I now frame psychotherapy - talking therapy - in the field of Ecotherapy and Ecopsychology and our connection with and responsibility for the natural world.  We live in interesting and difficult times.  The extinction and climate crises challenge us both in how cope and in what response it calls forth.  The Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked what we need to do to save our world.

“What we most need to do,” he replied, “is to hear within us the sound of the earth crying.”

Ecotherapy is applied ecopsychology, a developing and field that considers human identity, psyche and spirit, as inseparably and intimately part of the natural world.  Ecotherapy puts counselling and psychotherapy in this wider context of our relationship with all life. Healing, becoming whole, involves rebuilding this relationship with Nature.

“A central aspect of both (ecopsychology and ecotherapy) is developing a reciprocal relationship with nature to ensure both psychological and environmental well-being.  Whereas ecopsychology is about the psyche and the greening of psychology, ecotherapy focuses on the total mind-body-spirit relationship…”. (Martin Jordan & Joe Hinds (eds.), 2016.  Ecotherapy: theory, research and practice.  London: Palgrave. p.1)

Ecotherapy can involve working out-of-doors, getting up close and personal, engaging in a way that cleanses the filters and where the natural environment becomes a co-facilitator, bringing gratitude and joy. Research shows that this ‘soft fascination’ is deeply restorative of psychological health and general wellbeing. But this perspective equally applies to talking therapy sitting in a room together. Remembering our own true nature enriches our lives.

The corollary is that our psychological distress is always, deep down, bound up with the current environmental crisis and climate change, at the level of the collective unconscious, whether we are aware of this or not. We do not have to take everything personally. Feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, grief and a sense of loss are rational responses. Joanna Macy has written:

‘Until the late twentieth century, every generation throughout history lived with the tacit certainty that there would be generations to follow. Each assumed, without questioning, that its children and children's children would walk the same Earth, under the same sky. Hardships, failures, and personal death were encompassed in that vaster assurance of continuity. That certainty is now lost to us, whatever our politics. That loss, unmeasured and immeasurable, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time’. (Emphasis added.)