of other lives, other sensibilities, other perspectives.

     A study needs to be done to investigate how such a technique changes the quality of “voice” in a person’s narrative accounts of others. The quality of “voice” after all changes the capacity to “hear” another person, other people. When we speak of others, what we know of ourselves and how we perceive the other lives of the people we speak of, is reflected in the quality of our narratives. To speak of others without feeling something of what another is feeling is to speak as if “tone deaf”: there is sound, but not much content.  To “hear” another allows us to speak of them in a deeper, fuller way. The man I mentioned above, could well benefit from psychotherapy, if he ever should wish it. The purpose of therapy here would be to learn how to fill out a life with reciprocated relationships that feel good, by recognizing the felt being of others. That makes for a life among others rich and fulfilling.

 

 

Can Hypnosis Retrieve Memory? by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

January 2021

       Every now and again, I get requests from potential clients to help them remember something they’ve forgotten using hypnosis. I generally say I don’t do this sort of thing. There are three reasons for this, and I say so to these people. One is that memory isn’t a large, permanent and possibly accessible storehouse of information, nor is it a recording device; two, hypnosis isn’t a searchlight into such a storehouse;, and three, hypnosis wrongly done can plant false memories, and I’m uninterested in doing that.

     Memory is already a distortion of experience since it is an internal representation of an event and not the event itself. No amount of uncovering bits of information through hypnosis will get to an absolute truth. What hypnosis might do is allow a person to think about a situation or event differently, and this is useful therapeutically, but as a possibly inviolate forensic tool it is generally not admissible in the court of law, with few exceptions. It should be remembered that hypnosis isn’t a powerful tool to recover accurate memories under a variety of conditions including accurate memories as far back as birth or even past lives. You may get glimpses of ideas, but that’s about it.

     Digging into memory using hypnosis, it has been found through years of considerable research, is as susceptible to the problems of distortion and confabulation as any other method of trying to remember something. It would be unethical of me to use hypnosis to fulfill someone’s desire for memory recovery, and I won’t recommend any other practitioner who might claim to do this dubious thing.

     My interest as a clinical hypnotherapist, as opposed to a forensic hypnotist is the loosening up of rigid ideas about oneself. I use hypnotherapy as an adjunct to my psychotherapeutic practice, but only by client choice.  I am a psychotherapist first and foremost, and my participation in my clients’ healing is my actual interest in the field.

     I have helped some clients find missing objects, but not by directing them to that object. I know from personal experience that when something is missing I am more likely to find it when I’m not concentrating on looking for it. It’s when my attention is elsewhere that I can find pointers to the lost thing. When preparing for exams, I used to play difficult fugues on the piano and in this way solve the mathematical problems by approaching the issues from other directions. This, to me, is a far more interesting way of approaching difficulties.

     This loosened therapeutic direction, valuable as it is as I use it, actually also points to the inherent danger of trying to hypnotise someone in order to direct them to actual memory. A hypnotised person’s openness to suggestions, as well as an expectation that hypnosis will work, sets the stage for possible confabulation. Memory is easily contaminated by a whole range of things (just like a crime scene), including the very desire for hypnosis to uncover truth. If you believe something will work, you are most likely to believe the veracity of the something. In court cases where hypnosis is used to trigger memories (real or not), the person is likely to say they are more than one hundred percent sure that such and such is true. This is a red flag. Nobody can be so sure of anything. I note that I avoid such directiedness by saying something like, “Maybe you will find it; maybe you won’t, and that’s alright.” I try to avoid direct statements of any kind, as I do not wish to create stories for the other person.

     By avoiding direct statements during a hypnotherapeutic session, I also avoid client resistance, which is just more inflexibility to a much more fluid approach to life. Loosening anxiety around a problem has the capacity for releasing a person from the problem itself, and that matters enormously.

    So, hypnosis is an unreliable means for uncovering things unremembered, but it’s a wonderful tool for learning to think outside the box; it is a doorway to greater creativity and self confidence.

 

All the waters of the world by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns, PhD

December 2020

     Most people who know me know that my passion is swimming, snorkelling, and diving. Just being in the water is bliss. These days, it feels to me that all the pools, ponds, lakes, rivers, seas and oceans I have ever swum in are gathered together in the singular swim of the day. It is as though all the waters of the world are present in the now of this swim.

     I have swum in the North Sea (Scotland, England, the Adriatic (off Italy),  the Andaman (off Thailand), the Indian and Southern Oceans (Western Australia), Fonty’s Pool, Manjimup (WA south-west),  in the Pacific, the Atlantic (Iceland) multiple rivers, streams, lakes (including Lake Zurich in Switzerland), the Silfra Fissure in Lake Thingvallavatn in Iceland (water temperature, 3-4 degrees Celsius); hotel and public pools (last year I was in Berlin swimming in their pool on top of a shopping centre, and Caracalla Spa in Baden-Baden), etc.,  etc. I actually dream of swimming across whole countrysides, and it feels fantastic. 

   One thing I love to do when diving, is swim upside down gazing at the underside of the shimmering water’s surface. I’ve had dive masters try to save me, thinking I’m drowning! This, I guess, is the legacy of nearly drowning when I was four years old. That time, I wasn’t yet a strong swimmer and couldn’t follow the group of swimmers who left me behind, so was going under. Far from being afraid, however, I was fascinated by the underside of the surface of the water with the light streaming through. It was magical. I was pretty cross on being saved and told to play on the beach like the other little kids. I guess the reason I didn’t drown was the children’s capacity for stilling the breath, something I consciously practice these days.

     I have a hankering to free dive the kelp forests off Tasmania, and plan on doing this in the next couple of months. I bought the useful extra long free diving fins and added them to my existing rather large fin collection (I’m the Imelda Marcos of swim fins).  My Octopus Teacher, that beautiful documentary made by Craig Foster on the way in which an octopus taught the man about octopus-life, has added fuel to this desire. The dance of waving kelp seduces me.

     So, what has this all to do with psychotherapy? Far from being a remotely connected idea, understanding what being in water requires and understanding what being in the presence of other people in the psychotherapeutic realm necessitates, gives a very clear pointer to how the one reflects the other. 

     Being in the water and working with clients requires in-the-moment attention; it requires focus, listening, awareness of everything around me, and all done while alert and yet relaxed. The nature of both and all the interconnections within is an imperative of the therapeutic communication. 

     It is no accident that water is often seen as the essence of communication, a word that shares its meaning with “communal”, or “togetherness”. Sound travels long distances in water. A microphone dropped beneath a boat captures whale song of those swimming many metres away.

     In astronomy, Sedna, the planetary body beyond Neptune, was named after the Inuit goddess of marine life. She, or it, in this romance, usefully could symbolize the coming of  consciousness from a backdrop of watery unconsciousness. This is our task in psychotherapy, and in life. It’s also what I endeavour to do while swimming, that is, swimming with awareness.

     Water is subtle in her currents, shifts in water temperature, clarity or murkiness, volume (it took awhile to perceive in my body depth perception), the delicate sense of water tension, and the strange way in which the swimmer can sometimes forget that there is a watery substance, but just the natural environment of the marine animal. Swimming the waters of the world is how I’m coming to know how interconnection, individuation and consciousness all roll into the doing of participation in the art, craft and process of psychotherapy. I swim for the enjoyment of coming to know my work, my life.

Smoking and Clinical Hypnotherapy by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 November 2020

     People come to me for clinical hypnotherapy and counselling  in order to give up smoking and other issues (pain management, sleep issues, speech disorders, eating problems, confidence issues, etc.). Today I want only to talk about smoking and the efficacy of hypnotherapy in the treatment of that. What many people do not realize is that hypnosis cannot make you do anything against your will. If you have no actual intention of giving up smoking, the hypnosis won’t be effective. Hypnosis isn’t magic. It is only an altered state of consciousness where you are in a  trance state, much like the state you enter when you are absorbed into something, like reading, or running, or swimming, or watching a movie. The hypnotherapist is talking to your unconscious and giving you information about smoking that you already know: that it tastes horrible, it’s expensive and is terrible for your health, and that you don’t need to do it. If you really don’t want to smoke, giving up is well within your capacity. Hypnosis, in this case, acts as a trigger to change. No one is compelled to smoke; it is up to a point a choice, even though you may feel it is an addiction to nicotine or something to occupy your hands.

     I’ve known people who had smoked for 50 years and gave it away overnight. One man who told me about  his own experience in this, also said that he cried and cried during that night,  for his smoking had concealed a profound anxiety and depression. And this brings me to a fundamental point. Those who smoke heavily generally do so to deal with emotional and often relational issues that the smoking habit attempts to cover up. At this level, the problem is semi-conscious, that is, it is not something deliberately done, but comes about as a kind of self medication. I’ve be noticing this repeatedly ever since I first trained in this field and then began offering clinical hypnotherapy all those years ago, which is why I now want to emphasize that if you really want hypnotherapy to be successful, you need not only to actually want a given outcome, but to shake off the idea that hypnosis can deal with the problem without your emotional and intentional input and also I suggest that you commit to several sessions of counselling as well as hypnotherapy.

     During counselling you will be heard by someone interested in you.  Connecting to someone (me) about matters that are really important to you are the best ingredients for essential interior change. Hypnosis can beautifully set the landscape up for effective communication. It is relaxing and it feels very good and, with the suggestions presented to you under hypnosis, you have the settings for the beginning of enduring change.  This is not a quick fix, and it has substance.  

      I knew a hypnotherapist who had clients who gave up smoking for a year and then resumed this horrible practice. To my mind that’s not good enough and this is why I continue working for something far more effective.

     Of magic and such, some people expect change without their intention for change, as though with a wave of a wand and sparkles in the air, essential change can happen – whatever your mind set. Such an approach doesn’t work on stage, and it certainly doesn’t work in the clinical setting either.  Hypnosis isn’t magic and change usually cannot be achieved in a small number of sessions. Anyone who claims otherwise is delusional. You really will have to commit to several sessions and, with me, do the actual work to  shift  your relationship with nicotine.  

      Of smoking as an addiction. All the study, conversations and research I’ve done into addiction says the same thing: ‘the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s connection’ (Johann Hari). When we start connecting through meaningful communication we start to heal. This is why I’m urging potential clients who want to be free of smoking, or anything else, to consider coming to see me and get down to the real work and not just a seek magical removal of symptoms.