Don’t Despair!
During our weekend in Knoydart the issue of social and environmental despair came up.
When something is too scary we can despair. In order to protect ourselves from the pain, we can then find ourselves dumping that scary thing (without even consciously knowing we’re doing it) somewhere deep in our minds - where we don’t have to deal with it, where we can deny it exists.
This ‘denial’ process has been worsened by the mass media, and accidentally by various social and environmental organisations, who have over the years bombarded us with horrific images of butchered whales, starving children, war charred bodies, clear cut forests, dioxin filled rivers and oil soaked sea birds. It’s important that these issues are known about, of course, but after a time we can’t cope psychologically anymore, we despair, we feel overwhelmed and helpless… We have a couple of choices.
One is to work on really burying the scary stuff! Alcohol works, so do various other drugs, watching mind-numbing TV (Big Brother?), buying stuff we don’t need, immersing ourselves in celebrity culture…
Another is to act to draw those bad feelings out into the open where they can be dealt with. Essential with this option is having people to share the difficult stuff with and giving yourself the time to explore your feelings deeply in a supportive atmosphere.
This second response is one of the principles of the Natural Change approach. That’s why we work with a small group and spend a lot of time together in a kind of ‘retreat’ situation. The group is our container where stuff can be let out and then dealt with openly and in ways that feel emotionally safe.
What usually happens is that the energy which was subconsciously being used to keep all that difficult stuff in denial gets unleashed… often into positive action that directly improves some of the situations that were driving us to despair in the first place.
Environmental activists Joanna Macy and John Seed call this type of process ‘despair and empowment work’. Dealing with our despair leads to empowerment… which leads to change.
