Love, Collapse &
the Climate Crisis
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
Introduction
Love, collapse, and the climate crisis. These are three themes that in my experience many of us struggle to discuss, including psychotherapists and counsellors: In themselves, in their work, or in formal supervision. This is my account of all three.
I write from my viewpoint as a traditionally trained psychodynamic psychotherapist and latterly an eco-therapist, but most importantly from a personal view. There could be some risk in sharing my personal experience, indeed it is unusual for therapists to do so. But my purpose in doing so is a hope that in reading others may feel less alone, more able to engage with, and speak about, their experience of personal collapse, fears around the climate crisis, and where they find connection, love, and a way to better cope.
This is my journey, yours will be different. I hope it inspires and reassures.
In around 2017 I started to become aware of how the climate crisis was affecting me, a theme which crystallised through some enquiries from clients seeking therapy. Let me explain. Potential new clients usually find me through recommendation by a colleague, or via one of the various practitioner registers. I'm aware of those who choose me pragmatically based on location or fee, and those where there is something more connected, more synchronistic from the outset. As one’s experience as a therapist grows, you just get a feel for this.
Late in 2017 I received enquiries from and held initial sessions with three women, all aged in their early 20's. While they came for different reasons, there was a common theme; they had all chosen not to have children because they did not want to bring a child into a “dying world”. Obviously, it is not unusual for people to have mixed feelings about having children.
Doubts about their partner, the cost, interruption to career, peer-pressure, health matters, loss or change to personal identity, and so on. But this felt different to me. In this pre-covid time, it seemed a real situation was coming into the consulting room, not just the idea of one. These three women touched on a simple truth: if they have a child, by the time it reaches 30 years old, will the planet be one in which it can survive?
I became aware that my psychodynamic background was no longer enough to explain this. My usual take on the object-related paradigm kicked in around ambivalent mothering, paternal failure, catastrophic, magical, end of the world thinking, and so on. But I knew there was more to understand than I had expected.
The climate crisis is a global, real-life experience, present in the world right now. It is not a phantasy or imagined catastrophe. I began to notice how it was often thought about – and then indeed denied – in terms of complete collapse: The end of the economic systems based on constant growth, the end of millions of species, the end of humanity as we know it, the supply of water, food, and energy that are thought to inevitably collapse. No amount of therapy was going to change that. You could say that the planet is giving us a lesson in the true power of globalisation.
Below I explain more about where my journey led, but for now I acknowledge that I became afraid. I didn’t know how best to respond, I was lost.
The framework for this journey is firmly based around a series of dreams, over several years. Why? Because they matter to me, they help me make sense of myself, the world, and I see them as a communication, rich in imagination and creativity. Even the nightmares. This is why I was drawn to psychoanalytic theory, Freud and Jung recognising that our dreams lead us to the unconscious, a place for exploration. Some people see dreams as a process, a sort-out in the filing cabinet of our mind, and nothing more. However, for me they are my inspiration.
As these dreams evolved and time moved on, I began to understand them as archetypal dreams, those with a message and direction to move forwards; no longer looking backwards, where I would analyse them to infantile anxieties.
Having concluded my long analysis some-time before, I had returned to the same therapist in 2018 following a very disturbing dream where everything was either black or white; no greys, no colour. It felt like a warning of some kind. My ambivalence about the climate crisis was directing me back to a place where I could explore.
In returning, I found the space I needed to let go of my object-relations focus, much needed before as I worked through infantile ambivalence, considerable mourning, and trauma. And in the space opening before me, I was better able to feel my way forward and see where I went. My therapist, an experienced Jungian training analyst, patiently allowed me to find my own way.
♾️ ♾️ ♾️ ♾️
As a therapist, working with the unconscious and a particular interest in dreams, I am very aware just how precious they are, for all of us. Whether it’s a client in therapy, or a stranger on a dog walk telling you about the dream they had the night before, I believe all dreams deserve the utmost respect, as if the dreamer were telling you their innermost fears, loves, and desires. I hope you, reader, will extend my dreams the same respect and kindness.
Blue
I am in a small domestic dwelling. All the walls are white, the rooms quite small, and there are a few people dotted around the space.
Someone says, "make way for Daniel... make way for Daniel". In walks a man wearing blue ceremonial robes and hat, with a gold trim of symbols.
The blue is a very particular blue, vivid, deep, new, and yet with symbols referencing the ancient.
I can't quite see his face, but he is revered by those around me.
Upon waking, my go-to analysis started with identifications with the name, locations, robes. Later that day I found myself researching “Daniel” in the Bible, which was odd for a died-in-the-wool atheist. But none of it fitted or satisfied my psyche. Dare I say maybe it was as simple as needing to make room for something spiritual?
This dream marked a gateway to a very fertile, energetic, and curious period of personal development. I am aware that as I write there was a part of my thinking back then that feared this was a manic defence, turning to God or spirituality to dislocate myself from feeling the potential doom of the climate crisis. While this is one way of thinking about it, I was able to choose to see it more as an invitation towards something. As a good friend and colleague once quipped, "Yes… well, you do have a tendency to be optimistic".
I found myself reading voraciously. While I had a long established and fruitful relationship with my supervisor, I needed all the help I could get. One book I read lead me to my contacting the author and requesting ecotherapy-focused supervision. She kindly obliged even though I didn't quite know what I wanted. We spent the next year meeting monthly, sharing stories and accounts of utter despair, but also of deep connectedness with Nature - both out-there, and in-there. She had the skill, sensitivity, and experience to help me understand how I might work with these themes, and more importantly to honour my experience. It's quite unusual to meet someone who, when you tell them of your deepest pain at how we humans treat other-than-human beings, says "yes, I know" and shares a tear, rather than giving an analytical interpretation. Priceless.
At this point I came across a paper by Jem Bendell, “Deep Adaptation: A map for navigating climate tragedy”. Reading it changed the course of my life, and how I work. It gave a hook for my despair. I was distraught, guilt ridden and impotent, left feeling that everything I had been doing was pointless. I now see the paper - which has evolved into a social movement – differently, but at that time it jolted me into utter despair. Which was just what I needed.
I can best describe the feeling at that point with this metaphor: Imagine being at sea in a life raft. You've recently left the sinking ship of your idealised childhood. You are tattered but still afloat, appreciating your life, your health, your resilience. The sun is coming up and you have enough drinking water to make it to shore, which you realise is somewhere over there, but you don't really know where. You have your nearest and dearest with you; thank goodness they are safe. They are looking to you to sail the raft, be able to use the compass, and hold the hope.
The breeze develops into a wind, a storm is forming in the distance. The waves gather pace and depth. As you start to paddle you realise the drinking water has leaked. The paddle snaps. Your nearest is panicking, your dearest jumped overboard. The raft punctures and deflates to leave you alone, hanging onto the last piece of expanded-polystyrene float that formed part of the raft’s skeleton. You are wondering is this it, really? Is this the end? Your end? And then you are taken to a line of thought...
You realise that expanded polystyrene doesn’t decompose. The material that represents the very problem, is keeping you afloat, and alive. A paradox. You can’t win.
That is how I felt when I read “Deep Adaptation”. My collapse, my split, a day of reckoning. The dissociation that was keeping me in the shadows, was now seen. The world was collapsing around me and the guilt I felt just to hang on to everyday life – the car, holidays, denim, my dogs, food with air miles, clingfilm, toothbrushes, is recycling even worth it? etc – was unbearable. And yet I carried on, disconnecting from the guilt in order to stay alive, as so many of us do.
A few weeks later, having discussed, identified with, and then recovered from reading that paper, I made the following painting. A simple line drawing attempting to show the ups and downs, the steady and the broken, the individual and the collective. I took this piece to both my therapy, my supervisors, and a couple of well-informed friends, one an art-therapist. They each had a different take on it. I realised it was a personal communication that ultimately only I could interpret, and watch transform in meaning as I looked again and again over the following years.
I would say the most valuable gift from my long analysis was being able to observe myself. This is not surprising, the aim in analysis is always to develop a sense of subjectivity. For many this happens quite naturally in childhood and adolescence, but for many it doesn’t, at least not fully. This is important for me to say: I believe that having had a thorough analysis I was able to experience and observe this collapse in myself and at the same time, stay safe, be able to function, indeed, work, love, and still care for others.
I’m noticing that at that time, all those helping me to stay afloat were women.
Green
I open my front door to see a woman on the doorstep, she
has her back to me. I can't see her face.
She has shoulder-length luminous-white hair and is wearing a
long green robe.
She steps forward as I watch her walk away in a straight line,
down the driveway.
Again, my go-to, neurotic driven interpretation was around losing someone, being lost in the human-made suburban construct around me. But a second later, I realised she was a goddess, a Green Goddess, showing me the way into something green, into nature.
I have always been interested in the quality of light in dreams and their interpretation. Is it bright and photographic, or grainy and ancient. Dark like the night, or bright like a summer’s day. The light of her hair and green robe was vivid, had vitality, was alive. The simple design held meaning, and as she walked away, I realised I was being invited to follow. As simple as that.
As I started to incorporate aspects of the collapse, loosened by the acceptance of my shame, some of my manic despair sublimated into action. I joined the Climate Psychology Alliance, an expanding professional group who offer peer-support around all aspects of the climate crisis, for anyone who is ready to engage. Through them, I trained as a Climate Cafe facilitator, and started to offer Climate Cafes online, and once restrictions lifted in the Covid era, in person in my local park. I was already offering free Forest Bathing sessions (pre-Covid) and these continued apace. I also formed two development groups. One for therapists trying to bring the climate crisis into their regular way of working. Another using environmental arts therapy on a 12-month programme based around the book by Ian Siddens, “Environmental Art Therapy”.
When I moaned to my supervisor that I wasn't making a difference, she said, using my name firmly to ensure I was present in the moment, "But Andrew, you are doing so much".
As I look back at the period, I was doing a lot. I was busy learning and busy experiencing. Looking for an ethical alternative to that expanded polystyrene to keep me float.
But the guilt-itch was still there, I still couldn't quite reach it.
Black
Ahead of me, in a brightly sunlit lush green glade, sits a brand-new large family car. It is sparkling, a vivid blue.
On waking, I lift my neck to see if the car is really there but am startled by a floating figure to my left, wearing flowing ragged black robes.
The word "surrender" hangs in large three-dimensional letters above us all.
Upon reflection, this dream marks a shift in how I understood and interpreted all my dreams that followed, so it helps if I provide a more context than I have for “Blue’ and “Green”.
Following the Green Goddess into nature, and as a development from some of the forest-bathing I had undertaken, I decided to spend some time in the woodlands. Having discussed with my supervisors, I found a format that worked. I would drive down (yes, feeling guilty about the emissions) Thursday evening, stay in an air b'n'b near by. Then at 3.30am, before sunrise, drive to my secluded woodland, and set up deep in with the trees. I would stay in the same spot with just water for as long as I could.
As I approached the village, the car blew a tyre. We limped the last half-a-mile. On arriving I attempted to fit the emergency tyre, but nothing worked. The wrench was missing, the locknut was the wrong shape, and the jack had broken. The kind woman whose garden shed I was staying in, called on her next-door neighbour. While he was charming and interested in what I was doing there, he couldn't help. His dog seemed interested in helping too. A second neighbour came over, who despite recovering from quite major surgery insisted he wanted to help, and he did. With his pristine and well-loved tools, we fitted the emergency tyre, allowing me to drive off and have a new one fitted.
Why am I offering so much detail here? What has this to do with love, collapse, and the climate crisis, you may be asking?
When I told my supervisor this anecdote in passing, she again stopped me in my tracks and suggested, in her joyful and ever-loving manner, "Andrew, that sounds to me like a hero's journey: The man going off into the wilderness to find himself, those gathered around helping him on his way”. She can be even more optimistic than me, but I like that.
A brief but good sleep knocked the dents out of my ego from not being man enough to change a tyre, and I set off as planned. I awoke two minutes before the 3am alarm - my psyche sensing the importance of catching the sunrise. I arrived at my spot in the woods, moving no more than two meters in any direction. I sat looking at the changing day light, the shadows, the moisture, texture, and smell of the surrounding moss, grasses, trees, brambles. A few creatures joined me- birds, squirrels, a passing dog, and insects. I became fascinated with a fly crawling on my hand for what seemed an age. Its intricate design and beauty were enthralling.
In all I stayed in that spot for 12 hours that day. After around six hours I fell asleep, which is when I encountered this black figure. Was it the grim reaper, linking then killing my desire for a bigger CO-2 emitting car? Was I lamenting the family of CO-2 emitting children I never had? Was it a warning to my ego to take better care of myself, or else die prematurely? Was it a Jungian scarecrow, guarding over me?
Importantly, this figure didn't have the scythe or skull-face of the grim reaper, so who was he?
Trying to figure out this dream, was, I believe, the first time I really felt what an archetype is: A swell in the collective unconscious, through the personal unconscious, clothed as a figure, to be able to communicate with the dreamer. I experienced something I cannot put into words, but the nearest would-be serene, equilibrium. But even more than that.
Some months later, chatting with a friend about this Black dream, the deep adaptation concept, and the climate crisis, I used the phrase, "We need to surrender and prepare to die". Delivered as a quip, it was the succinct expression of that brief dream.
But what next? Is surrender and wait for the (inevitable?) mass extinction the best I could hope for?
Blue-Black
I am laying on my back, head raised, looking down my body.
Before me I can see a landscape of fields, hills, mountains, and sky beyond.
The light is a blue-black, cool, but living. Perhaps moon-bathed.
To my right is a magnificent bird of prey, black shiny feathers, with powerful wings folded close to its body.
This bird has my head on it, as I am now.
This dream - again brief - took place in a floatation tank, my first experience of one. As I lay in the warm space-age pod, naked, suspended in heavily salted water, wearing ear plugs, my mind went to being in the womb, to (re)birth. After some experimentation and re-positioning, I finally lay still and soon after drifted off. Like the “Black” dream, I awoke suddenly, this time less panicked but needing to see outside the pod.
I was accompanied on this float by my good friend, also a therapist. While we sat eating lunch, dissecting our experience over noodles, my first thoughts of the bird had been the ancient Egyptian image of the human headed bird. As a child I was very interested in Ancient Egypt and made a request at school that we study it in what I found rather dull history lessons. Mr Henley told me there wasn’t enough time, as we still had to cover the industrial revolution, but I could see he was pleased a pupil had asked the question.
I recall also, as a 12-year-old, taking a marker pen to my bedroom’s white walls, copying out hieroglyphs from the “Book Of The Dead” on loan from the library, not knowing what these ancient Egyptian spells meant, or why I did it. My father just raised an eyebrow, stuck somewhere between irritation and pride. My mother bought me an expensive book on Tutankhamun, using savings from her secret purse.
A couple of days later, I had to miss an evening class I usually attended. A friend who was there later told me how they had discussed the painting “Ulysses and the Sirens”. The conversation that followed with this friend, an artist and art-therapist gave synchronistic rocket-fuel to the floatation experience and the dream.
The depiction of a crew, ears filled with wax to protect them from hearing, as Ulysses tied to the mast, his body restrained, tolerated the human-headed-sirens’ deathly song. The sirens, compelled by myth to plunge to their own deaths: Seduction leading to death, belief leading to freedom.
My suite of archetypal dreams was starting to sing a song, not just individual notes.
In researching the Greek myth of Ulysses, I realised that it is rooted in the ancient Egyptian Ba-Bird, or Soul bird. The Ba inhabits the man’s body, leaving and flying to the dreamworld while sleeping, or to the afterlife when the body dies. The two are reunited each morning upon waking, or in the afterlife, following bodily death.
I believe there are various interpretations of the hieroglyphs that record the conversation between Man and his Ba, but it seems to be a debate about suicide, the Ba contesting that if the man kills his body, the Ba will have to roam the afterlife unformed. This would be torturous for the Ba, for the soul.
This brief dream is, I would say, the most important for me. It connects me at the time of the dream, to myself as a child, to the past, and to something ancient. And as for the ancient Egyptians, it links to a respect for and worship of the Sun: Its rhythm, each day being a death and a rebirth.
Let us remember that everything that has ever happened on this planet, or ever will, is because the sun gives its energy. It fuels photosynthesis in the leaves, that feed the animals, that die and fossilise, that become oil, that makes fuel and plastic, that burns, that heats the planet. A beautifully intricate ecosystem that takes place over hundreds of millions of years … and may boil us alive.
Speaking psychodynamically, there are links in this dream to my father, his undiagnosed PTSD, and his suicidal melancholia. In Jungian terms there is connection via my personal unconscious to myth, religion, civilisation, astrology, and the Sun.
Reflecting as I write this, I was learning that in surrender I wasn’t powerless or impotent, rather I had found balance and connectedness. I was better able to steady this connection to the life-giving Sun, the ancestral and the collective - with my individual Self. While I couldn’t save the planet, or the animals that go to slaughter, I could save myself. And in turn stay available to those around me, ready to connect to the collective.
My research continued. I attempted to paint the Blue-Black dream, my lack of art skills showing, but my shame reducing, I just went for it. I attended a tour at the British Museum on Ancient Egypt and the afterlife, remembering that as a child I wrote to them asking about “The Book Of The Dead”. (The handwritten response, in fine calligraphy, on headed note paper, became one of my most treasured possessions. Until I managed to 'accidentally' throw it away along with my birth certificate, exam certificates, and a few other trinkets when I packed to leave home. My young-adult Ego wanted to leave the past behind and move to the bright lights of London.)
This significant dream led to an interest in anything based in nature, spiritual, or ceremonial. Astrology, wicca, druidry, shamanism, tarot, mediumship, foraging, tree hugging as well as returning to some fundamental psychoanalytic literature from my training years. Looking around me, I realised I had been presented with what I came to call a soul-family, a clutch of people who knew about such things. Old friends who had waited for me to be ready to debate and share experience. Those who could read the stars, another who could read the land, someone to hug trees and share trips with, through to a stranger in the park, leaving stone circles and trees clad in red thread as evidence of their nature ceremonies. I could feel the unifying love between us.
During this time a good friend recommended I read “The Middle Passage: from Misery to Meaning in Mid-life” by James Hollis. A book I had been aware of for fifteen years or so, it was only now that I was able to read it. It is essentially an outline of Jung’s concept of Individuation in middle life. This was the moment when shame reduced, spirituality emerged, and my ageing became something to honour. I was surviving my collapse. The world was still in crisis, well actually humanity was in crisis, along with the millions of species we are extinguishing. But as we well know, the planet will continue.
It's quite a moment when you realise your own insignificance, and quite another when you realise humanity’s insignificance, in this infinite, self-regulating cosmic ecosystem.
My collapse, my individuation, my much craved for dissolution of the middle-aged Ego, led me to research non-dualism, in turn taking me to a Swami based in New York who provides regular online talks. Perhaps the internet isn’t all bad after all.
One of his many idioms stayed with me and illustrates a new chapter opening to me. He said:
A student monk looks up and announces, "the flag is moving". A slightly more evolved monk says, "it is not the flag that is moving, it's the wind that is moving". The yet more evolved monk says, "it's not the wind that is moving, it's your mind that is moving". Hearing this, the wisest and eldest monk woken from rest in his room high in the temple says, "It's tongues that are moving - get on with your sweeping!". Or something like that.
This new chapter could start as all my heady reflection, my torment, my research, my mysticism became balanced with the need to get on with life, to be practical in this moment.
There was a chance I might be feeling ok.
Orange
I am looking forward into a warm glowing light. The yellow fades into orange, the orange into yellow.
The light has depth, familiarity, energy. Just as I am falling into it, an edge forms on the right, perhaps the rim of a pram hood.
On it a spider feels her way forward, with long legs. She moves towards another smaller spider on the edge.
I am not afraid.
This dream simply represents fear-less peace, being contained and yet being infinitely expansive, surrender and comfort, mothering in the warm life-glow of the Sun. Sun as symbol, not as object.
Spiders have been a significant symbol in my life. The adolescent dreams of giant white fleshy spiders crawling into bed, followed by the moment desire grafted on to horror as I looked on at my sexy cousin’s pet tarantula.
There was the time I woke to feel a large spider crawling across my face in Walthamstow, and the stunningly beautiful spider sat in her web at a Hindu temple in Bali.
Amazing to me even now, the time I shared a room with dozens of orb spiders at London Zoo, and then the money spider crawling across my book, that I just had to save, protecting it until I could find a garden to deposit it in.
The gigantic protective-mother spider sculptures of Louise Bourgeois’ dotted across the globe, and, the most important of them all: Charlotte, weaving a web that could save Wilbur, the terrific pig.
A fervent arachnophobe, Klein gave them meaning as a terrifying, punitive, alien, abject sexuality derived from a depressed mother, traumatised father, and homophobic culture. But as we embraced Jung, my therapist and I wove old silk into a new web of meaning. Spiders had evolved and became so much more. They could Mother and bask in the Sun.
In the end, my journey told through these few dreams, is a familiar one of mid-life individuation. I needed to make a shift from black & white to colour, the individual to the collective, from past to present, from Klein to Jung, from save-the-future to being-in-the-moment. Your journey will be expressed differently, but it’s one I believe we need to make if we can begin to live in this time.
The climate crisis continues. In our fear, we are turning against one another as belief in the usual systems of economics, politics, religion, science, and consumerism wains, leaving us with the silence between the waves. Could this be where we hear our existential dread? We are torn between consuming-to-numb and feeling-the-pain. We disconnect on a micro and macro level, and yet we are all trying to be “in the moment”. Really, can we be?
I choose to believe we can connect, and through the pain of awareness, find the love that connects.
Who knows who wrote that song of summer
That blackbirds sing at dusk.
This is a song of colour.
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
Then climb into bed and turn to dust.