Finding the Positive

As I sift through the notes I have taken over these past weeks I am trying to find the themes that speak to me, and what I want to focus on in the development of an ecopsychology workshop. More and more I find that the critical aspect of ecopsychology is what I am drawn to, which is not the most useful when thinking in terms of therapeutic applications. Ecopsychologist Andy Fisher (2012) writes that ecopsychology has two ways of being radical.

"The first sense is recollective. It involves recalling the unity of humanity and nature. This is about rediscovering our roots in the earth and realizing human-nature kinship in all its concrete detail-- a task requiring new and old knowledge, skills, and practices. Such recollection is radical because it overcomes the forgetfulness of our earthbound nature, healing a deep wound in the modern psyche and opening up a rich world of more-than-human relations unimaginable to the earth-alienated min. Less familiar than the recollective sense is the critical sense of ecopsychology-- the questioning of our entire social formation insofar as it generates ecological and psychospiritual crises through the domination of nature. The critical work of ecopsychology involves such established areas as the critique of ideology, historical and cultural analysis, and critical social theorizing in general. Its big picture approach offers interpretations that reveal connections that are invisible to the mainstream view and that provide root level insights into our historical ecopsychological situation. The recollective and critical sides of ecopsychology are its positive and negative moments. Together they form the radical whole." (pps. 81-82)

I find that the notes I am taking, the journal entries I scrawl on page after page, they all bear more of the "negative" or "critical" side to ecopsychology. Though I think that this is a very important aspect of what makes ecopsychology a critically important lens, when we are talking about treatment applications it would seem that looking at the  recollective elements of ecopsychology are the most vital. How can we reintegrate into our place as a part of the whole of life? What are the webs that need to be rewoven to bring about a shifting of our individual, and ultimately collective wellbeing?

Fisher (2012) points our that it is too easy to use "nature" as one more pill in the medical model of therapy. That we must change our entire framework and way of thinking in order to address the pathology that is creating the wounds to being with. "Ecopsychology easily reduces to slogans along the lines of 'Nature is good for your mental health,' a medical notion that perpetuates a nature-estranged way of talking (nature being something external than can be prescribed)" (p. 82).

And so I go back through the underlined texts, and the stacks of notes to find the underlying themes that I am personally drawn to utilize in a therapeutic context. To reexamine the critiques and look for the moments of movement and growth within them, so as to have actual tools to bring to my work as a counselor. In these next weeks I will be developing a workshop to tie together some of these practical tools as treatment applications. I will then present the workshop outline here.

References

Fisher, A. (2012). What is ecopsycholgy? A radical view. In P. H. Kahn, & P. H. Hasbach (Eds.), Ecopsychology; science, totems, and the technological species (pp. 79--114). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

A Personal Reminder

The internet went down today as I sat in an upstairs nook of the library at the college where I got my undergraduate degree. I've been coming here every Wednesday this semester. I bring my two kids along and while I pour over school texts, they pour over picture books, peg boards with rubber bands, math cubes and cooperative board games. We camp out in the curriculum room for most of the day next to the large windows that peer out upon the mossy forrest and the looming grayness.

At home we have a house rule that computers are not open, or used for very long, when then kids are awake. We are trying our best to be present and not have our relationships mitigated by technology. So my graduate schoolwork is shoved tightly into the hours after their bedtime and weekends when they are with their dad. Aside from these few precious study hours on Wednesdays, our routine is filled with books and cooking, playing dress up and wizardry, chasing chickens, wandering through the woods, and reading in the grass.

But I find that I am increasingly preoccupied and less able to be present. The heaviness of expectations, the call of the laptop, or the textbook, takes me, even subconsciously, from the moments that make my life worth living. In the hours allotted, I am franticly trying to complete assignments, research internships, read the extra material that will help me recontextualize all of the "mainstream" counseling psychology texts through a radical ecopsychological lens. But I carry the stress of it in every minute, and every interaction of the day.

And then the internet went down.

I pressed refresh over and over again, to no avail. It was down for the count.

And I felt a moment of terror. My schedule upheaved from it's fragile balance. I wracked by brain to come up with an alternate location to get my work done for the day. One that would contain and entertain my children and allow me space to get enough work done to alleviate some of this pressure from my chest and shoulders.

And then suddenly I remembered.

I remembered what it actually is that I am doing. Why I am doing this program at all. Why I believe in the path that I am on and the work I am supposed to do in the world.

Here I am studying to be a therapist, looking to help people find healing from trauma and suffering, stress and addiction and disconnection, and I have lost my own balance in the process. It doesn't matter how many hours of the week I go to the woods if I am spending that time feeling guilty about how I should be drafting my response to the psychopathology assignment. If I keep my computer closed when my kids are around but find my patience with them short because I am carrying the weight of worry about my schoolwork and the inadequacy of hours in the day.

So today, when the internet went down I packed up my laptop, and my books and we went home to spend those last Spring hours of daylight playing make-believe in the backyard. I saw the sunset over the evergreens and let the kids play out their game until past dark when they decided to come inside on their own. Dinner was late, as was bedtime. And I never got that work done that I "should have" earlier. But somehow it all makes more sense than it did when I was on schedule.

Looking at the Story

Last week I wrote about an idea for treatment that included noticing our place in the primal matrix, as Chellis Glendinning (2006) calls it, and having that inform the ways we orient towards health. In Ecotherapy; Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth, Clinebell (1996) offers some other ways that making lists, of both helpful perspectives as well of harmful beliefs, can aid our treatment goals. Like Shepard (1996) and Glendinning, Clinebell asks us to consider looking at things from a different perspective in order to gain a greater understanding of our place in the larger context. One of these perspectives he offers he names the "Whole-Biosphere Well-Being Perspective"which asserts that "[o]ne species can have optimal health only to the degree that the whole biosphere is made healthier" (p. 79). 

For me, this speaks to something that I posed in my post last week; Is it even possible for people to exist free of anxiety, or depression, or find mental and emotional health when we are a part of a system that is destroying the very organism we live as part of? Clinebell (1996) in a personal story about the grief he felt after learning of the extinction of a species of butterfly writes "I suspect that comparable feelings are shared, at least subconsciously, by millions of people around the planet, as more and more of us feel the personal grief that the ecological crisis is producing day by day" (p.80).

If we take the perspective that we are part of a whole instead of living outside of nature we can begin to understand how the healing of the whole is necessary to the healing of individuals. If we are fundamentally alienated from the rest of life, which creates feelings of displacement, of insecurity, then can a change in perspective offer us a chance to regain the power to heal ourselves? What does a list of perspective changes, or perhaps even value changes, look like that can offer us true empowerment and connection?

Another list that Clinebell (1996) writes about identifies pathogenic beliefs that create the root causes for the destruction of the biosphere, and I would argue, the disconnection and alienation that make our individual pathologies possible (pps. 97- 107). What are these cultural memes? What are the stories that are so rooted in our way of life that often we can't even distinguish their mythology as learned and not inborn? As a tool to regain connection and empower us to find our ways towards health and wellbeing, perhaps really looking at our assumptions and perceptions to distinguish which set of stories have life-giving properties, and which create the very symptoms that we struggle with? And within these pathogenic beliefs can we identify what the true impulse is that lies at the heart of it? Is there a deep, primal desire, or need that is unmet and we are attempting to fill?

References

Clinebell, H. (1996). Ecotherapy; healing ourselves, healing the earth. Minneapolis, MN: Augsberg Fortress Press.

Glendinning, C. (1994). My name is chellis and I'm in recovery from western civilization. Boston, MA: Shambala Publications.

Shepard, P. (2004). In Shepard F. R. (Ed.), Coming home to the pleistocene. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Contextualization Within Our Primal Origins as a Therapeutic Tool

This week in my Psychopathology class we have been studying anxiety. Following is a post I wrote addressing the construct known as Anxiety Disorder:


"The PDM (2006) says that Generalized Anxiety Disorder would be better categorized as a “personality disorder in which anxiety is the psychological organizing experience” (pps. 56-57). This makes sense to me as a way to organize the characteristics that can show up in a variety of ways that signal anxiety. From the readings it seems that what we define as Anxiety Disorder can actually be seen as a symptom of a larger issue, and shows up as a symptom of many disorders. As I understand it, anxiety is a really broad term with a lot of different ways of showing up. As are many disorders, anxiety can often be co-morbid and show up in conjunction with many other symptoms. Does this point to it as a more general symptom of other defined disorders rather than a disorder on its own.

Maddux and Winstead (2013) address many ways that Anxiety Disorders distort psychological reality, including creating false dichotomies between what is seen and normal and what is pathological in a client (p.166). There is also the distortion of a strict set of ways that it can be defined and identified including exclusion of co-morbid factors, and specific thresholds and criteria.


One of the things that this week’s reading made me think about was the greater environmental factors in mental health, disorders and diagnosis and where the dichotomy between normal and pathological lies in a socio-cultural context. The PDM (2006) defines anxiety as “fear in the absence of obvious danger” (pp. 96). It also goes on to name the shared traits of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychic Trauma, and Anxiety as including feeling “overwhelmed, the sense of having suffered a catastrophe, loss of a sense of security, and fears of injury and death” (pps. 100-101). Being in both the courses Human Growth and Lifespan Development, and Treatment Applications in Ecopsychology it is hard not to bring these lenses into the way I am examining this topic.


I wonder at what point a symptom or set of symptoms is pervasive enough that the cause or context for it can be seen as part of a larger pathology of civilization? When the developmental needs for security and full maturity of humans is actually counter to expectations and values of civilization, can the creation of individual pathology can be traced to what might be called a cultural epidemic of disconnection that creates individual pathology?


If we are using the definitions of anxiety as referenced above then it would seem that civilization as a whole is not only suffering from these symptoms, but is perhaps chasing its own tail by also continuing to be the very cause of the symptoms themselves? Through a human development lens, a securely attached human has a greater chance of processing fear or insecurity, and has less potential of experiencing prolonged trauma. From a somatic understanding of trauma, domesticated animals experience trauma, but wild animals living in a their natural context have an ability to process through intense events that does not leave a traumatic imprint. From an ecopsychological understanding, living outside of relationships with the rest of the living world of which we are intrinsically a part creates the psychic ability which makes it possible for us to see nature as “other” and thus try to shape and control it. In this context, our disconnection makes it possible for us to destroy the very habitat which feeds us, which must create a feeling of being “overwhelmed, the sense of having suffered a catastrophe, loss of a sense of security, and fears of injury and death” (PDM Task Force, 2006, pps. 100-101). Living immersed in the culture that is perpetuating the trauma would create a difficulty in seeing the possibly global and underlying causes of the symptoms, which could cause what felt like “fear in the absence of obvious danger” (pp. 96).


I looking at these ideas not to discount the necessity of addressing individual symptoms and how these affect the lives of our clients, but in the quest for a greater understanding of the larger context of mental health and wellness. I am curious how a new generation of therapists can begin to look at the root causes of symptoms and perhaps be part of re-contextualizing ideas around mental health that erase the dichotomies between normal and pathological and address the global nature of the issues at hand."


I often wonder if the health, environmental, and social factors of the culture in which we live make it possible to exist free of anxiety? As therapists how can we address these factors while still existing in this context? What do treatment applications look like while addressing things through a larger lens?


One of my favorite books is by the ecologist and anthropologist Paul Shepard. In Coming Home to the Pleistocene (Shepard, 2004) he lists some 70 themes of cultural recovery that he calls "Aspects of a Pleistocene Paradigm" (pps. 171-172). I like to think about how we could culturally repair all the ways that we have disconnected from our whole and healthy way of being in the world. I love the idea of creating lists like this to use in a therapeutic context. To look at the roots of certain symptoms and address them in a more holistic way. As a therapeutic tool, I wonder what looking to our primal roots can do for our mental health and wellbeing. This idea of making a list of the small steps we can take towards our reintegration into the web of relationships with the earth and our place as animals in it might offer us a tangible path.

Below is Shepard's (2004) list as an example of themes found in land-based, in-tact cultures that we might utilize in order to reform our connection with our whole, sane selves developing into full maturity.


"Themes of Cultural Recovery

Ontogenic
(The process of biological growth and development)

1. Formal recognition of stages in the whole life cycle

2. The progressive dynamics of bonding and separation

3. Earth-crawling freedom by 18 months

4. Richly textures play space

5. No reading prior to "symbolic" age (about 12 years)

6. All-age access to butchering scenes

7. All-age access to birth, copulation, death scenes

8. Few toys

9. Early access via speech to rich species taxonomy

10. Formal celebration of life-stage passages such as initiation

11. Rich animal-mimic play and other introjective processes

12. Non-peer-group play

13. Parturition and neonate "soft" environment

14. Access to named places in connection with mythology

15. Extended family or dense social structure

16. Extended lactation

17. Play as the internal prediction of the living world

18. Little storage, accumulation, or provision

19. Diversity of "work"

20. Handmade tools and other objects

21. No monoculture

22. Independent family subsistence plus customary sharing

23. Ecotypic economy - keyed to place

24. No landownership in the sense of "fee simple"

25. Little absolute territoriality

26. No fossil fuel use

27. Minimal housekeeping

28. No domestic plants or animals



Social

29. Prestige based on demonstrated integrity

30. Little or no heritable rank

31. Size of genetic/marriage/linguistic group or tribe: 500-3000

32. Clan and other membership giving progressive identity with age

33. Limited exposure to strangers

34. Hospitality to outsiders ,

35. Functional roles of aunts and uncles

36. Postreproductive advisory functions such grandparental roles

37. Size of fire-circle group: 10 adults (council of the whole)

38. Occasional larger congregations

39. Emphasis on mneumonics with its generational repository

40. Participant politics vs. representational or authoritarian

41. Vernacular gender and age functions

42. Totemic analogical thought of eco-predicated logos

43. Dynamic, emergent, and dispersed leadership

44. Decentralized power

45. Intertribal tension-reduction rites (song duels, peacepipe)

46. Cosmologically rather than sociohierarchically focused ritual



Other

47. Periodic mobility, no sedentism

48. Conceptual notion of spirit in all life, numinous otherness

49. Centrality of narrative, routine recall and story

50. Dietary omnivory

51. Rare-species demography

52. Subordination of art to cosmology

53. Participatory rather than audience-focused music

54. Sensual science ("science of the concrete") vs. intangible science

55. Celebration of social and cosmological function of meat eating

56. Religious regulation of the special effects of plant substances

57. Extensive foot travel

58. Only organic medicine

59. Regular dialogue on dream experience

6o. The "game" approach -- to love, not hate, the opponent

61. Attention to listening, to the sound environment as voice

62. Running

63. Attention to kinship and the "presence" of ancestors

64. Attunement to the daily cycle and seasonality

65. No radical intervention on fetal genetic malformations

66. Immediate access to the wild, wilderness, solitude

67. Nonlinear time and space-no history, progress, or destiny

68. Sacramental (not sacrificial) trophism

69. Formal recognition of a gifted subsistence

70. Participation in hunting and gathering

71. Freedom -- to come and go, to choose skills, to marry or not, etc. (pps. 171-172)"






                                                                   References

Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM, 5th ed.). (2013). Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Association.

Maddux, J. E., & Winstead, B. A. (2012). Psychopathology: Foundations for a contemporary understanding (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

PDM Task Force. (2006). Psychodynamic diagnostic manual. Silver Springs, MD: Alliance of Psychoanalytic Organizations

Shepard, P. (2004). In Shepard F. R. (Ed.), Coming home to the pleistocene. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Noticing Where I Am

Today I counted the rings of my emergence. With pen to paper, drawing the rings. Around and around, each circle the representation of a loop in the seasons of my life. Ring by ring I recounted the growth that brought the new skin. The weather that colored the bark. The rise and fall of the waves from cracks and striations. Thirty-eight years of growth and life on this planet and I am only recently living with the awareness of my identity in the context of my environment.

I have been thinking so much about connection with place and the ways that being in relationship with the seasons, with the plants and animals that are my neighbors, calms this fear of abandonment that has taunted me my whole life. How seeing the cycles of the moon, watching the rains swell and quiet, noticing that the Stellar's Jay has left to find its winter home and feeling a deep knowing that I will meet all these again has made me feel more attached and secure than my culture has ever allowed me to. We unfold in the context of the endless unfolding, and life and death are just seasons in the circle. In this, my anxiety and my fear have turned into grounding.

In Ecotherapy; Healing Ourselves, Clinebell (1996) speaks of how the denial of our animal selves, our place in the context of nature is a way of "denying human finitude, contingency, vulnerability, and eventual death. The dominant urban, scientific, death-denying mentality tends to be used to support illusions of control over uncertainties, contingencies, and vulnerabilities of the many experiences that really are beyond human control" (p. 32). But what if, as has felt true for me, the letting go of delusions of control, the reconnection with our primal selves is what ultimately can free us from our suffering, our fear, our anxieties? And what if, in that reconnection to our place in nature, emerging from denial of the inescapable reality that we are nature and not separate from it is the thing that alleviates this, but also makes it implausible to engage in the processes that are creating our very suffering?

I am interested in looking at the ways we are disembodied from our wildness and how the reconnection to place can help heal the wounds we suffer, as well as help stop the further alienation and distancing that create the problems.

I have begun reading both Roszak (2001) and Clinebell (1996) in search of therapeutic applications of this ecopsychology. I am particularly focused in this project of finding ways that we can use this lens of reconnection to inform the way we treat clients in a therapeutic setting. 

References

Clinebell, H. (1996). Ecotherapy; Healing ourselves, healing the earth. Minneapolis, MN: Augsberg Fortress Press.

Roszak, T. (2001). The voice of the earth; An exploration of ecopsychology. Grand Rapids, MU: Phanes Press, Inc.