The Four Pillars of Climate Healing
Excerpts from The Climate Optimist Handbook
© 2023 Anne Therese Gennari
When I first decided to become a climate optimist, I thought the answer to doing so was to seek the good news and ignore the bad. I thought if I could only filter out all the negative and painful information about climate change, I could continue wearing the smile I was given and start to believe in a better world. I wanted to be the sun in all the clouds, for myself and for others, and continue to show up with optimism, action, and faith. If I gave in to the doom and gloom of climate despair, I was afraid I would lose myself back into that world and not be able to continue on my mission.
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I had no idea how wrong I was.
What I had to learn the hard way is that there’s no such thing as not knowing. Because even if you’re trying hard—really hard—to focus only on the positive, a part of you still pays attention to everything else, and your body will remember the pain. While you’re out there spreading sunshine, your subconscious picks up all the other valuable information it thinks you ought to pay attention to and stores it for later. And if you never give it any attention, that information will add up and keep adding up.
It took me some years to recognize this, but one day, the outbursts started to become more and more frequent—crying in the shower, tantrums at the salad bar, foul moods over nothing in the car. The “attacks” always came without warning, and I never quite understood what was going on. I seemed to be holding on to something, but I didn’t know what it was. Arthur (my husband), even more clueless, always tried to help, but he soon learned it was better just to leave it alone. I would come out of it eventually.
That is what having climate anxiety has done to me. I’ve cried in the shower. I’ve thrown adult tantrums over plastic forks. I’ve started fights with my family about things I can’t remember. I’ve been angry for no reason, sad for no reason, and for years, I was haunted by this deep and uncomfortable feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I’ve felt alone in the world as if no one truly hears or understands me, which only strengthened my anger toward the world. I’ve hated society. I’ve hated people and their ignorance. I’ve even hated myself many times. How could we live like this? How could we be so ignorant and selfish when the natural world is desperately crying for our help?
Climate anxiety is real, and it can show up in many ways. My low was probably when I was consciously starving myself because I wanted to feel the pain of the millions of suffering factory farm animals around the world. I thought if I could feel pain, I could somehow connect my pain with theirs, and we would be in it together. This might be the stupidest thing you’ve heard, but when you’re upset, you often act in ways that don’t make sense.
My climate optimist awakening (a moment of pure surrender when I cried on my parent’s floor and landed in the message: “You’re here to be a climate optimist”) saved me in many ways. It was when I recognized I had to start taking serious care of myself or none of my work would matter. If I’m not strong, how can I help the world? If I can’t be light, how can I activate the light in others?
I’m grateful for the ups and downs my mental climate journey has taken me on because I’ve learned the only way to change the world is by changing ourselves first. And the only way to heal the world is by healing ourselves. If we don’t choose to actively work on our own healing, how can we serve the healing of others? If we can’t find our light, how will we help others find theirs?
If a friend falls down a well, you don’t want to jump down after them and say, “Hi, I thought you might want some company down here. At least now we’re stuck together.” Do that, and they’ll look at you in disbelief and simply reply, “Idiot.” Instead, you want to find a rope, muster all your strength, and help them out. The same goes for our healing work.
Although empathy and the ability to see and understand someone else’s pain is a beautiful act in the moment, you don’t help them in the long run by lowering yourself to the same level of pain. If you want to truly help someone, let them grieve as needed, waiting to offer a portal back into the light. They won’t want to be stuck in Sorrowland forever, and when they’re ready, they will seek out the light again. You get to be that light if you choose to be a conduit for healing, an anchor to the good energy so needed in this world.
When it comes to the world at large, I believe it’s important we understand this idea of keeping the light burning. With all the pain surrounding you, more often than not, you might feel that to be a good citizen, you should shoulder the fears and sorrows of everyone around you. If you don’t show them you’re heartbroken and disturbed all the time—because how could you not be with everything going on in the world?—it might come across like you don’t care. Therefore, it’s almost easier to be angry and worried all the time because it’s what you think is expected. Choosing to channel the light can seem scary, but that is also how you begin embodying the change we so desperately need.
When I chose to hurt myself to “feel the pain” of all the animals around the world, I wasn’t helping anyone. I recognize that now. But it took me many years of active healing to get where I am today. I still have days when it’s hard to keep the tears down, and when those days come, I allow myself to cry because when I allow myself to feel, I also allow myself to heal.
I want you to become a master at this. I want you to get so good at staying attuned to your feelings and emotions that you can process them effortlessly when needed, and continue to be a conduit of healing and light for yourself and for the world.
This work is not a “one and done” thing. Healing and emotional empowerment take practice, and just like with working out, to stay strong, you need to commit to it for the long haul. But similar to working out, once you’ve reached a certain physique and made your new normal strong and resilient, sticking to these habits will become second nature for you. It will be who you are—a healing vessel for change.
To me, climate healing relies on four pillars:
- Start by recognizing that it’s okay to feel and let yourself be one with your emotions. Ignoring your feelings will not make them go away. They will only build up inside, which can lead to anxiety and depression. Letting yourself feel is the first step in healing. You might feel scared by this, but your heart is stronger than you know, and if you practice tuning in to your emotions more often, you will soon learn how to let them flow through you with ease.
- Once you’ve recognized it’s okay to feel your emotions, no matter how difficult they are, it’s important to remember you don’t have to hold on to these feelings to make a difference. You’re not a better activist because you’re angry and worried all the time. In fact, you’ll be much more effective if you choose to heal yourself and act from a place of strength, love, and light.
- Understand that you’re not alone. By talking about it with others, you activate your own healing, first of all, but you also allow others to start their healing process. When we share how we feel, we begin to understand we’re not alone. That is a good first step in releasing pain. Also, when we come together in fear and grief, we feel like we have support, like there is hope. Hope is where the action grows.
- This leads me to the last part—taking action. Pennsylvania State University psychology professor Janet Smith explains the fastest way out of anxiety is by feeling you have control. When you take action, you feel you have control. Whatever you can do to make a difference, no matter how small it may seem, do it. Become the change you wish to see, and slowly work yourself out of despair and into empowered action. (We’ll talk about this a lot more in the Choosing Empowerment section.)
You can’t grow abs by closing your eyes and dreaming about them. At some point, you have to get on the floor and do some crunches. The same goes for emotional resilience. You can’t just tell yourself you want to feel better. You have to seek out activities that activate healing. I prefer free, simple, and easy to access at all times activities. My favorite exercises for mental health are journaling, talking, and positive action. For free resources on this, visit www.theclimateoptimist.com/resources. But it also comes down to learning how to deal with awareness, and more importantly – growing your emotional resilience and fear mark.
Raising Your Fear Mark
Learning how to deal with negative news is something they don’t teach you in school but absolutely should. Instead, it seems we get an overload of incredibly difficult information dumped on us without any help or guidance on how to actually deal with it. It’s like we’ve forgotten that behind all our titles, outfits, and social media accounts, we’re actually humans. We are living, breathing things with pumping blood and beating hearts, bodies with feelings and minds that process information way beyond what any robot would have. (I know robots are becoming astonishingly smart these days with cute “feelings” and all, but stay with me here.)
If you’re anything like me, you may have experienced compassion overload. It gets to the point when you simply can’t see another story about wildfires, oil spills, or school shootings—it’s too much to take in. You reach a point when you simply can’t care anymore. The world seems to be going under, and you feel there’s nothing you can do but surrender to that fate.
If we’re going under, so be it—I’m tapping out.
This is what happens when we run out of emotional storage. In Climate Cure, Jack Adam Weber calls it our fear mark: “Our fear mark is the degree of fear we can tolerate while remaining rational and skillful in our response to information. Until we develop awareness, our fears rule us.”
Until we develop awareness, our fears rule us. In other words, it’s not enough to be aware of the issue at hand. We also need to be aware of how it might make us feel. If we’re blind to the fact that learning certain things hurts, we are powerless to properly handle the information. Raising our fear mark, then, means getting better at staying aware without getting overwhelmed.
Chances are if you’re not aware of your fear mark or haven’t been trained to raise it, you can’t take that much. Someone you meet on the street could say something you’re not ready to hear and your immediate response is, “Oh, I know, it’s terrible. I don’t want to talk about it.”
That’s fair. We don’t have to talk about everything that’s going on in the world (and I’m getting to that point shortly), but if our instant reaction is we don’t want to know, we’re keeping ourselves stuck in our current state of awareness. From there, it’s impossible to grow.
If you don’t understand your fear mark, you probably have a low threshold for bad news. You might hear the news, but you’re not letting it actually touch you. If your fear mark is low, it’s simply too hard to handle difficult information. Instead, you close those ports and hope the painful feeling will pass by you and move on.
But we need to be aware, so ensuring we can handle difficult information is paramount. It’s not enough to say we’re ready. We have to actually be ready. That is where acknowledging our fear mark comes in. Because once we acknowledge it, we can begin to grow it.
In the beginning, your ability to take in negative news might be low, and that’s okay. There’s no need to overwhelm yourself, and by taking in bad news in bite-size pieces, you can get stronger and raise your fear mark over time. And if you can raise it really high, you can know what’s going on in the world, actually feel it in your emotional body, without letting it overwhelm you. You’ll be a super-compassionate being with the power to—in all honesty—change the world.
One of those super-compassionate people was Mother Teresa. I read she had to ignore homeless people on the street daily. It surprised me. I thought she would be so aware she could never ignore someone in need. But then I understood she did see, but she also recognized she couldn’t help everyone. And part of being vividly aware and strong was being able to understand when you should act and when you should not.
If we try to be everything for everyone, we’ll end up being nothing to anyone
I live in New York. When I first moved here, I found it so difficult to go anywhere because whether you take the subway or walk down the street, you will pass by someone in need. Being a poor student at the time, it was difficult to know when to drop a dollar in their cup. I felt so ashamed and disappointed with myself. Who was I to ignore suffering?
But then I remembered what I had read about Mother Teresa and reminded myself not every battle was mine to fight. Simply recognizing others don’t have it as good as me is sometimes enough. I don’t have enough money to feed every person experiencing homelessness I pass. That’s just a fact. I can choose to acknowledge I can’t help everyone, or I can close my eyes and ignore the people suffering all around me. One requires strength and humility; the other is the easy way out. I realized that choosing not to see the suffering would be worse than acknowledging my economic shortcomings. It takes strength to see something, want to help, and at the same time accept that you can’t always do so.
A couple of years later, I attended a practice run at a secret theater club where a group of acting students performed a sketch as if they were homeless. To practice, they had spent a couple of nights on the street with actual people experiencing homelessness (I was very impressed), and they said what they learned stunned them.
One man had told them something in particular that changed how they view people experiencing homelessness forever, and by sharing it on the stage, they did the same for me. This man had said what he was asking for, more than anything else, was to be seen. “It’s okay if you can’t give money or food,” he had said. “We can understand that. But if you can just acknowledge that we’re there, maybe give a nod and a smile if you feel comfortable doing so, that’s enough.” People experiencing homelessness feel their absolute worst when people pass by and act as if they aren’t even there.
What that teaches us is that the most important thing we have in this world is the love and energy shared between people—known or unknown—and never to take the relationships we share for granted. (Think about that the next time someone yells at you for something. At least they recognize your existence!) I think it is also a great reminder that it’s okay to acknowledge difficulty and pain and tell ourselves we can’t always step in and help. Think of Mother Teresa, the saint of all saints, who walked by the homeless and recognized she couldn’t help them all individually. If she could do that, so can you, but you have to raise your fear mark first. You have to learn to get comfortable with the world as it is before you can fully take your place in it.
Here are five steps for how to deal with difficult and negative news. Practice these and you will notice your emotional resilience grow and your fear mark with it.
- Find your balance. Too little awareness might lead to anxiety and stress, and too much can overwhelm you. Recognize that we’re all on different resilience levels and some people can consume more negative news than others. By knowing yourself and your limits, you can begin to recognize when you feel overwhelmed and take a break. Keep it bitesize and grow your emotional resilience over time.
- Practice healthy denial. We all deny negative news to one degree or another. It would simply be impossible to live and function if we were to think about it all the time. Denial isn’t always bad, and tuning out from time to time is essential for our wellbeing.
- Mix in optimism. A good way to consume negative news is to follow up with something positive. That way you can remain aware without feeling like you lose yourself to anxiety and stress. It’s okay to find reasons to smile amid all the bad and you—the everyday hero choosing to work on your emotional resilience—deserve it more than anyone. Seek out the good news too. Listen to uplifting music. Sing, dance, and enjoy life. Do that and you’ll be much better equipped to do something about the things you’re learning.
- Talk about it. By sharing what you’re learning with others, you might find that you’re not alone in your worries, which will help ease anxiety. Just keep in mind that others’ emotional resilience might be very different from yours—tread lightly and with kindness.
- Fear + Grief = Empowered Action Grief alone can consume you. Fear alone can push you into a paralyzed state. But when combined in healthy doses, and applied to an attitude of wanting to make change, you can fuel it into empowered action. Don’t just learn and let go—empower yourself and do something about it. Knowing what you know now, what can you do today to make it better? Choose to act and be the change, and be assured the world will follow.
The truth is that we are in this now, whether we like it or not. But we’re in it together, and if we are able to change the narrative of the stories we tell ourselves, we could see these times for what they (actually) really are – a time for change. We choose our tomorrow today and the sooner we find the courage to start choosing change, the bigger our chances of creating a future that’s not only different from what we know now but perhaps more beautiful than anything we’ve seen to date.
Will we make it through? Will we be able to reverse global warming and build a regenerative, thriving economy and world? Who knows. But what I do know is that right now, we have the power to try and everyone alive today gets a chance to participate in this journey toward a better world. I don’t know about you but I think this makes for pretty exciting times to be alive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Therese is a TEDx Speaker, author, educator, and sustainable influencer who’s passionate about changing the narrative on climate change so that we can act from courage and excitement, not fear.
Her book The Climate Optimist Handbook came out in 2022. Learn more at www.theclimateoptimist.com.
Posted by mkeane on Wednesday, May 31st, 2023 @ 10:07PM
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