Eco anxiety
How does climate change make you feel? Sad? Afraid? Guilty? Rest-assured you’re not the only one feeling this way…
Author and psychoanalyst Anouchka Grouse helps us to understand what we’re feeling and how to manage our emotions.
What is eco anxiety?
No one who experiences eco-anxiety needs to be given a definition of it. If you follow the science on the climate emergency, you know. The question is how to live with it, and this can be even more difficult to answer if you live or work with children who are experiencing it too. While you might just about be able to metabolise your own painful feelings, it’s sometimes much harder to carry the feelings of younger people who’ve done little to contribute to the crisis but are faced with its escalating effects.
What can we do about it?
The two main pillars of advice regarding eco-anxiety are to act to preserve the future and also to appreciate the present. The two need to work together. If you’re only focussed on pre-empting what lies ahead you’re liable to burn out. But you can’t just be happy pottering around in the here-and-now knowing that there’s an emergency that needs tending to. This goes for children too. They need to feel empowered to make a difference and to appreciate the world as it is. It’s a paradox, but an important one for us all to be able to live with.
Helping our children
We can’t shield children from knowledge of what’s happening — they’re going to hear about it one way or another. So we have to be there for them when they have questions and to be able to take their fears seriously without amplifying them with fears of our own. It can sometimes seem like an impossible task.
Feeling guilty?
One of the most difficult aspects of being a parent or significant adult is the haunting idea that we didn’t do nearly enough, that we thoughtlessly fed the problem rather than trying to fix it while there was still plenty of time. This can make us feel helpless and guilty. But maybe it can be useful to remember that we were children once too. We were also born into a world being run along certain lines and it took us time to realise we could make choices about how to live and whether or not we agreed with the systems and cultures we were a part of. We’re not SO different from our children, we’re all just learning as we go.
Just be honest
Perhaps one of the best and bravest things we can do for the next generation is to be with them in their hopes and fears, rather than retreat into shame and self-castigation. We need to be honest as well as kind, realistic as well as hopeful, simultaneously urgent and accepting. It’s a notoriously difficult balance to strike and it would be understandable to be haunted by the possibility of defeat, but that’s all the more reason to keep going. Inter-generational conflict needn’t be a thing if we’re realistic about our flaws and failings and are able to face the future with courage. Our children need us to hold them until they’re ready to stand alone, and this is nowhere more true than in the climate and ecological crisis.
Peace and love — keep going!
Anouchka x
