Catastrophic thinking leads to climate action. How can it be more welcomed?
I have been sitting with climate grief and anger off and on over the past six months. This blog shares some of my process in being with this topic and the eco-anxiety it creates. As well some new research that provides a way forward, and how Focusing can help. The short answer is, we need to welcome our catastrophic thoughts about climate change.
How serious is the climate crisis?
My eco-anxiety about the climate crisis first flared-up this past summer with a paradox: one part of me felt the urgency of the need to be doing more, and another part of me knew overdoing and burning myself out wouldn’t help in the long-run. Fast forward six months and it is back. This time my eco-anxiety has had some deep grief and feelings of helplessness, and also anger due to the combination of knowing we’re doing too little, too late and how many opportunities to do more we are squandering, in my opinion, because of either a lack of courage or lack of foresight.
Case in point, the Conference of the Parties (COP27) this past November failed to include language articulating the need to phase out all fossil fuels, again only mentioning coal. They did manage, after decades of discussion, to finally make a decision to establish a loss and damage fund. That it has taken this long to take this step is infuriating. That the move will likely delay mitigation efforts, helping us blow past the 1.5 degrees C target (2.7 degrees F) by the end of the decade is exasperating. And yes, if it is news to you of our impending inability to achieve 1.5 degree C it is because it is barely even mentioned in the news.
The situation is dire. The Global Carbon Project (GCP) has estimated that the unused carbon budget for 1.5C—specifically, the amount of CO2 that can be emitted while having a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees C of warming—or 380bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) will be blown in just nine years. And worse, Carbon Brief calculates that the timeline may be as little as 6.5 years when the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data is combined with the GCP’s. Considering there are a host of terrible tipping points that are predicted to happen between 1.5 and 2 degrees C, and we keep getting our predictions wrong (many climate change impacts are happening sooner!), all of this can cause me to feel so completely helpless and hopeless. It’s really serious.
Thinking catastrophic thoughts
So when I came across an article in the New York Magazine’s Intelligencer titled “How to Live in a Catastrophe: In search of a way to think clearly about the planetary crisis” by Elizabeth Weil, I was intrigued. I thought there might be some helpful nuggets in the article, and indeed there were. The one that I’m going to share in this blog and build upon is the sharing of Susan Kassouf’s work.
In our waning era of petromodernity, most of us are, to differing degrees, witnessing participants in an overturning of those climate systems that made earth habitable for much of life as we know it. Can we overturn our thinking in response? I suggest that developing our capacity to think catastrophic thoughts may allow us to make meaningful contact with these evolving realities, enabling us to translate thought into long overdue action and make change in the world.–Susan Kassouf, THINKING CATASTROPHIC THOUGHTS: A TRAUMATIZED SENSIBILITY ON A HOTTER PLANET
In her article, Kassouf outlines how those who have had experiences of interpersonal trauma have what she calls a “traumatized sensibility”, a capacity to think catastrophically about the more-than-human environment. That the “interpersonal trauma had not broken them but broken them open.” And that these individuals are able to be with the living memory of their own experiences or imagine what the future may hold and then tolerate the despair that arises, while continuing to be, think and act in the world.
Kassouf also cites literature that “those with less power in our society, for example because of gender or ethnicity, seem more open to recognizing the realities of climate change.” The reason behind this may be that when you have a less-than-ideal childhood, you’re less invested in maintaining a fantasy. That climate change comes as more of a shock to white and privileged people, believing they are separate from the environment (which is counter to Gendlin’s philosophy that “body and environment are one”). Kassouf goes on to share research about how a similar dynamic exists between activists and scientists: that activists have “quite sophisticated ways of dealing” compared to scientists that can be defensive and more likely to discuss other people’s trauma, rather than their own experiences.
She also clarifies that working with early and systemic trauma is only one way for us to “come to feel, think and act upon the realities of climate breakdown”. It creates the question: how else can we make it safe to feel, think and act for the climate?
Welcoming despair
How do we invite feelings of despair, helplessness, overwhelm and grief? In our Focusing practice, we often sit with uncomfortable feelings; we welcome them even. We invite the felt sense to tell us what it needs and keep it company. Here’s a quote from Gendlin on how to do this:
“Whatever comes in focusing will never overwhelm you if you have an attitude we call ‘receiving.’ You welcome anything that comes with a body shift, but you stay a little distance from it. You are not in it, but next to it. This space, in which you can be next to it, forms in a few moments, as your body eases…You are neither running away nor going into it. You get a breath. You sense that there is a space between it and you. You are here, it is there. You have it, you are not it.” –Eugene Gendlin, Focusing, p. 70-71
Creating a space to sit with whatever emotions are arising, inviting a felt sense to come and help carry us forward, uses Step 6 Receiving. This is often also called welcoming or the Focusing Attitude.
Often, we will need to spend additional time resourcing/clearing a space prior to Focusing, to have the grounded energy to be welcoming to our feelings about catastrophic climate change. Here are four ways to resource:
Especially with grief, one can use clearing a space backwards. This involves noticing what feels ok in the body, like the tip of one’s nose, so that the good energy can grow a bit to be able to hold some of the grief.
Using positive memories. I’ve blogged about this before. View Finding some calm: the power of memories and the right name for them.
Activating your heart energy and compassion can also help. See Ways to activate self-compassion in this blog about the Focusing Attitude.
A final way to resource is to be in and with nature. My favourite way it to walk in the woods, or by a lake or stream.
All of the above may not be enough at times. As humans, sometimes we need the co-regulation of another being (person or animal) to come back to our emotionally regulated selves.
Having a listening partner definitely aids with Focusing sessions that have more charged energy. The loss of clearly defined seasons, melting of glaciers, extinction of animals and insects, and host of other casualties—of this slow in human years and extremely fast in geologic time—catastrophe can need the comfort of another.
Using an archetype to co-regulate: Mother Earth
Recently, while Focusing on the helplessness and hopeless that I was feeling about the climate crisis I could feel the lack of my Self energy. That’s why I was feeling helpless; I didn’t have any agency in that moment. And then a beautiful image came. It was a crossing of Mother Earth from the Montreal Botanical Gardens (see left image below) and Tafiti from Moana (see right image). The Earth could pick me up, could energize me to find the strength to carry on. This direct caring by nature in my imagination was a powerful image. While it certainly hasn’t alleviated all of my climate anxiety, it really helps to have the feeling of another, even if it is an archetype that you can imagine in yourself.
In a separate Focusing exercise that used movement, I also felt the power of the earth to regenerate, when placing myself in child’s pose on the floor. That experience also felt connected to Mother Earth energy, that nature can reach us even when we’re in our homes.
Next Steps
In 2023 I will be doing more work with climate change and Focusing. Crossing them together with new courses and team offerings, and further exploring how being embodied (with practices like Focusing), can help us create a space to take courageous action. While I’m devastated that this is where we are as humanity, taking astounding risks with our planet and each other, I am somehow also more fired-up then ever before to work on this cause.
I knew years ago that being embodied gives us more access to our heart-knowing and that when integrated our mind-body can choose sustainable choices; similarly, we can collectively make sustainable choices if we allow for more integration in our teams, organizations and governments. To have the tough conversations and allow change to happen. But alas, for now our insufficient progress means that future action will have to be far more rigorous to avoid the worst scenarios (e.g. Hothouse Earth). Now is the time to dig in and welcome catastrophic thoughts. If we don’t, the situation and resulting thoughts needed will just get worse, and it will be that much more difficult to achieve a stable climate.
