Taboo and Overwhelm
We avoid touching on what hurts.
Today, I’m bringing one of the most delicate areas of ecopsychology in relationally eroded contexts such as modernity: the reality that we are not merely facing a lack of ecological information, but a massive clash of perceptual defenses. This invisible yet heavy social taboo of acknowledging or speaking about eco-anxiety or eco-grief—of silencing, shaming, and humiliating intense ecological emotions as mere “excessive sensitivity.”
Here, in modernity, we have been trained, for decades, generation after generation, to survive in a narrow reality… to be functional, not to feel too much, not to disturb the family, not to “dramatize,” not to speak of death and much less of collapse, not to touch on coloniality nor name the loss of worlds. And then we arrive at ecopsychology, hoping to “feel good about nature”, because that is the only acceptable emotional contract our culture still tolerates.
But on this ecopsychological path, we do not offer nature as a sedative to the modern individual. We venture to co-create a path, slow and relational, to undo the fantasy that we were ever separate.
Ecopsychology drips reality drop by drop onto privileged and anesthetized bodies (that is, those who have not yet directly felt the devastating impacts of the multiple crises already here), in an art of waking from relational anesthesia. What has happened to us that the Earth, the air, the water, the heat, the food, the noise, the territory, and the future are no longer felt as part of our psychic life? We need to create places where the world’s pain can finally cease to be a silenced, concealed, and private threat, becoming a matter of connection, lucidity, and collective responsibility, so that we can collectively open ourselves to the necessary and inevitable difficult conversations.
We recognize that the taboo is a collective defense and not an individual failure
The taboo against speaking of the polycrisis is not merely apathy or ignorance. It is a defense against pain, powerlessness, guilt, historical shame, the loss of a future, and the fear that, if we truly look, the life we know will cease to be livable. It is a taboo that weighs tons in unprocessed emotions, unacknowledged grief, and violence turned into culture.
The literature on anxiety and ecological grief shows that these responses are not pathological in themselves, as they can be reasonable responses to real, anticipated, and unequally distributed ecological losses. Cunsolo and colleagues emphasize that anxiety and ecological grief arise in relation to physical losses, loss of environmental knowledge, and anticipated future losses. These impacts disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples, farmers, young people, climate scientists, and other highly exposed groups.
The question becomes: how do we create communities mature enough so that feeling reality is not experienced as a private collapse?
What world had to be erased for you not to feel?
In contexts of apathy and dissociation, asking directly, “What do you feel about the climate crisis?” can be disorienting, frightening, and overwhelming. Denial and defense/attack quickly take control of a situation perceived as threatening. The truth is that dissociation is often a form of survival. Due to the weight of social taboo, combined with the emotional intensity of all this, many of us still lack the language, body, community, or inner permission to respond. But let’s try asking in a different way:
“When you hear about the ecological crisis, what happens in your body?”
“What part of you wants to change the subject?”
“What part of you thinks this is an exaggeration?”
“What family, cultural, or social loyalties are asking (demanding) you not to feel this?”
“What would be too painful to acknowledge?”
Ecopsychology is not meant to “convince,” but to map defenses with tenderness and precision, to support and embrace complex and highly emotionally charged issues. Joseph Dodds, by crossing psychoanalysis and ecology, works precisely at this threshold between eco-anxiety, denial, defenses, humor, guilt, dissociation, fantasies of control, splitting, and the way the ecological crisis confronts the modern subject with limits they cannot process.
We begin with the discrepancies
In a context where “ecology” still seems abstract, perhaps the first step is to reveal the reversal … for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the noise that pierces us, the heat that exhausts us, the food that reaches our table, the anxiety without apparent cause… are concrete! The home, the salary, the territory, the fear, the exhaustion, the isolation, the screen, the fragmented sleep—all of this is ecological, however fragmented and violent. And yet, as I have been pointing out, we call the abstract, isolated, autonomous individual—separated from the world—“real”!
Except that the polycrisis has never been an external issue, but a relational field already present in our lives and bodies.
Co-creating a Refuge
In privileged and numbed contexts, truth without a container triggers further denial, overwhelming us and raising defenses and dissociation. Through ecopsychology, we can create containers of listening that are safe, but not comfortable in the modern sense. That bring truth without crushing us—despite the already crushing of the worlds communities through ongoing neocolonial extraction. Without lulling us to sleep or causing dissociation.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson writes about collective grief as something that Western culture tends to individualize and rush… there is little (or no) space to mourn cultural, racial, historical, and collective losses. When pain arises, it is often tolerated for a short time and then returned to the individual, “here, this is yours alone.”
This intersects directly with the taboo of the polycrisis, for we are not merely afraid of the crisis; we have lost the culture of staying together when the crisis enters the body.
Therefore, an ecopsychological practice is a place where we can begin to feel a little more of reality, without having to carry it alone.
Working with the fantasy of “feeling good with nature”
The expectation of “feeling good with nature” is understandable (and a biological reality), but it needs to be carefully nuanced. Nature, when it ceases to be shackled by a therapeutic setting, is not merely soothing; it is kin, body, wound, otherness, mystery, conflict, death, nourishment, decomposition, interdependence, loss, and regeneration…
Ecopsychology does not deny nature’s restorative or inspiring dimension, but opens up the relationship, making other questions possible: “What is this place asking of me?” “What pain of this territory do I still not know how to hear?” “What part of me wants nature without the world, without conflict, without politics, without loss?”
Pluriversal and decolonial psychologies help here because they reject a psychology detached from land, history, and power. They clearly affirm that the decolonial struggle for land is also a struggle over systems of reciprocal relationships and obligations, and that Western psychology has often ignored the land as a nourisher of the soul, culture, community, and identity.
Because ecopsychology is NOT therapy with a pretty landscape, but a reconfiguration of the psyche as a relational territory, amid wonder, grief, trauma, contamination, destruction, enchantment, and love.
Dissociation as a loss of the world, not as a moral defect
In colonial, conservative, and normopathic contexts, many people wear an armor that was not freely chosen—it was inherited, imposed, and necessary for belonging. Through ecopsychology, we do not want to tear off the armor and be left raw, but to listen to it and ask what it has been protecting. For perhaps it is preventing contact with one’s own life.
I often say in class that there is no shame in this process; it is not a personal failure or mistake, nor is it an accusation, but rather the naming of our collective context. The pedagogy of the polycrisis offers firmness without humiliation, because your numbness is not your fault. But now that you are beginning to see it, it becomes a responsibility.
Making pain a collective competence
Camille Sapara Barton shows that grief does not have to be merely private or clinical. It can be a communal practice, a generative force, a way to create intimacy, trust, and interdependence. Barton specifically critiques the Western tendency to help people “move on” and return to productivity, rather than recognizing grief as a force for transformation and connection. We must cultivate and nurture these other ways of relating to intense emotions, for without them, pain crystallizes into panic, cynicism, collapse, or moral superiority. With a collective container or refuge, pain can become connection, lucidity, fierce tenderness, responsibility, and localized action.
This is a huge key to Ecopsychology, for feeling the polycrisis is not the end of the capacity to act, but can be the beginning of a less fanciful agency.
Aww, I’m so glad you made it this far ❤️.
Let’s re-educate the nervous system!
Perhaps the role of ecopsychology, in these modern-colonial contexts, is to humbly and generously accompany a layered journey:
From nature as a backdrop to nature as a relationship.
From individual well-being to relational health.
From anxiety as a private problem to a shared field symptom.
From crisis as an abstraction to body-place-history.
From paralyzing guilt to situated responsibility.
From hope as anesthesia to commitment without guarantee.
From armor to porosity with margins.
From fantastical dissociation to contact in transformation.
And this requires rhythm and commitment, imperfect presence, courage, and a certain dose of affectionate madness, despite the taboos and emotional burdens in which these themes are entangled, and despite our being overwhelmed. The modern clock demands “results,” but waking up from anesthesia is not productivity. It is a re-education of the nervous system, of the imagination, and of belonging.
Barton, Camille Sapara. Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2024.
Bednarek, Steffi, ed. Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2024.
Comas-Díaz, Lillian, Hector Y. Adames, and Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, eds. Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2024.
Cunsolo, Ashlee, Sherilee L. Harper, Susan Minor, Katie Hayes, Kimberley G. Williams, and Courtney Howard. “Ecological Grief and Anxiety: The Start of a Healthy Response to Climate Change?” The Lancet Planetary Health 4, no. 7 (2020): e261–e263.
Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville R. Ellis. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss.” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Karen Landman, eds. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.
Dodds, Joseph. Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze|Guattari and Psychoanalysis for a Climate in Crisis. London: Routledge, 2011.
Doherty, Thomas. Surviving Climate Anxiety: Coping, Healing and Thriving on a Changing Planet. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2025.
Johnson, Michelle Cassandra. Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2021.
Johnson, Rae. Embodied Activism: Engaging the Body to Cultivate Liberation, Justice, and Authentic Connection. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2023.
Parra-Valencia, Liliana, Saulo Fernandes, and Dolores Galindo. Psicología y descolonialidad: Saberes para curar en palenques y quilombos (Colombia-Brasil). Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, 2022. https://doi.org/10.16925/9789587603637.
Wray, Britt. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety. New York: The Experiment, 2022.