Environmental Bereavement

By Patrick Draper

I have been doing deep feeling therapy for well over a year now and throughout, I have been trying to figure how to connect this work with my passion for a sustainable way of being in the world. Given the obvious links that fields such as eco-psychology are making between the destruction of our planet and our psychological neurosis, I feel there needs to be some way to connect deep feeling work and the environmental movement.

I recently attended a workshop entitled ‘Climate Change: Despair & Empowerment’, facilitated by Australian Rainforest activist, John Seed , which did just that. The workshop provided a container for the expression of feelings surrounding the destruction of our planet. As with our personal process, making the felt connection helps us move through denial that nothing is wrong to acknowledging the reality we know and feeling this fully. We can then move to a place of empowerment, which, for those of us trying to shift this culture off its destructive path, is deeply necessary.

I believe that most people know intellectually about the destruction and insanity that is civilization and our current way of life, but this knowing does nothing to change behaviour until there is a felt connection. Environmental bereavement, grieving for the loss of non-human life, reminds us of our connection to the rest of nature and allows us to release the feelings that are there. As in deep feeling work, it is a process of un-learning repression and accepting the feelings that lay buried within.

Given my passion for living an ecologically sane life, my deep feeling process has helped me understand the deep rooted trauma and repression that enable us to cause such widespread destruction. As I have peeled back the layers of my own trauma, I have had to confront the pain of feeling disconnected from the more-than-human world. Tears have been shed for my mother just as they have for The Mother – The Earth. This process, as with all connected releases, has helped me to re-connect with this world around me and re-learn to value the wildness of it.

While psychology has conventionally focused solely on individual human trauma, both ancient wisdom and modern science (including fields such as eco-psychology) help us remember that we are not closed systems. We interact every moment of every day with the world around us. Our breath is a beautiful gift exchange with the plant world. Our skin is a porous membrane which is constantly taking in the environment. Food, which becomes our body, is the life force of another being. As we touch the bark of a tree and smell its earthy aroma, so too does the tree touch our skin and smell our scent. The world around us is alive and constantly interacting in a dynamic process of evolving life. Believing that we are not a part of this world is an illusory thought that occurs only to the traumatized. Understanding our inter-connectedness allows us to expand our sense of self to the universe around us – to an ecological self.

Conventional psychology has also pathologized feeling pain for something outside ourselves as symbolic of some inner trauma. This has supported the repression of feelings of pain for the world around us. When I cry because I see only objects in the forest around me, instead of living, breathing beings with whom I can communicate, it is not symbolic for other pain. It is real in its own right, just as is the pain of disconnection from a mother.

Life is diminished to the extent that we live in-authentically. This is as true for the quality of our own lives as it is for the quality of life for those around us, including the non-human world. I believe that most, if not all, social and environmental ills arise because civilized humans are damaged and our neurosis leaks out destructively. Life tends towards wholeness and the primal process as I understand it is nothing more than the natural healing force that calls us back to a life lived wholly. As we are called to greater authenticity and wholeness, we will learn to live in harmony with each other and the rest of the natural world, as our tribal ancestors did for the majority of human history.

I know intuitively that my authentic self is embedded within the world and that growing into this expanded self means coming home into the world. The world has been waiting all along, inviting us to re-join the circle of life.