Read on Twitter
As #ecoanxiety and #ecogrief have taken hold of society in new ways over the last few years, the tendency to prescribe activism as a tool to beat the feelings back has grown. But climate-aware psychotherapist @Carolinehickma argues there’s a danger lurking in that sentiment.
It’s a shortcut -- a too-quick move from pain to action -- and it threatens to leave people far less resilient and capable of facing the ecological crisis than they ought to be... https://gendread.substack.com/p/why-activism-isnt-really-the-cure
We all need to process some of the anxiety, grief and depression that come with our life-threatening ecological reality, and learn how to fold them into our lives. This is what Hickman calls “internal activism”, and it is just as important as “external activism”
The trick is to not get lost in the dark places that internal activism brings us to - - to keep moving - - and to welcome the idea that we’ll cycle through the trenches again because this crisis is life-long.
Read the full article that gets into how this works as well as @Carolinehickma's brilliant scale of how eco-anxiety shows up in our lives: https://gendread.substack.com/p/why-activism-isnt-really-the-cure
+ the insights of @reneelertzman can help us frame how we think about action as a way of bringing relief to ecoanxious feelings in nuanced ways that don't promise to erase the pain
For weekly writings about living well with eco-anxiety and grief, the dilemmas this crisis puts us in, and how to change the mental health system so it can respond to the climate crisis with more integrity sign up at http://gendread.substack.com
