Eco-Psychotherapy

The rod and serpent of Asklepios – the Greek god of healing – serves as the emblem of scientific medicine. Yet it reminds us of the ancient underlying idea that healing emerges from below. It is the earth that brings us wholeness or health. To truly heal we must attend to that which presents itself to us in the form of our symptoms. These manifest both in our personal body/mind and in the greater planetary body/mind of which we are a part. The imagination is a key to admitting these chthonic energies which promote the healing of both self and planet.

Video lecture with slides – 37 mins

This presentation explores how body-based interventions, such as mirroring and attunement, can reawaken our connection to the Earth as a life-sustaining system. We come to know ourselves through the body and the key to our eco-sensibility lies in the dance between the sensing, feeling animal body and the life force of the physical world around us. This talk was aptly located at the London Wetlands, arguably one of those areas essential for life itself. This is an opportunity to practice reciprocity, as we connect to the delicate balance of our ecology and explore the place of eco-sensibility in our work.

Video lecture with slides – 35 mins

We are saturated with expert knowledge of energy problems and solutions. This presentation suggest that moving to a deeper engagement with climate action involves combining the external landscapes of science and politics with people’s emotional worlds and inner narratives. Drawing on research with a community based arts and climate change project in South Wales, we will explore the roles played by creative processes in achieving pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour change, and offer suggestions for how creative processes can be incorporated into energy engagement at a community level.

Video lecture with slides – 23 mins

With the therapeutic value of mindfulness and outdoor therapy now well established, mindfulness in nature retreats are increasingly available. These retreats, usually framed as a spiritual practice rather than a therapeutic intervention, are typically facilitated in some remote location and last several days. This presentation offers practical techniques for teaching mindfulness in nature as an element of outdoor therapy with groups or individual clients. These techniques don’t depend on ‘wilderness’ and can easily be integrated into an hour long therapy session. Although there is some discussion of the theoretical context, the talk is primarily concerned with practice.

Video lecture with slides – 27 mins

We have left action so late there is now no way of avoiding dangerous climate change which does not also require a major transformation in the way in which we live. But surely to say that a cultural transformation is required is to be unrealistic, it is to ask too much of us? The danger is that, overcome by feelings of hopelessness, the self withdraws anxiously into a psychic retreat from where facts are accepted but meanings and implications are denied. But there is another way. In our lifetime positive cultural transformations, for example in relation to sexism and homophobia, have been set in motion. What can we learn from these processes of change which might inform the collective action we now require around climate change?

Video lecture with slides – 25 mins

Staying with the Trouble

There is now considerable evidence that when facing the mortal threat of ecological and climatic destruction our responses go through a number of stages. The primary initial response is disavowal where the threat is acknowledged but in a way that leaves the self undisturbed. A critical moment is reached when this defence breaks down for it is easy to flip from denial straight into despair as all the feelings that have been split off flood in and overwhelm the self. The challenge is to find containment for the anger, hopelessness, grief and guilt so that we can face up to the threat using both reason and passion. In climate psychology we call this “staying with the trouble” – how to sustain our love for the world whilst facing the worst.

Video lecture – 59 mins

Active Hope is different from being hopeful. It involves starting where we are, identifying what we hope for and then taking action to move that way. Drawing on evidence-based approaches to behaviour change and community carbon reduction, this talk describes practices to inspire Active Hope in ourselves, in the communities we belong to and in the larger society of which we’re part.

Video lecture with slides – 24 mins

Emma explores how – borrowing the words of Gary Snyder – our ‘practice of the wild’ can be the foundation of our nascent or established practise of ecopsychology and ecotherapy. She invites us to explore a therapy practice of the wild – practice which can take place both indoors and out, potentially taking us to the heart of our own connection and disconnection with ourselves, one another, and other-than-human and more-than-human life.

Video lecture with slides – 42 mins

Humans seek meaningfulness, satisfaction and quelling of anxiety through two basic, psycho-culturally rooted, choices. The most prevalent is consuming from outside, as if attempting to fill up an emptiness or lack. The cumulative behavioural effects of this are generating eco-systemic degeneration everywhere on planet Earth. Emphasising that humans are, collectively and personally, participants in (or members of) planet Earth’s ecosystem, the contextualising orientation seeks to discern a meaningful sense of contribution or role within it. Contextualising orientation and seems to generate longer term, personally systemic meaningfulness and satisfaction than consuming orientation which requires addictive replenishment. Contextualising is also more sustaining eco-systemically. Both orientations and their implications have long been presaged in the deeper understandings of transpersonal-religious traditions.

Video lecture with slides – 36 mins

Why, when so many people express concern about climate change, do they find it so hard to talk about or even remember? Drawing on his recent acclaimed book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, and his expertise on climate communications, George Marshall explains that climate change speaks poorly to our sense of threat and can only be felt is through the medium socially constructed narratives. These may shape disinterest and denial but, if they speak to people’s core values and identity, can be also be a source of strength and hope. We will examine why and how.

Video lecture with slides – 30 mins

This presentation will sound some of the keynotes and associated elements involved in moving psychotherapy out into natural environments. Referring to personal experience and case material, we will take a metaphorical walk through an outdoor therapeutic space, engaging with the significant considerations that arise through working in this vital setting. Along the way, attention will be given to matters such as relational vitality, expansive relating, and embodied process, all of which can promote a deeper internal connection with personal traumas and ways-of-being in the world. In exploring this unique therapeutic process we will also visit the concordant potential for profound attachment to the places that sustain us, and the implications for both their future and our own.

Video lecture with slides – 48 mins

As well as political campaigning, we also need community-based action to encourage and support carbon reduction and the shift to a low-carbon society. Carbon Conversations project, with its system of small groups, draws on and adapts a variety of therapeutic approaches to achieve significant carbon reductions in the lives of participants and develops their capacity to influence others, dealing with issues of loss, anxiety, guilt, self-efficacy and the process of change. This talk will also compare the different experiences of Carbon Conversations groups in England and Scotland which have seen divergent government engagement with climate change since 2010 and discuss the psychological impact of this.

Video lecture with slides – 15 mins

Chris Rapley, Professor of Climate Change at UCL and Director of the Science Museum argues that the ultimate solution to climate change lies in developing a society that does not identify human happiness with material growth.

Video lecture with slides – 36 mins

If climate change is a symptom of our dysfunctional relationship with the earth, a step towards healing includes spending time on the land, listening to, and communing with, the other-than-human world. This opens the door to a different order of reality, an experience of living inside a conscious, sacred matrix; an ancient way of being. Along the way there may be many difficult and painful encounters with the shadow of our dominant culture; when this is honoured our ecological crisis can then become an extraordinary portal of modern times. I will give some examples of how these issues come into sessions with clients and how I might enable clients to make a relationship with Nature. This includes working outdoors.

Video lecture with slides – 46 mins

Follow-up Q & A

Audio with slides – 5 mins

The Wild Therapy project is about bringing therapy into the wild, but equally about bringing wildness into therapy. Working outdoors in comparatively undomesticated settings encourages us to bring the other-than-human and more-than human – animals, birds, plants, trees, hills, rivers, winds, dreams, ghosts, spirits – into the therapeutic process. Spending time ‘in nature’, as we say, can help us appreciate that we are never anywhere else, always inhabiting and encountering our own nature. In living, working and creating community together, and meeting other species in the outdoors, we may come to a stronger recognition of the interdependence of all beings: moving from a more hardened, human-centric view to a softer recognition of the value of all that lives. Bringing these experiences back indoors, we discover how they change our therapeutic work, moving us to work in a less constrained and habit-bound style when we are in the therapy room, as much as when we are outside.

Video lecture with slides – 32 mins

Climate change has no colour, no odour and no audible tone. Its effects – measurable and well evidenced as they are – are unpredictable with regard to specifics of where, when and how events will unfold. This situation, along with the absence of an identifiable ‘enemy’, militates against the development of a global ‘we’. This talk will explore the particular nature of such difficulties and identify existing situations where common humanity takes precedence over individual, group and national interests. What can we learn from such examples? And how can we further the development of a concept of oneness as a global community as a basis for acting together in response to the challenges that lie ahead?

Video lecture with slides – 27 mins

A vibrant new imagination is currently emerging of a different, sustainable future. Fighting for this future means repairing environmental and social damage, and also repairing our hearts and minds damaged by our current culture of uncare. Understanding the toxic effects of this culture is crucial for change, as without this understanding we are in danger of imagining the future with blind, disaffected or despairing eyes.

Video lecture with slides – 19 mins

The seeds of complex trauma are often rooted in early attachment difficulties, emerge from overwhelming traumatic events, and are maintained through continuing nervous system dysregulation. What elements of nature are actively therapeutic, and how can we harness them to help us to regulate a dysregulated nervous system, and – through the use of metaphor and meaning, connection and containment – to establish recovery on solid ground and foster post-traumatic growth and resilience? Recent ideas from a variety of disciplines – for example, affective neuroscience research, sensorimotor psychotherapy, and evidence-based therapeutic site design – as well as hands-on personal experience, will be explored to offer some insights and inspiration as to how we might incorporate the natural world more effectively and confidently into our healing work.

Video lecture with slides – 50 mins