Climate emergency as trauma
because it's clear we need clean air and yet...
For many of us, the climate emergency is causing a pre-traumatic stress state. We haven’t lived through the worst danger yet. But we can see it on TV or social media. We can see it looming. So our body is already turning on those protective neural circuits. We fight the information, wanting to deny it. We run away from it, telling ourselves it will happen to someone else. Surely not our children. Or we choose to never think about it. Even with climate refugees already arriving because so many countries struggle to farm, we aren’t preparing to welcome the people displaced by our actions.
The resolution is acceptance and grieving. This is true as a trauma therapist, to accept the past and mourn for the person who went through this pain. For humans, we have to accept the future we’ve locked ourselves into (at least 2 degree C of warming and all that entails), grieve the losses – lives of humans and other beings, ecosystems and species, loss of political and financial security. Uncertainty is hard - learning to be at peace with any outcome is a challenging part of our journey as humans. A mindfulness practice will keep us more aware of our reality. We also need to practice interoception, listening to our body’s messages. To what it needs. To treat it gently, because it, too, is part of the earth ecosystem. Just like a patient noticing a hard lump, finding cancer at early stages helps stop its spread.
We are more isolated in modern times than ever before. Loneliness is a risk factor for mental health, as well as for experiencing those 3F of trauma – the responses are more likely when we experience the danger alone.
Luckily, there are communities already working on the climate emergency, especially processing our responses. I met Laura Schmidt from the Good Grief Network at a workshop run by Meg Wheatley, whose book Who Do We Choose To Be was just rereleased because of how much it resonates. I’ve trained with Lydia Harutoonian, who is creating a legacy of Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects with cultural humility and equity, as well as the body’s innate rhythms. Professor Vanessa Andreotti’s book Hospicing Modernity is a call to an Indigenous framework to palliating the systems that have caused all of us, some of us more than others, so much harm – because we have to deconstruct colonial paradigms and capitalistic need for growth in order to change. adrienne maree brown and her sister have a podcast “How to Survive the End of the World” which is much funnier than you’d imagine.
We fail to acknowledge ways of knowing and being that are in harmony with our planet. I’ve visited rural Kyrgyzstan where horses' lives are intertwined with citizens, the same as the Maasai in East Africa. I’ve worked in villages in Laos or the mountains of Nepal where people are receiving and responding to signals from nature. Modern technology and industry has severed these connections.
We need to resurrect ancient and Indigenous ways of knowing. This doesn’t mean asking a First Nations elder to join every board. Although we should work at giving them more land to steward, as they’ve proven to be the best at it. It also means we need to look at the benefits of our own ancestral heritage. What did our lineage do to preserve food? To look after each other? What rituals did they have for grieving or celebrating? We can build social capital: help our neighbors, invest locally, learn useful skills, be a good role model at something.
There’s a desire in all of us to believe the hype, buy into cognitive dissonance, because sometimes the story we tell ourselves takes the edge off our pain and the truths - that we just heard from the IPCC – are frightening. We assert that technology will solve the problem. Here’s the thing - we’ve had the tech for ages. People in power, and the ones lobbying them, that stops us from using it. When we’ve been through trauma, we start to feel like we are powerless.
The treatment, as a trauma therapist, is to show how we have agency. To gain more and more control over our lives, over the information (which has been taken over by the people benefiting from the climate crisis). We know it’s industry and policy that will really turn the tide, but what can we do about that? Protest. Take legal action. Choose how to invest. Learn how to tolerate discomfort without distractions, which will never solve the root-cause problems.
The core root of trauma is often shame. That we believed we deserved the bad thing to happen. I’ve started to feel that way about us as a species– we’ve caused this mass extinction, we keep voting in people who harm others and the planet. What if we deserve what’s coming?
We don’t. What we can do is to examine the shame, this core pain deep in our hearts. In therapy, we might try to normalize it - validate how all humans experience this feeling, and like any feeling, it can flow through and pass. It’s key not to get stuck in it, let us stay in freeze. Or to start to think that we have to be perfect at this. We aren’t perfect beings, but we can do better. Start with self-compassion, learn to attune and co-regulate together, experiment in thriving rather than surviving.
Severe trauma causes our amygdalas to take all our energy. We lose access to our thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t participate in decision making. This could be a large part of why so many decisions seem irrational, as they continue to harm our ecosystem. People make choices that aren’t aligned with their values and morals. That deny the rights of future generations, or see others as less-than-human to justify their actions.
We will resolve this through neuroplasticity. Healing the connection to our thinking brain. Like a physician, we can make a rational diagnosis and create a treatment plan. Once we aren’t hijacked by the traumatic reflexes, we will have more access to creativity. This will help us innovate. To truly understand that exponential growth is impossible, that we have to focus on growing in quality rather than quantity. Even the OECD, an intergovernmental group focused on world economies, has a Strategic Foresight division. I took part in one of their workshops, where we discussed how the city of Calgary might respond to various climate-related scenarios. Every complex system must evolve and adapt.
Post-traumatic growth is different from resiliency, where we return to our baseline or the status quo. We can’t afford to do this – we need to transcend our past and create a new way of being.
This might involve more local economies. Permaculture. Keeping trees in the forest and oil in the ground. Stop using humans as sources of labor and the earth as resources rather than our home. I’ve seen such transformations through asset-based community development and social innovation labs, where people imagineer their own solutions to local challenges.
This will only resolve if we move from an individualistic to a collectivist lens. If we truly believe that we’re all in this together – humans, bears, fish, trees, and sky. We need to practice anything that leads us to really feel, to embody, this connection. For some, it’s psychedelics. For others, it’s being in nature. Indigenous communities make decisions based on the wisdom of seven generations past and the dreams they have for seven generations into the future. We can all be good ancestors. It will mean giving up some comfort, some luxury–to repair the balance that humans have extracted too much from our environment. It’s time to give back, not just to the earth, but to those humans and other beings who did not contribute to this harm but have suffered from it.