Ecotherapy and Ecopsychology frame the field of all the work offered here, both one-to-one and group work, 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 for – and in what response it calls forth.  

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.  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. We do not have to take everything personally. Feelings of uncertainty, grief and a sense of loss are rational responses.

Ecotherapy involves facilitating contact and connection with Nature to effect positive change in wellbeing.  At its simplest, this will include getting out into Nature, getting up close and personal, engaging in a way that removes or cleanses the filters.  As we are reminded of our membership of the Earth community, this brings gratitude and joy.  Research shows that this ‘soft fascination’ is deeply restorative of psychological health and general wellbeing.

“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 and Joe Hinds (eds.), 2016.  Ecotherapy: theory, research and practice.  London: Palgrave. P.1)

So, the relationship is reciprocal, benefiting people and planet.  We serve it as it serves us.  And, the Natural World can support us, as we support it; our fellow creatures are our allies as we ally with them.  Any personal work to support our resilience, and to strengthen the personal resources for how we cope, must therefore take into account how we are responding to the cry of the Earth, both individually and collectively.  What is life-affirming for us is life-affirming for our home Planet as a whole, and vice versa; what is life-sustaining for our home Planet is life-sustaining for us humans, individually and collectively, and vice versa.

Ecopsychotherapy, as a form of ecotherapy, embraces and explores this aspect of our inner world, to support both client and therapist in their enquiry.

For, on the other side of the coin, 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’. 

Ecotherapy has a transpersonal perspective and remit that reaches beyond the personal.  We are all in it together, not only all us humans, but also all creatures.  The practice of the Ecological Self extends the boundaries of our skin encapsulated egos to identify with all life, and, including the non-living world, all creation.