When It’s Not a Communication Problem
But an Identity in Crisis
There are countless studies and articles on the challenges of communicating difficult or complex realities. But here I want to suggest that perhaps the plight lies not only in better communicating ecopsychology, the polycrisis or wicked-problems, or openness to other cosmologies. Even if we find clearer words, more accessible metaphors, or a more effective pedagogy, the challenges persist. For these are very fragile and emotionally charged areas.
I am speaking of an apparent and deeply felt misunderstanding that does not stem from a lack of information, but from the threat that this information poses to the identity structure that sustains us (us=the global north, low strugle, western thinking, kind of humans).
In the context of ecopsychology, when we say that the psyche has never been merely human, that individual suffering is also ecological, historical, relational, and political, we are not simply adding context or layers. The most fundamental structures are called into question, and what may emerge is a tectonic shift in the very modern fantasy of separation. And this fantasy is not superficial but an entire collective structure, where many of us have learned to recognize ourselves as individuals, rational, autonomous, neutral, objective subjects, separate from the world we consume and observe.
Communicating that the psyche is also ecological strikes at a civilizational defense mechanism, because it is not about trying to communicate difficult content. But it touches a deeper layer where modern identity protects itself from losing its footing: “I am separate,” “I see reality as it is,” “my culture is neutral,” “ecology is the environment out there,” “psychology is the human inside.” When this structure is disrupted, the response may come as bewilderment, confusion, intellectualization, accusations of abstraction, or feeling exhausted or overwhelmed.
Not because the content is necessarily too abstract—after all, we are returning to the living body-place—but because it threatens to make visible what was comfortably and normopathically invisible.
Therefore, openness to other cosmologies is not light, inspiring, or “a matter of intercultural communication” or even inclusive language. The point is that it can trigger an existential crisis, pushing us to lose the world in which we considered ourselves the center, the measure, and the exception. Forcing us to confront the fact that what we called “human” was sustained by exclusions—whether of the Earth, of bodies, or of other beings; of peoples considered “less rational”; of local knowledge; or of the histories that modernity classified as belief, myth, or backwardness.
But it may also seem abstract, vague, intangible, or “merely” theoretical, as a consequence of a civilizational loss of vocabulary, contact, ritual, place, and of direct experience and participation in belonging to the body-place. Our modern psyche has ceased to know or perceive this interweaving.
The point is that the polycrisis of super-wicked problems does not merely challenge our political or economic models. But it tramples on the identity produced by those models and institutions. We are not facing a failure of literacy, but a profound ontological wound. The modern subject is invited to recognize that they have never been outside the living web, that they have never thought without a body or a place, and that they have never been independent. Their freedom, as they imagined it, may have been built upon a violent relational amputation.
After all, the difficulty may not lie solely in the so called content. There may be parts of us that hear “ecology” and immediately think of trees, recycling, or the natural world outside, or even something too vague, or even a philosophical delusion. Or when we hear “other ontologies and cosmologies,” we feel we have entered a territory that is too abstract, distant, and remote.
Yes, it may seem confusing or vague, for we have been taught to perceive ecology as something outside our intimate lives… after all, we have learned that our suffering is ours alone. And upon hearing “the human has never been merely human”, the mind resents it: “but then where do I fit in?” These reactions are not a mistake, but a symptom. Timidly, we begin to recognize that psychology has never been outside of ecology—how could it be? We don’t even need to believe any of this; we just need to notice what happens when other possibilities are presented—what arises first? Resistance? Relief? Irritation? Exhaustion? Confusion? Fear that my “self” will dissolve into the world’s pain?
The problem isn’t that we feel overwhelmed, but the culture that has left us exiled and without the strength to feel and participate in interdependence.
This is because modernity doesn’t live only in the ideas we defend. It also lives in the questions we manage to ask, in the limits of what seems realistic to us, in the things we feel are obvious, ridiculous, dense, or impossible. So, when everything seems overwhelming and hazy, perhaps it’s not just because there are too many concepts. Perhaps it’s because we’re touching a naturalized structure that taught us to separate human and nature, body and world, individual and system, psychology and ecology, reason and belonging.
The question may begin to transform: “What part of me needs the modern vision to remain the only real one?”
After all, denial is also an ecology
In some contexts, like the one I dwell in, we do not first encounter eco-anxiety, eco-grief, or ecological pain. We encounter earlier layers: those of apathy and denial—intellectual or visceral—that human life is ecologically implicated. This denial is not merely ignorance, but a cultural adaptation. It protects the modern subject from an enormous loss of the fantasy of separation, which, when it falls, triggers a turbulent cognitive and sensory apocalypse that seems to tear us apart into sharp pieces. In truth, it is here that we recover more whole parts of who we have always been.
Curiously, when ecopsychology seems “abstract,” perhaps we are facing a reversal, where the most concrete and material—body, place, air, home, food, territory, noise, heat, work, water, belonging—has become difficult to feel as psychological, real, or visceral.
And the most abstract—the isolated, neutral, universal individual, separated from the world—has become what we call “real.” Undoing this inversion holds enormous potential for unlearning.
Here in Ecopsychology, we do not say that your individual experience is not real, invalid, or inferior, but we ask what relationships made it possible. Because ecopsychology does not remove the individual from the center to abandon them… it removes them from isolation to return them to the world. Because the individual does not disappear when they gain context, they gain body and place. Belonging to the web of life.
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