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.