Eco-Distress
In recent months, I’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of people contacting me about eco-psychotherapy. Each person’s story is unique to them, but I also can’t help noticing certain common themes. Clearly, people sense that something is out of kilter when it comes to how human beings are relating to their home planet. There is an intellectual and political aspect to this - fossil fuels, climate change, vested interests, pollution, Greta, carbon, bushfires, etc. This gives rise to activism, heated conversations, and local pragmatic action.
But something else is stirring. People are increasingly feeling emotionally - or perhaps even spiritually - distressed. What is going on here?
Melancholy & “Othering” the Natural World
Our culture differs from most indigenous cultures in how we talk and think about the natural world. Collectively, we tend to think of the natural world as an IT - something we are separate FROM and move about IN. As such, our relationship to it is categorically a relationship between subject and object. But the distress people are feeling has more in common with the way we might feel when a brother, sister, child, friend, or pet is suffering. That is, we suffer in a way that suggests empathy, responsibility, and love. We suffer in a way that suggests that we intuitively feel a subject-to-subject relationship with the natural world.
In this way, people’s heartfelt distress confuses them. It is almost as though people feel shy, coy, or embarrassed. As though, in feeling distressed to their core, they are being silly, or melodramatic.
But the confusion here is not in the feeling of distress. The confusion is in the category error we make in objectifying the natural world. The truth is closer to something like this: we are of the earth, bound in intimate relationship. It is in our flesh and bones. The Earth and us - we are KIN.
Coming Home to Nature
It took me a long time to stop feeling apologetic for the intimate connection I felt with the natural world. Since then I have actively developed and nurtured it. In this vein I spent three years completing a Research Masters - exploring and articulating the experience of being alone with nature. I came to trust more deeply in that experience than in philosophy or science. and I now confidently recognize that it is not me, but the culture, that is confused in understanding the human/nature relationship.
Freud famously differentiated between mourning and melancholy. Both involve a sense of loss, but where the person in mourning knows what it is they have lost, and can grieve freely, the melancholic does not. This confusion leads to a sort of constipated grief, and subsequently melancholy. These days we call melancholy by another name: depression. In my practice, when it comes to the natural world, I increasingly encounter this melancholy - people grieving, but not knowing what it is they’ve lost. Eco-psychology is grounded in the notion that the loss we feel is born of our cultural separation from nature. Eco-psychotherapy serves to help people remember their kinship with the natural world, and come home.
Eco-psychotherapy & Climate Change
When people come to me for eco-psychotherapy, I meet them with my own hard-fought and embodied recognition of the human/nature relationship. Their experiences of distress and longing are received simply in their truth. This brings a deep relief. From there we turn to deepening and exploring the contours of that relationship. The most common refrain I hear after a few sessions is something like - I feel like I’ve come home. This in turn gives rise to a clarity of thought and action, and a sense of having located a deeply nourishing renewable resource.
It is for these reasons that I think eco-psychotherapy has a great deal to offer in the current moment: healing the human/nature connection at the individual level - at the emotional and spiritual level. If anything here resonates of you have questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Sean.