The Great Grief: How to cope with losing our world

"[...] In order to respond adequately, we may need to mourn these losses. Insufficient mourning keeps us numb or stuck in anger at them, which only feeds the cultural polarization. But for this to happen, the presence of supportive voices and models are needed. It is far harder to get acceptance of our difficulty and despair, and to mourn without someone else’s explicit affirmation and empathy.

Contact with the pain of the world, however, does not only bring grief but can also open the heart to reach out to all things still living. It holds the potential to break open the psychic numbing. Maybe there is also community to be found among like-hearted people, among those who also can admit they’ve been touched by this “Great Grief,” feeling the Earth’s sorrow, each in their own way. Not just individual mourning is needed, but a shared process that leads onwards to public re-engagement in cultural solutions. Working out our own answers as honestly as we can, as individuals and as communities, is rapidly becoming a requirement for psychological health.

To cope with losing our world requires us to descend through the anger into mourning and sadness, not speedily bypass them to jump onto the optimism bandwagon or escape into indifference. And with this deepening, an extended caring and gratitude may open us to what is still here, and finally, to acting accordingly."

- Per Espen Stoknes, "The Great Grief: How to cope with losing our world".

This short piece gives a sense of some of the psychological and emotional ground I cover in many of my presentations on climate change. It also briefly presents a version of the argument I make in my thesis (grounded not just in psychological research, but in Christian theology) about the significance of walking into our uncomfortable emotions if we are to think and act well as followers of Jesus and human creatures on a warming world.

Christian faith is a good context in which to explore and embrace the grief this article speaks about. Such grief (and the related anger, guilt, anxiety, etc.) is one of the vastly under-acknowledged realities of our day that shapes (amongst many things) the possibilities of Christian outreach; this is one of the things going on for many people, who are earnestly looking for a narrative that can make sense of this experience and a community in which to live it and respond to it.

And from my experience of talking to now thousands of Christians about this, there are many people in the pews experiencing this grief who have their own pastoral needs. It is not an issue that I think Christian leaders can ignore.

I have been touched by this Great Grief. Have you?
Image from here.

Climate and mental health

“People may, indeed, suffer from anxiety about climate change but not know it. They will have a vague unease about what is happening around them, the changes they see in nature, the weather events and the fact that records are being broken month after month. But they won’t be sufficiently aware of the source, and furthermore, we all conflate and layer one anxiety upon another.”

- "Climate Change is Wreaking Havoc on our Mental Health, experts say", The Star, 28th February 2016.

Living on a warming world is bad for your mental health. For climate scientists, environmentalists and those who have lived through climate-related extreme events, the impacts are often quite conscious. For many others, there is a deep unease lying not too far below the surface.

Awakening to climate change has affected my own mood considerably over the last eight or nine years. I have spent long periods of time depressed, angry, anxious and grieving. My thesis topic looking at emotional responses to climate change was prompted by both my own experience and the testimony of many people I know well who have started to take climate change seriously.

Finding resources to cope and reasons to keep going when we know worse is on its way will only become more important as the century progresses. My hunch has been that the gospel of Jesus, the community of the church and Christian practices of discipleship and spirituality may have a constructive role to play for some people. Not that these "cure" mental distress, but that they can shed new light on uncomfortable emotional experiences and keep open the possibility of creative action amidst bleak situations.
Image by Loic Venance (AFP/Getty Images). Waves breaks against a pier and a lighthouse during high winds in Les Sables-d'Olonne, western France, on February 9, 2016