Eco-Psychotherapy
“It may well be that more and more of what people bring before doctors and therapists for treatment—agonies of body and spirit—are symptoms of the biospheric emergency registering at the most intimate level of life. The Earth hurts, and we hurt with it.”
–Theodore Roszak, Voice of the Earth
As an overall term for environmental methods of physical and psychological healing, ecotherapy focuses on the need for psychotherapy and psychiatry to hold a consciousness that nature and the human-nature relationship matters. It takes into account the latest scientific understandings of our universe and the deepest indigenous wisdom. This perspective reveals the critical fact that people are intimately connected with, embedded in, and inseparable from the rest of nature. Grasping this fact deeply shifts our understanding of how to heal the human psyche and the currently dysfunctional and even lethal human-nature relationship. It becomes clear that what happens to nature for good or ill impacts people and vice versa, leading to the development of new methods of individual and community psychotherapeutic diagnosis and treatment.
Eco-psychotherapy is a response to how human connectedness to the other-than-human and more-than-human, to all the beings with whom we share this universe, has been broken. Broken to the point where we no longer take care of the world through which and in which we live, and which is increasingly damaged and destroyed. It is very frightening for any of us to face the reality of the collapsing biosphere. This fact creates anxiety in our every day living especially at an unconscious level. Do we live naturally in the world, or are we so separate from what is natural that we are living at cross purposes with the world around us? How do we understand and relate to the full environment in which we live? How is it possible to stay fully connected to the natural world around us and become more fully human? These are the domains of ecopsychotherapy.
In body-oriented psychotherapies we do not separate the mind from the body, nor do we separate the individual body from the wider world. If we remain divided from our body then the world body remains separate and not the living space in which we belong, in which we are nourished. Eco-psychotherapy aims to heal the divide in our relationship with the natural world both at an individual and community level.