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.

“What we perceive depends on how we direct our attention.” (Milton Erickson) by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

January 2019

     Perception is an interesting thing. Most of the time we see our world as we have become accustomed to seeing it. This is generally useful as it means we are not having to work hard at living life, but can assume a lot of things and then get on with making sense of the novel. 

     Our responses to what we perceive can largely become part of a well-oiled machine, which is not to say that this is necessarily good. In families, old patterns of behaviour in interactions between members and beyond that to interactions with other people who simply remind us of a family member, can be practically set in stone in a destructive manner. For example, a little girl is bossed around by her older sister who has been given the care of the younger one because mother is ill. The older sister has always been angry at having to be “mother” to her sister and forced, more or less, to give up her own childhood. The younger one doesn’t really know any difference. Mum is sort of there, but not as a comforter when she is hurt. “Mother-sister” is unreliable (she’s angry, after all), but who else is there? Father works away, and there is no other family nearby, and so the little one has to depend on this person who feels good/not good. When she grows up, she meets a man who is good and not good. He is familiar, but still not quite known. He behaves unpredictably and erratically, he is there and then he disappears and returns to surprise her, and then goes, and then comes.  Every time the woman meets with her older sister, she feels attacked and sort of depleted. She notices that afterward seeing her sister she eats a lot of sweets even though she isn’t hungry and even though she is now pre-diabetic. She attends psychotherapy sessions and starts to notice the patterns of behaviour in her own life as well as that in the man she’s with. She breaks up with him and at the same time, builds an understanding her sister more. She starts to notice that as her perceptions of that woman’s behaviour change, so are her reactions changing. She doesn’t feel the same imploded feelings so much and doesn’t consume massive amount of  ice cream in the way she used to.

     The process of psychotherapy interrupts not only tired old modes of interaction that are not working, but brings insights that create an ongoing capacity to change how we respond to others in the world. This, though, doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. As anyone who has experienced how it is to stop reacting as one has traditionally done within families and other groups, one’s non-reactions disturb the machinery of the family system and certain others can become belligerent and nasty. My suggestion when such things happen is to walk away and leave the antagonist to fight their own shadows. I’m reminded of the martial artist who, when the opponent lunges aggressively at them, simply steps aside. The opponent topples over. Neat.

     In time, the perceptions of other people in response to us change as we change and how they behave towards us changes too. Family and other social systems are not immutable, but fluid and flexible. What once was, doesn’t have to be forever. Our perceptions change according to how we direct our attention, and that changes practically everything.

A Therapeutic Conversation by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

December 2018

     In September this year I travelled to Germany and then to Scotland, particularly around the Isle of Mull. In Germany I met with a couple of Facebook friends for the first time, one of whom is a psychotherapist like myself, the other an artist, like my otherwise self. We talked for hours in a little café called La Boheme in the old town of Heidelberg. This was, for me, a turning point in life and work. I remain in conversational contact with my colleague and he encourages me to new understandings and new readings and has enlivened how I work. I’m delighted by all this, and have been mulling on things ever since.

     In a non-direct way, through talking about Psychodynamic-interpersonal Psychotherapy, which both of us practice, I’ve been introduced to Conversational Psychotherapy, or simply the Conversation Model. It’s filling in my intuitive sense about how I work and how I’ve come to understand the self, and myself. This concept of self, which is a kind of consciousness, has been there all along, largely unarticulated, prompted by my early readings (in the 1970s) of William James and other relational-humanistic psychologists, but the clear statements of the Australian psychiatrist Russell Meares, b. 1936 (son of Ainslie Meares, psychiatrist, hypnotherapist and writer on meditation) has brought it into the clear light for me.

     The self, seen as a dynamical interrelational process, is not an abstract entity somehow separated from environmental encounter, nor known through the immersion of arcane texts; it is a dual process of felt bodily reaction and a dynamic play with inner events that bring about reflective awareness.  The self is ecological and relational and involves a sense of aliveness, of vitality, of well-being, positive feeling (warmth and intimacy), non-linearity, coherence, continuity, temporarily, spatiality, content beyond the immediate present (that is of the possible, the imagined, the remembered), with a sense of ownership, boundedness, agency and a that duality.

     The self, according to William James (1842-1910) is a duplex of one pole of awareness and another pole of inner events in a dance of self-reflectivity. Consciousness doesn’t always take this form. When we are alarmed or annoyed, reflective awareness is lost. Meares identifies the characteristic consciousness of those damaged by the impacts of the social environment as adualistic. It is reactive and responsive to the brain’s interplay with the environment, without self-reflectiveness. The aim of therapy is to restore, generate, and potentiate that dualistic kind of consciousness that is the self. But this pole of awareness plus a reflective pole of inner events cannot happen by itself. It has to be met, connected with, related to, for the self is part of an ecology. As a part of an ecology, any change in one part affects everything.

     Trauma plays a big part in this disturbance and interruption of the dual process, for it locks the person into reactivity, dullness, and a sense of stuckness. Psychotherapy then becomes very useful in creating a close, safe and supportive environment of reciprocity and engagement as it reconnects a person to themselves and the social environment.

  

     Conversation, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the action of living, or having one’s being in a place or among persons”. It isn’t just about talk; it’s engagement and focus upon the shifts, the movements, the waxings, and wanings of this experience, and it is this that lies at the core of the interpersonal therapeutic approach. It is in conversation (in its style, content, context) that we come not only to express what we know but come to know what we don’t yet know.

     Conversational Psychotherapy is directed towards the restoration of a disrupted sense of personal being, or self. It’s interested in the inner life as well as emotions of reaction and building a capacity for self-awareness. An old mentor of mine used to ask me, “And how is the inner life” and such is a very good question for therapists to ask. We should not ignore a person’s perception of their inner life for herein lies tools for healing and strengthening  their capacity for self-reflection and not getting caught up in reactions and adualistic looping, that won’t go away in isolation from conversation.

   So, talking with my friends in the little café near the old bridge of the city of thinkers was not only great fun, but is bringing a greater awareness to my psychotherapeutic practice. Thank you, Jürgen and Aksel.