Therapy is a psychological effort to heal psychological wounds. But it also includes a “coaching piece” which supports your efforts to solve objective problems in the outside world. For example, getting and keeping a good enough job, partner, or circle of friends can require plenty of collaborative work, bringing the situation into sharper focus and finding the most strategic spots where a little pressure can turn things around.

But what about those giant historical forces that contribute to depression and/or anxiety, but that can’t be addressed by personal coaching? They shouldn’t be “therapized away” either, because they’re mostly objective and external, not subjective and internal. It isn’t neurotic at all to be concerned about climate change, or the loss of the natural world, or the rapid erosion of public institutions that used to guarantee a basic standard of political stability. In fact, being concerned about these huge trends is an important part of living together in the real world, and a therapeutic culture of atomized individualism can prevent the public from getting together to improve things.

Yet this, too, is a delicate balance to be struck and maintained, because we don’t pay our therapists to sway us into their favorite world-saving projects. Politicized utopian therapy tends to help nobody at all. In it, the patient is manipulated and under-prioritized; the therapist becomes a self-important priest of virtue; and the public they pretend to rescue is never actually served in any detectable way. The proper balance, it seems to me, remains focused on the patient’s individual well-being, and includes bigger issues only insofar as the patient is already struggling with them. I don’t cause people to start worrying about global warming, but I do not flippantly suggest that patients who are losing sleep over rising sea levels should just forget about it.

I’m a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, and I’m aware of the extremely serious state of the world’s natural systems on which our safety depends. I’ve been interviewed on Guy McPherson’s Nature Bats Last radio show several times, and the recent book I Want A Better Catastrophe by Andrew Boyd contains an interview he did with me in Los Angeles. So I get it. 

I’m a bit more hopeful about the human prospect than I was when those were recorded, some years back. But our industrial system of living arrangements hasn’t changed, and humanity still seems locked into the cornucopian dream of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. The world needs collective psychoanalysis, but there’s no way to deliver that. A decade ago, Naomi Klein wrote a book about the climate crisis, saying we had just about missed our chance to address it democratically, so that only a top-down, autocratic solution would have much chance of reversing our reckless course. Now it seems we’re getting the autocracy, but without much progress on climate change—indeed the opposite, at least for the moment. 

And yet, here and there amid the mayhem, courageous people achieve real improvements every day, with a local reforestation program here, a soil restoration project there; another solar power plant replaces another coal plant; a threatened species like the peregrine falcon is nursed back to sustainable population levels in the wild. Though Yes! Magazine ceased publication in June of this year, you can still get a regular dose of positive reporting, environmental and otherwise, at https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/.

None of this is enough, of course, and the big climate problem is a trillion tons of excess carbon already in the atmosphere. “Net zero” is politically frozen, and even if it were enacted tomorrow, it would only prevent new carbon from adding to the existing load. Yet all is not lost, and that margin of brighter possibility—however slim—means two things: 

One, we have to try. As Rabbi Tarfon says in The Ethics of the Fathers: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it” (Pirkei Avot, 2: 16).

Two, we cannot let the giant issues of our day prevent us from fulfilling our birthright: our lifetime’s chance at the earnest effort to achieve wisdom and well-being. I use those terms instead of the Declaration’s famous “pursuit of happiness” because the latter is often too light a word, given what many of us deal with, and what we face as a society and as a species. If happiness is to be our aim, let it be a deeper version that includes the bittersweet struggle to achieve it. As I often mention, Aristotle says happiness “is not amusement; it is good activity,” and goodness often involves the sober and courageous confrontation of what’s necessary. 

All is not lost. Two organizations, and probably more, are focused on restoring the climate, not just slowing its destruction. One is www.climatefoundation.org, based on a fine book by Peter Fiekowski called Climate Restoration. The other is Project Drawdown, which includes a range of already-existing efforts to pull carbon out of the air, and into commercial products and processes that benefit the public and the natural world. These need more attention than they now receive, but that’s changing every day. 

I’m a therapist and a writer, not a climate scientist or an industrial engineer. I don’t know the future. But I am entirely convinced that your best bet, and mine, is to live lives of hope and effort, reaching for agency and awareness rather than helplessness and dissociation. When I work with patients who aren’t troubled by the giant themes of our collective historical moment, I let those sleeping dragons snore in peace. But when patients suffer from excessive preoccupation with problems of greater-than-human scale, I invite them to toggle back and forth between brave confrontation and merciful rest. If your top priority is to push back against the Big Troubles of our historical moment, remember that you can contribute a lot less when you’re exhausted and despondent than when you’re healthy and strong.

If this perspective appeals to you, consider booking an appointment with me today at 917-873-0292, or use the contact form on this website.