climate wellbeing network
  • Home
  • About
  • Support
    • Ecotherapy
    • Support Groups
    • Depth Psychology
  • Insight/Research
  • Resources
  • Blog

Blog

Expressing urgency without alienating: sharing our climate stories

20/11/2015

2 Comments

 
Picture
By Rosemary Faire


“I’m an activist first and a therapist second”, I heard myself saying to Sally with surprising clarity and quite a charge. We had been discussing how to structure a short “self-sustainability” session for staff in a government environmental department as part of “mental health month”. The theme I had proposed for this session was: How do we take care of ourselves as we face the global challenge of climate change? Sally was suggesting that perhaps beginning with workplace issues and then broadening the discussion to more global issues would be wise? Some of them might not even have thought about climate change?

I found myself reacting quite strongly to this suggestion. I had spent most of my career teaching and supporting people, with body-oriented and arts-based approaches, to take care of themselves in difficult life and work situations; but now the spectre of climate change and its implications for life on earth loomed large for me, overshadowing other self-care issues. “If they haven’t yet thought about climate change, maybe it’s about time they did!” I blurted.

Reflecting on these statements of mine later, I am reminded of Jungian psychotherapist James Hillman’s work, with which I resonate. For Hillman, modern psychotherapy needs to be situated in a larger context, the context of our currently dysfunctional relationship with the ecological world. In the 90’s I had enjoyed the conversational book he and Ventura had written, We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy - and the world’s getting worse, which explored the idea of the therapy room as a place to support people’s expression of their discomfort with the status quo and the arising impulses toward social change activism - “awakening civil courage” - rather than pathologizing and ameliorating these as unhealed personal past trauma.

I’ve never been able to stomach the idea of being paid to do corporate “personal growth/team building” sessions whose purpose is to make workers more efficient and happy while their corporations are busy adding to the global capitalist growth enterprise that is rapidly extracting, exploiting and decimating the planet. So I guess that’s what I meant by being an activist first, therapist second.

My urgency voice is stroppily saying: At this late stage of my working life, I don’t want to “pussy-foot” around putting people’s comfortableness before the life-death challenge of climate change. It’s clear to me that socially sanctioned climate change ignorance/denial is not bliss, but a ticket to oblivion for human civilization as we know it and most of our fellow species.

However, then I am faced with the “yes, but…” that George Marshall has so eloquently described in his book Don’t even thing about it: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change. I realise that Sally was right in being cautious, not only for considering client wellbeing, but even in terms of supporting mobilization: confronting people with the facts has been tried by scientists and activists for many years, and instead of mobilization it has resulted in a backlash response. Clive Hamilton refers to as “sinister” the recent labelling of non-violent and legal activists, by Australian Senator Brandis and others in our climate-recalcitrant government, as “eco-terrorists”, “sociopaths”, “climate catastrophists” and “bullies” who practice “vigilante litigation / lawfare” in order to prevent new massive coal mine developments or coal-seam-gas expansion. Hamilton says these words reveal a deep loathing for environmentalists. Such a loathing presumably springs from the defence of a world-view, and a beloved business-as-usual scenario that is now on increasingly shaky ground.

So how do I honour my feeling of urgency without alienating those who might not yet have dared to come face to face with climate change? How do I find a middle ground: facilitating a movement forward toward engaged citizenship rather than either fostering “comfortable numbness” or feeding a reactionary loathing for “greenies”?

Does one answer lie in sharing stories? When I think about the most memorable aspects of recent talks I’ve attended by inspiring social change agents, what stays with me are their stories. Christopher Wright, co-author of Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: processes of creative self-destruction, has collected and analyzed many climate change narratives from corporate environmentalists; at a recent Living in the Anthropocene meetup in Sydney, he described how his own “climate aha” epiphany actually came after meeting an Al Gore Climate Reality presenter. Scott Ludlam, WA Greens Senator took what he described as “a risk” at a Festival of Democracy session to tell us a personal story: his mind-expanding experience when he, as a young white city-raised environmentalist, was first exposed to the indigenous perspective on uranium mining on their country. At the same session, Julian Assange spoke to us, via Skype from his prolonged confinement, with some humour about how he draws some optimism from the bungling incompetency of the bureaucratic surveillance machine.

The questions so often asked during Q&A sessions after such presentations are: How did you first become involved…? and How do you keep going in the face of…? We want to know the human story behind the scientific facts and the moral imperative.

Because it is the human stories that contain the seeds of empathy, resonance, that can awaken in us, and make it safe to feel, the enormity of this challenge – because others have trodden that path and survived. Thus perhaps it is by sharing our own climate change stories that we can find that delicate middle way toward a movement that can transition us into a liveable world…



2 Comments
Elena
8/8/2017 05:14:23 pm

Dear Rosemary,

Thank you for this story. I have also been struggling with bringing my therapist and activist selves together, so far just in my thoughts, because I have not yet completed my degree to become a therapist. Every day I ask myself a question if I made the right choice choosing a career in psychology instead of environmental activism. And I do not know the answer. I found your website searching on internet what others says on how to bring those 2 fields together. I hope you will write some more in the future. Let me know how is serving your community as an activist and a therapist at the same are going for you, I would love to hear it.

Reply
Rosey link
9/8/2017 03:29:30 pm

Thanks Elena, glad to hear from you. Since writing this blog my therapist/activist dilemma has given way to a role as carer. Family and self care have predominated. Experiencing the recent death of a parent brought me up close to the question: when is it time to let go of the fight to save a loved one? I have been struck by the fact that some have already reached that point with our planet - but I am not ready to give up on that one! Hope you are enjoying your training and finding the points of overlap towards a world-engaged therapy.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Members of the Climate Wellbeing Network regularly post here.

    Archives

    November 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015

    Categories

    All
    Aboriginal
    Active Hope
    Climate Change
    Climate Depression
    Climate Stories
    Deep Ecology
    Great Barrier Reef
    Grief
    Mental Health

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
  • Support
    • Ecotherapy
    • Support Groups
    • Depth Psychology
  • Insight/Research
  • Resources
  • Blog