In the angle of this chronicle, that of the intimate and the inner whispers below the ambient turmoil, there are the shock waves felt by millions of people in the face of what stands before us like an inevitable: the climate crisis.
The last budget, for example, the betrayals it contains, the aberrations it repeats, leave little room for our hopes of a real reversal of the economy versus ecology paradigm. The dominance of one over the other remains entrenched, pushing “those who are afraid” to join the vast battalion of people who suffer from mental health problems. If the term “eco-anxiety” has not yet entered the reference work of psychiatry (the DSM-5), it is nevertheless considered, in everyday language, as a health problem that afflicts us, in the instead of being seen as something that could be related to wisdom, to knowledge, to a necessary sensitivity.
While nothingness, its experience and the psychic choreographies necessary to support it have always been intertwined with human becoming, this is possibly the first time that entire generations, simultaneously, are entitled to think of it as a realistic collective outcome, which goes beyond the question of his personal finitude: nothingness as the end of an inhabitable world. What largely justifies the fact of experimenting with what we quickly pathologize: eco-anxiety, which will vary according to our degree of denial, cynicism, or resistance to the shock imposed by what the whole of the scientific community s hear to announce.
Anne Vadenais, a clinical psychologist for nearly twenty years and a great friend, works with adolescents and adults who come to consult her for various symptoms, including this anxiety which she first welcomes with a legitimization: “You are right to ‘to fear “. “For me, anxious people in general are highly sensitive people who cannot metabolize everything they perceive. In the current dominant clinical logic, there is a lot of talk about teaching them to regain control of their symptoms, to “manage” them, as if these symptoms were necessarily exaggerated or disconnected from reality. Yet climate change has begun. They are documented. Why would I start working with someone so that he denies what seems rather to be an accurate reading of the possibilities of reality? Obviously, we will work so that this lucidity is not experienced with so much suffering. »
the hummingbird
Anne has been interested for several years in a movement called “ecopsychology” and which she defines to me as follows: “It is a multidisciplinary movement which brings together militant, philosophical and even spiritual branches, but which , through the prism of the psychological clinic, invites us to rethink our relationship with our environment. We can summon nature in therapeutic support, as in the mindfulness approach, in particular, but we can also question our strictly utilitarian relationship to our environment. »
In fact, it will be a question of seeing the symptom no longer as a single indicator of an intrapsychic or interpersonal dynamic, but also as a possible indication of the relationship that the person has with his environment in general (including all living things) . A relationship that is always limited to the utilitarian dimension could well lead to a feeling of loss of meaning. Rehabilitating sensitivity to one’s environment in order to rethink this relationship as one in which we are in a nourishing, mutual dialectic generates not only meaning, but also relief.
“There is a strong resistance, in our modern human-centric conception, to accepting our dependence on nature. This is what scares us with climate change in the first place: accepting our submission to the environment. The pandemic has gripped us in this way. However, the more we become aware of our relationship of interdependence with the environment, the more we let go of our eternal fad of domination of the elements. The anxious person then accepts to no longer control everything, and can begin to think of real changes, within their reach, which will make them experience a higher sense of coherence.
Changing oneself to change the world would therefore become a happy way of transforming our justifiable paralysis into meaningful actions rooted in our personal ethics. She ends with this image, which she borrows from the essayist and ecologist Pierre Rabhi, that of the hummingbird which, to put out the forest fire, tirelessly carries water in its beak. “If he’s unlikely to do it, on his own, of course, how could we ethically recommend him to quit?” »