Here's an excerpt from the keynote address by Nick Totton to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy conference ?Is therapy the future??, October 2004. It was printed in Psychotherapy and Politics International, Volume 3, Number 2, 2005.
ECOPSYCHOLOGY
This leads on nicely to the third strand I want to explore: the relatively new movement that goes by the names of 'ecopsychology', 'ecotherapy', and other similar variations. Ecopsychology asks the question: how come we have allowed the world to get into the sort of mess it's in? How can we tolerate, and even largely ignore, the environmental catastrophe that surrounds us, the loss of species, the pollution and contamination of great swathes of the biosphere, the greenhouse affect and all it means for us and the rest of the natural world? How can we all ? and I seriously do include myself in this - continue to act in ways that we know are damaging to our environment, ourselves, other species, our children and grandchildren - all for the sake of a minor inconvenience or luxury.
Well, immediately the danger comes in here that you will hear this as a broadcast from your own internal critic, and quite rightly and reasonably switch off. This is one of the fundamental difficulties that ecopsychology faces: we don't want to think or talk about these questions. They make us feel bad.
So let me try posing a different question, or the same question in a different way. How can we more deeply feel and express our love for the living world? Our passionate, heart-opening response to the unbelievable, magical beauty of the plants and animals around us?
It seems to me that if we were in living contact with that response in ourselves, then we would necessarily live differently. Something has damaged and deadened our responsiveness to nature, alienated us from it - in fact the simple use of that word, 'nature', to describe something other than ourselves, something we are not part of, is incredibly revealing. We are talking about dualism again - that we are living within an apparent opposition between 'human' and 'natural', between 'civilized' and 'wild', which allows us to think of nature as something we have the need and the right to control and use for our own benefit - rather than to experience other species as beings to love, venerate, respect and learn from ? beings with whom we ultimately share community.
Ecopsychology has come up with a number of models to explain this alienation; but for me, once again, we are looking at the effects of trauma. Dissociation, splitting, deadening, re-enactment of abuse - we see all of these things happening in our relationship with the biosphere. We also see a very powerful addictiveness working itself out in our patterns of over-consumption that have led to so much ecological damage, and I think addictiveness is also a response to trauma.
If you accept for a minute my emphasis on patterns of individual and societal trauma as the key to understanding a range of destructive social phenomena, then we need to ask ourselves: what can we as therapists do about this? Obviously we can work with individual trauma, and hope that this will have a knock-on effect. But how can we offer therapy to the whole culture? As Freud pointed out many years ago, we cannot expect society to turn up at our consulting room door.
Well, one thing we can do is to keep talking about these issues, naming the role of societal trauma. Over the last century, many concepts that originated in psychotherapy have worked their way through into general cultural awareness, and this does over time make a difference. Another thing we can do, or at least those of us who feel drawn to this work, is to facilitate groups of various kinds to look at how trauma is affecting their actions and experience. I have already mentioned working in areas of inter-community conflict - also a tremendous amount of good work is going on with survivors of traumatic conflict, trying to ensure that the trauma is not simply knocked on into the next generation to repeat itself in acts of mutual revenge.
But as regards the environmental crisis, of course, we are all in the front line, all in the combat zone. And what ecopsychologists have found is that, in order to start addressing these issues, many people need help in opening up to their despair about the future. In a very real sense, our culture is dancing on the edge of the volcano: it is exactly because we know how grim the future looks that we are unable to look at it, unable to do anything about it. The Buddhist activist Joanna Macy has developed a very powerful structure called 'despair and empowerment work', which facilitates people in going down into their grief, rage and hopelessness about the future of the planet, and then to turn upwards again with a new sense of power to effect change. This applies not only to ecopsychology, but to any sort of social activism for change. We need to give up before we can start to work in a creative way.
"If the complexity of our economies is impossible to sustain [with likely future oil supply], our best hope is to start to dismantle them before they collapse." George Monbiot
