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Potter. S, 2022, Awareness of Climate Change Relational mapping and therapy letters, Reformulation 55, p. 60-61
Dear Map
I want to understand what stops me taking more responsibility for the damage we are doing to our ecosystem and climate worldwide. I have been using this map to work out my relationship with climate change and the crisis we are already in. I am aware a bit, but I don’t know what I do with my awareness. It is like a dream state. I have a feeling for some of the words, like alarm and crisis, or of future generations, but I don’t know my story. I am aware that something is going wrong, but I am not awake. I am not actively doing my bit. And, even if I did more actively do my bit, I don’t know how it would feel within a larger story. I think it has something to do with our human capacity to shift our sense of self, within and between, different states of mind. There is a capacity to disconnect and disassociate.
You could say I am in denial but then denial can be done in a thousand ways and I was trying to put my words and thoughts, and my discussions with others, on paper, and this map is the result. I would like to use it to talk about denial and stages of being more alert and awake and active. I know mapping and talking are not the answer but just a part of a larger conversation and many courses of action.
Figure 1 - Differentiating positions in climate change denial
The story of the map begins with Box 1 at the top and centre of the sheet of paper. Moments of wake up calls make me aware of the harm and the dangers from global warming and the impact of humankind’s industry and lifestyle and economic system on this beautiful earth. There I am writing romantically as if conjuring feelings but I think this is partly a way of bypassing what I feel. I think I am awakened bit by bit but don’t join up the dots and that is because I don’t join with others.
I go in my feelings to Box 2. I am alarmed. My body is aware of alarm, of difficulties breathing in the city, of eating compulsively the food that is sold to me. And I can follow the path to Box 5 and join the demands but then shimmer with ambivalence, because do I want to belong to a cause, or do I carry a fear of flag waving, and being over identified and exposed?
Something, beyond my understanding at present, but deeply buried and deeply ideological, makes me privatise my unsettling emotions. I am raised and trained to be an emotional individualist.
Figure 2 - Climate Change Denial Map
I may be in the corner of Box 6, my need, for involved in activity but I look for safety and protection by salvation and emotional catharsis or rescue, is met by Hollywood moments from big screen movies of Armageddon fantastically, met and faced.
You know those films with a white guy and black guy, a muscle guy and a brainy guy.
Around them are a good and heroic group cast of everyman and woman, all kinds of brains and ages and eccentricities. We see fleeting scenes of whole cities and regions destroyed but somehow the audience are alongside the heroic group with which we are meant to identity and we do. There is always a survivors bus and our idealised band of ‘oh so human’ heroes and heroines are on it. We imagine being the ones chosen for salvation and always the last minute rescue. It is better than alright to be on that bus.
Freud built his theories of psychoanalysis as a response to hysteria and emotional individualism in Vienna at its most creative but at the end of the Habsburg empire. We are now at the end of another empire of white male colonialism and we are faced with another kind of male hysteria rooted in social media, combined with narcissism.
To free ourselves from emotional individualism, or Hollywood hysteria, to a collective and real relationship with our feelings about climate change, we need therapeutic conversations, about the processes as mapped above. I know others are making maps, and we CAT therapists may be able to join together, in a network of conversations, to raise our shared awareness.
Steve Potter
Correspondence: stevegpotter@gmail.com