Today we’re sharing the foreword to Steffi Bednarek’s book—Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety—written by Thomas in collaboration with Lori Shridhare.
The Familiar is Dying
The subtitle of this illuminating book is a stepping stone into a threshold. As the reader walks through the dimensions of this threshold of change, dismemberment, fragmentation, and disintegration are revealed through a kaleidoscope of wisdom and professional expertise. We, as readers, are embarking on a journey that elucidates this precise cycle of death, when what falls away around us and within us are the necrotic tissues of the past—the “normal” that is actually a faint echo of a pulse, now barely perceptible to our ears.
As you read this book and enter into the communal conversation that permeates this prescient collection of essays thoughtfully edited by Steffi Bednarek, you will move through the perspectives of the individual, weave into the collective, and then return to your perspective as the individual reader. This way of reading introduces a new way of engaging in conversation around the climate—and the associated traumas—as we shape our reference points as both individuals and collectives. We move from the consulting room into the world, and we then bring the world into the consulting room. We understand the deleterious impact of colonialism on our lives as individuals, and on our planet. We navigate through our separate, enclosed spheres as individuals, then realize our interdependence with all creatures and the rest of the natural world. We come to understand the level of disembodiment that permeates our lives, then begin to learn to sense the connection to the ground below our feet. And we realize that we don’t live on the planet but as the planet.
In this way, Climate, Psychology, and Change becomes a gateway to illuminate the practice of healing as we perceive ourselves through the lens of the planet itself. If we could see through this larger lens, what would Earth tell us about her needs for healing? When we view Earth from outer space, our perspective widens as witnesses. From this vantage point, we can see Earth’s beauty, but we also need to become receptive to the tremendous wounds and scars she holds. With our feet firmly grounded in her soil, we can see and experience the actual suffering.
Climate Change and Collective Trauma
We find the familiar on shaky ground, not only as our natural environment breaks down, fires and floods rage, and weather patterns disrupt and destroy, but also in the reverberating impacts on our global public health. Women, who make up the vast majority of people forcibly displaced by climate change, are exposed to greater risks for sexual violence. These seismic shifts jeopardize food security, water access, and our habitats. Oppression, racism, ableism, and other forms of polarization worsen in the face of the demise of many of the Earth’s ecosystems.
Climate disruptions are landing on fractured landscapes that have been broken apart by unresolved collective traumas of the past. We have all been born into a world shaped by trauma. For many of us, this perception of a collectively traumatized world is accepted as “normal” and “the way the world is.” I would say: this is how life is when we are hurt. For some of us, the familiar dangles its empty promises of comfort, continuity, safety, and well-being. For others, the familiar is composed of oppression, inequality, polarization, and war. It’s easy to be magnetized by the familiar, drawn into a false dichotomy that divides our psyches into “safety” or “insecurity,” or we violently oppose it, protesting until we kill the familiar.
My work over the past twenty years has taught me that the source of any significant global crisis originates in the collectively traumatized space we currently inhabit as humanity. In this state, our modern societies have lost the ability to generate healthy feedback loops, which every living system needs to generate to maintain stability. In a living system, feedback loops facilitate a self-regulatory process, bringing the system into balance when equilibrium is threatened. This flow of information allows a system to adapt and change so it can move in relation to the larger system within which it is embedded. We see the effects of this loss of equilibrium throughout our climate crisis. This, I believe, is one way to understand the term “climate trauma.”
Modernity’s concept of the familiar is rooted in what is nonemergent and stagnant. When there is a state of trauma in the collective body, we cannot generate solutions from a place of emergence and creativity. When change is not possible, a crisis is set in motion. Another way to understand climate trauma is to examine our mixed responses as humanity to the crisis. The disruption that has ensued not only manifests in the losses in biodiversity we observe, global warming, and the ongoing shifts in weather patterns, among other manifestations, but also as a derangement of modernity to make impactful decisions for our planetary well-being. Those of us who are aware of the ensuing harm, including policymakers and governments, realize there is an actual urgency to form a concerted global response. However, the response of our industrialized, hegemonic leadership is fueled by hyperactivation and stress, which underlies the collective trauma, constituting the sand in the engine of our current immobilization.
The first critical step is to slow down so that we may better formulate the appropriate, integrated response to this urgency. Only in slowing down—while consciously responding to the urgency—will we heal and integrate what underlies our current climate trauma. Also at play in our modern cultures are denial, numbness, and “absencing,” as Otto Scharmer refers to it—relinquishing all responsibility for and ownership of the planet as our very own nature. On the other hand, there is despair and a prevalence of climate anxiety, which especially impacts young people.
It is in this complexity that we discover the pulse of the new, the awakening of all our senses and calls to respond, the response-ability that is the call to live, the call to thrive. The strong separation that we see in the world currently diminishes our capacity for global collaboration. Moving through this threshold of change, we are embarking upon co-creating a world not based on our collective wounds but on collective well-being that is rooted in our interdependence.
A New Frontier for Humanity
“The familiar is dying.” I believe these words represent the threshold into which we, as humanity, are walking. We might view this threshold as an opening to the soul, a deepening of our lives, our paths, our journey, as that which is of the soul, as psychotherapist Francis Weller beautifully elucidates in the opening conversation of this book, describing the trails that the soul lays down in our individual, communal, cultural, and planetary lives. The familiarity of being an individual is dropping away. Only our conscious awareness can recognize the truth of this.
As we learn to see through the broken glass of trauma, we can engage in the global collaboration we need to solve this crisis. The journey through this dying process, this initiation, is sparing no one. Through restoration, we don’t return to the familiar, to a “normal,” but to a future that is yet unknown. We begin to harvest new ways of being and new learning that we could never have imagined before. We experience the blessings of posttraumatic growth as we integrate these traumas. When we realize that the individual and the collective are interdependent, we access the healing power inherent in that flow of intelligence. Our creativity flourishes—including the resolve to commit to viable solutions—as we experience a collective liquification, an unfreezing of the old, a release of the familiar. To open this door, with a client, with a group, within community, is to fulfill our collective soul’s sacred relationship with the earth, and with one another. As we turn the pages of “Climate, Psychology and Change”, we cross into a frontier that is ripe with possibility, expansive in its vision, and rich in embodied wisdom.
From Climate, Psychology, & Change by Steffi Bednarek, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2024 by Steffi Bednarek. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books
