Maria: It is as if going to the heath and going to the pond, pulls up a different part of me. I would say that it is a way for me to get back in touch with my ecological self. But not just my ecological self – I am thinking of myself, with a capital S with a Jungian terminology. That it pulls me into a larger part of myself; which is where I can access again a more mature wisdom if you like. Maria talks about the different strands of her outdoor work as an ecopsychologist. A big part of her practice is teaching ecopsychology and this highlights aspects that other therapists talked about in my research. For these therapists the work in the outdoors focuses on developing an ecological self through experiential contact with the natural world. Whilst not strictly being psychotherapy, this was seen as profoundly therapeutic, and part of a wider project linked to applied ecopsychology, in order to help people think about reciprocal relationships with the natural world.
Maria: But in a sense what propelled me into that was – it is no good just sitting in lecture theatres lecturing people about the need to live sustainably. You know, somehow we have got to find ways to help people think in a very different way. So that was my first jump-off point.
Doug also talks about the transformative and spiritual potential of the outdoors and how this links to his rationale for taking therapeutic work outdoors and the ecological concerns and goals that underpin this. He draws strongly from ideas espoused in both ecopsychology (Roszak 1992; Roszak et al. 1995) and deep ecology (Naess 1973) around the development of an ecological self. Doug is aware of the therapeutic process associated with the development of this way of being in the world. In this sense Doug (as with a few of my other participants) is committed
to an agenda of transformation and activism. From this perspective the self as an isolated entity is questioned. The development of an ecological self can be facilitated by transformative experiences in wilderness environments (Greenway 1995).
Doug’s story conveys perhaps most powerfully the central role that nature and wilderness play in his sense of well-being and how he actively seeks out these spaces in order to facilitate the development of his spiritual self.
Doug: And it was whilst I was travelling I had some really massive experiences in areas of wild land, you know beyond my wildest imagination really. I had always recreated in the UK but finally made it to Canada and America. And I think I got exposed for the first time to, you know, vast areas of land where they were wild. And that had a huge impact on me. I had some experiences there which were deeply transformative, and I think that is the point where being in those places became a deeply spiritual thing for me. And I guess to answer your question, finally (chuckles), is in those places that I feel most real. For Doug this links to an important psychological aspect of the work which facilitates a move to a less ‘ego’-bound sense of self, which also seems to inform the way he understands aspects of his therapeutic work. We see again here how the therapist’s model for self-healing is transferred and applied to a model for helping others.
Doug: And there are words like ‘original nature’ or ‘indigenous nature’ – there is something . . . I feel it in my body though. It is like, I recognise that even at home, if I go off out into the hills or off out to the sea or whatever, that something drops away physically. Like breathing out or losing an anxiety. And what it feels to me like is it is a very original state. Those environments to me are primordial environments, and everything else other than that requires me to hold some kind of a tension – I guess to maintain an ego or something? This focus and belief feeds into the therapeutic rationale for Doug’s work, which is to shift the sense of self as individual to more of a collective and ecological sense of self. These ideas seem to me to link to Jungian notions of a ‘psyche’ not solely contained within the individual but also spread out in the world (Sabini 2002). Rather than a contained ego-bound self which some might see as an illusion, the psyche is contained both within individuals and within the environment, positing a more ecological sense of self. Doug articulates a coherent theoretical stance towards this process and why working in what he terms a more ‘wilderness’ environment facilitates this shift in a sense of self.
Doug: I mean if you think about that classic kind of doughnut paradigm with the individualistic, skin-bound ego sense of self in the middle, and then the social sense of self around it, and then outside of that something else: but if you take
away the central sense of self, and replace that – in our western – of course we are forced to be skin-bound ego – things in the wild construct where no one gives a fig what you look like, or behave like – they don’t care – there is no one there to care. And that reconnects people to the primordial sense of what it is to be human. It gives that space, in a sense for the longest period in our evolution. So it reconnects people to the individuals as well, and it feels very real. I think it helps people get – getting a whole kind of sense of themselves. This primordial sense of self is strongly linked to a rationale for developing a more ecological sense of self. Doug articulates a position consistent with his affiliation to ecopsychology (Roszak 1992; Roszak et al. 1995) and deep ecology (Naess 1973). It is argued that the human being needs to be interdependent with their environment for ‘healing’. There needs to be a marrying between a psychological and ecological sense of self. Greenway (1995) has espoused this link to experience of wilderness, ecopsychology and therapeutic work with groups and this is the therapeutic focus of the work that Doug is engaged in.
Doug: But the psychological sense of self, it does not match that ecological idea of self, and so I think one of the challenges to the healing process is about getting those two senses of self to marry. And we have grown up with that frame of reference that it is ‘me’ – and ‘the world’, this is the whole idea embedded in our psychology. But ecologically, yes there are boundaries, and there are edges, but they are incredibly permeable, and there is a very close network of inter-connection which defines what we are, as organisms. So I think, you know, I think that the core of the work is giving people a direct experience of themselves as part of the ecosystem. And then helping them process that and of course that is usually . . . what we have found is, people feel lost and they feel – I mean if you did this and you didn’t really group and there wasn’t a process of support and people working therapeutically, it would be a horrible experience.
What Doug highlights here is the therapeutic element of this shift in self, which without some sort of therapeutic support and group holding, might destabilise the person. In this way we can see that there is an important psychotherapeutic element to any transformative work in wilderness environments. The development of an ecological self starts with the individual and their emotional and psychological world. Doug then goes on to discuss some important aspects of the therapeutic process in relation to experiencing this expanded sense of self. He highlights the importance of the group as a container and safe space (Bion 1970). The context – sitting around an open fire – is important to this sense of safety in order for participants to process what feels like a profound experience.