Murray Creek, Late December Haiku

Entry for 28 Dec 2012:

December labyrinth:

Winding path sprinkled

    with oak leaves;

We walk the circle again.

4:30am,

Fooled by false gloaming: Full moon

Fluoresces through clouds

-28-29 December 2012

EFT Tribes Book Chapter Published

Entry for 27 December 2012:

The second edition of Pete Sanders’ popular book on the different forms of person-centred therapy (PCE) was released in the final weeks of 2012.  The first edition, published in 2003, has been a perennial favourite with the students in our post-graduate course in person-centred counselling, helping them to reflect on where they want to locate themselves as budding counsellors and what their options are.  In order to clarify the relationships among the different PCE therapy suborientations, Margaret Warner and others hit upon the metaphor of “many tribes, one nation”, pointing to unity amid diversity.  (From a Scottish point of view, “clans” works well also.)

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) was mentioned in the first edition, sometimes critically, but was not represented by a chapter, leaving it status within the larger PCE nation unclear.  Then, about 18 months ago, Pete asked me if I’d be willing to do a chapter on EFT for the second edition of the “tribes book”.  Although academic pressures nowadays lead me to turn down most book chapter invitations, this one made sense to me, and I was pleased to take up the challenge.  As is common, work on the chapter got delayed and deadlines were extended but eventually several months ago I had to buckle down and produce something, which in quick succession got revised, copy-edited, typeset, proofed, and, finally, two weeks ago, published.

When I wrote this chapter I had in mind my students on postgraduate counselling diploma and MSc courses in the UK and elsewhere, as well as for folks with previous qualifications as counsellors or psychotherapists who might be thinking about coming along for training in EFT to build on their existing skills.  However, there is a lot of complexity to EFT and a lot of jargon. I hope that I’ve succeeded at least in part in providing an accessible overview of Emotion-Focused Therapy, thanks to help from the folks at PCCS Book and in particular Richard Miller, a former counselling diploma student who read an earlier version of the chapter.

Reference: Elliott, R. (2012).  Emotion-focused therapy. In P. Sanders (Ed.), The tribes of the person-centred nation: An introduction to the schools of therapy related to the person-centred approach (2^nd ed.).  Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

Travel Narrative: Glasgow to California

Entry for 23-25 Dec 2012:

Leaving Glasgow after an exhausting season of moves and crises.

Twelve hour time shift: up at 3am, 4 hours earlier than usual,

six am flight to Amsterdam, then 8 hours jet lag

by the time we reach San Francisco.

On the way back home to California,

I read most of second of two long-delayed

Australian Emotion-focused therapy doctoral dissertations,

finally beginning to catch up with myself.

We enter the US at Minneapolis,

with surprising ease: short walk, short lines,

American security officers efficient

but condescendingly proud of their equipment and training.

Bay Area rush hour a week before Christmas:

We rent a car and make the drive to Pleasanton,

Risky from sleep deprivation and jet lag.

Arriving at my mother-in-law’s house,

Kenneth is already there.  

He too has been in transition

and is glad to see his long-lost parents. 

Northern California is having a wet year,

storm after storm sweeps through,

filling reservoirs; mudslides block roads,

early snow falls in the Sierra Nevada.

Cool, fresh mornings make for good runs

for Kenneth and me, as we begin to

catch up with the intense jumble of each other’s lives,

clearing a space for recovery and reconnection.

A Toast for the Solstice

Entry for 22 December 2012:

For friends and family,

For light and darkness,

For continuity and change,

For wisdom and not-knowing,

For tears and laughter!

Dublin and Back

Entry for 26 November 2012:

My friend Laco Timulak invited me back to do another day on EFT for anxiety difficulties, after the first one I did for him 2 years ago, not long after my surgery.  I flew from Glasgow on Friday night, after a very full week of research methods and EFT training at Strathclyde.  It was very wet in Glasgow as we left but dry and cold in Dublin when Laco picked me up. 

It’s always nice to see Laco and to catch up on our latest adventures and misadventures; we have a history that includes the 6 months he spent in Toledo with me and my team on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2001. (His flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on 11 September 2001 was turned back halfway across the Atlantic supposedly for “maintenance issues”, in case there were terrorists on board.  This did not help his fear of flying…)

I had a lot more material on working with anxiety difficulties this time, thanks to two more years of research and the work I did for my keynote presentation at the World Associate conference in Antwerp last July.  As before, the group of psychotherapists was experienced and motivated, as this was the last session of a 12-day EFT training that Laco runs in Dublin.  This time, I was not recovering from surgery, had another two years of EFT training experience under my belt, and had had a reasonably good night’s sleep, so I was in good form, in spite of technical difficulties with a misplaced Apple Mac adaptor.

Laco is running a clinical case series study on the use of EFT with Generalised Anxiety Difficulties, with very promising results so far.  On Sunday, he generously spent six hours reviewing one of his cases with me, while we discussed and sometimes argued about EFT theory and case conceptualisation.  Laco’s version of EFT follows the recent work of Les Greenberg, Antonio Pascual-Leone, and others on the features of productive emotion and the emotional deepening process, which provides a fairly elegant organising structure that runs across different tasks and can help therapists learn the model. However, the exact relationship between the older, more modular task models and the newer more general model is not yet completely clear, so there is much room for interesting discussion. 

The next morning I caught the bus to Dublin airport and was soon flying back to Scotland.  Approaching Scotland, we flew past Arran on our left, Holy Isle standing just offshore, Goatfell and neighbouring mountains looming behind, covered in snow.  We also passed Bute and Cumbrae before reaching the Scottish mainland.  As we descended over North Ayrshire toward Glasgow Airport, I recognised Loch Semple below and thought that I could even make out the ruins of Semple Collegiate Church, which we’d visited a couple of weeks ago.  It was like a mini-review of many of our past Saturday Adventures, with a sense of our six years’ grounding here.

The Coming of the Dark: Beginning of Celtic Winter and All Souls Day

Entry for 2 November 2012:

Clocks went back in Europe last weekend, and with the time change sunset was suddenly at quarter to five in the afternoon.  Here, the closing in of the early dark demarks the psychological boundary between Autumn and Winter, leading to a variety of responses: On the one hand, there is the switching to heavier coats, cocooning, even mourning and the urge to hibernate or hide.  On the other hand, people experience a compensatory seeking out of light, warmth, and company. 

In the middle of this week’s encroaching darkness was the late autumnal triduum of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls, the inverted image of the vernal passiontide sequence of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter.  Both of these post-equinox festivals mark turnings and times for reflection on death and life, darkness and light. 

In the old Celtic calendar, Halloween marked the end of Autumn, the harvest time of plenty, and the beginning of Winter, the time of shortage and hunger.  As with the other three transition times in the Celtic calendar (31 January, 30 April, 31 July), the ancient Celts believed that at these times there is a thinning of the boundary between the worlds (life and death; everyday existence and the mysterious Otherworld of Magic and Fate). 

On these 4 nights of the year, for many years it was my practice to phone my mother, to wish her well and to reflect with her on the ancient time of turning.  Now that she is gone, however, it’s not clear to me what I should now do to mark these times.  This year I found myself meeting with the team of folks who are taking part in our new EFT for Social Anxiety Training Group, telling them about the day.  As I often do, I had a bag of chocolate pieces with me.  As I offered the chocolate to those assembled, I realized that this was in fact some of the stash of 2 kilograms of Trader Joe’s 52% Belgian chocolate that my mother had given me during one of my last visits to her at Murray Creek.  It was another chocolate communion!  I’d been here before; I’d even written about the ritual sharing of chocolate in the journal poem sequence about the time I spent with my mother during her final weeks.  This at least was something I could do to remember her.

Friday was All Souls Day, so we went to the 7.30pm service at St Mary’s, featuring Faure’s Requiem.  A key part of the service, which I hadn’t seen before, was the ritual reading of the names of the dead.  Alternating in stanzas of 12 at a time, two of the priests, Cedric and Chuks, read the long list of names people had submitted; they read my mom’s name fairly early on.  At the end, the list of names was carried up to the high altar, where it will be kept until next Easter.  This felt like a variation of the Focusing practice of Clearing a Space.

As the choir worked its way through the Faure Requiem, interspersed with the lessons, hymns, and the eucharist, I contemplated the words that the composer had set and how he chose to set them.  The imagery of hellfire and burning lakes doesn’t do anything for me anymore, but the repetition of the metaphors of rest/sleep and light stayed with me:

            “Rest eternal grant them, O Lord.

             And let light perpetual shine upon them.”

Rest: We wish those whom we have loved and who have gone before us relief from the pain they experienced in their lives and in their dying.  We hope that it is like a peaceful, untroubled sleep: healing and restorative.  At the same time, in so doing, we also make our peace with their passing. 

Light: We imagine those who have died to be surrounded by a warm, healing, sustaining light.  In imagining this, we shine the light of our memories on them so that they live again in us, where we keep them safely in our minds, warming them in our hearts.

Thus, we wish that the ones we’ve loved and who have died be soothed; and in doing this we soothe the image of them that we have carried with us, and find ourselves in turn soothed in and by this process.

Update for September-October: Adventures and European-UK SPR

Entry for 20 October 2012:

Over the past 6 weeks I’ve been extremely busy dealing with the move from Jordanhill and various work crises, on top of the usual things, and also being behind from all the time I missed between May and August.  I’ve never really caught up, and things keep piling up.  All of us are feeling overwhelmed and that includes me.  Meanwhile, I’m doing my best to keep sane and healthy, which means that a lot of things aren’t getting done when they should.  At times it really does feel like a crazy life, and it’s been hard to keep up with things like blogs.

One thing that hasn’t been sacrificed is our Saturday Adventures, of which we’ve had quite a few since early September.  Glasgow Open Doors day in mid-September was great for scoping out interesting churches and places in the Blytheswood area in the west side of Glasgow city centre.  In late September, we visited Crichton Castle, south of Edinburgh, and then Inverarary Castle, in Argyle, both of them getting ready to close for the season.

A high point was a trip to Falkland Palace in Fife the first Saturday in October.  This was another of the favourite haunts of the Stewart royalty in the 16^th century, really a hunting lodge, restored in the 19^th century and still inhabited by the current Keeper.  The little village of Falkland is lovely and I was particularly taken by the lovely Catholic chapel in the Palace and the larger than life-size wicker figure of Mary Queen of Scots with her favourite falcon, near a tree labyrinth in the orchard below the palace.  However, the most amazing thing was discovering on the grounds of the palace the oldest extant Real (or Royal) Tennis court, the original form of tennis, with lots of wacky rules, like having to serve the ball so that it bounces off the roof of the observer stand!  Apparently, this was all the rage with the nobility in 16^th century Europe.

Last weekend, we went to the European-UK SPR meeting in Porto, Portugal.  This was my make-up SPR conference, since I’d missed the international SPR in Virginia Beach in late June, so I was very glad to go.  It was very well-organized and in a great site, the Portuguese College of Physicians; and Diane and I had a very good time, and ate a lot of fish while we were there.  The European-UK conferences are smaller than the big international SPR meetings, but have quite a lot of diversity.  This year I heard quite a few presentations by different groups of Psychodrama researchers, who have taken up various of the suggestions I gave them when I met with them Edinburgh several years ago.  They bring a lot of creativity and energy to their research, and are doing very interesting research, including a couple of new randomized controlled trials. 

This week I’ve been trying to recover form the Portugal trip while managing a very heavy teaching load.  Exhausting!  Nevertheless, we managed a drive out to Kilwinning (= St. Finnian, the teacher or St. Columba) today, where we visited the ruins of Kilwinning Abbey, dating back to the 13^th century.  The village of Kilwinning is a bit depressing, but the ruins are lovely.  After that we went to Eglinton Country Park, which contains the ruins the Eglinton Castle, the site of the last major medieval tournament in the UK, which took place in 1839.  Like Kilwinning Abbey and its village, the Eglinton castle and its estate fell on hard times and only a few bits have been restored.  The theme of the day seems to have been an autumnal one: faded glory, decay and deterioration, but we’ve had plenty of chances to see signs of life over the past 6 weeks!