内部和外部行动主义

As eco-anxiety and eco-grief have taken hold of society in new ways over the last few years, the tendency to prescribe action as a tool to beat the feelings back has grown. But climate-aware psychotherapist Caroline Hickman 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. 

Hickman says we need to not only grow up in the climate crisis by cultivating our imaginative, creative, determined and hopeful capacities, we also need to grow down by building our tolerance for fear, depression, anger, guilt, shame, and anxiety. After all, life in a human and planetary heatlh emergency is not a straight linear progression. There are uplifting wins and more often, crushing losses. We need to be able to flexibly bear both by growing up and growing down, so that as we move forward in life, we become deeper human beings.

We all need to process some of the distressing feelings that comes with our life-threatening ecological reality, learn how to fold them into our lives, and harness them as strength. This is what Hickman calls “internal activism”, and it is just as important as “external activism” - the more conventional kind.  

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