Working with Fear
Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah,
we are full of the fears and anxieties over our position,
which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes,
have resulted from this over-hasty jump.45
~yuval harari, sapiens
In the previous chapter we explored the Yin and Yang dynamics of anger and grief, which pertain to the Metal and Wood phases of Chinese medicine, respectively. We also saw how working wisely with these emotions influences our ability to show up for our triangle of resilience relationships and climate action. Now we turn to building emotional intelligence around fear, the emotion pertaining to the Water phase. We will examine how fear often dictates what we notice and our capacity to engage with what matters.
Consistent with the dark depths of the Water phase, there is arguably no difficult emotion more foundational, powerful, and challenging than fear. Fear also underlies our resistance to experience other difficult emotions such as grief, anger, remorse, despair, and even joy. Together with grief and anger, fear completes the triad of difficult primary emotions pertaining to the Five Phases, all of which must be worked with to attain full-fledged emotional intelligence and truly holistic climate cure.
Self-healing through grief work is most effective when we know how to manage our unhelpful fears, including anxieties. Fear and anxiety prevent us from productive inner work with other challenging emotions, making us “cruel and dangerous” 46 to ourselves, the natural world, and one another. The corollary is also true: bolstering our triangle of resilience relationships while our fears and anxieties are active is invaluable for managing these heightened states. We should therefore simultaneously seek to improve these relationships while we work to mitigate fear and anxiety.
What follows is an orientation to the dynamics of fear and how to work with them in the context of relating with ourselves, others, and the ongoing environmental crisis.
Helpful vs. Unhelpful Fear
An allegory from Eastern spirituality lends insight to distinguishing between helpful and unhelpful fear, as well as to how our awareness can help us successfully navigate this emotion.47 The parable tells of a monk returning home after work. He comes upon what he thinks is a snake in the road and becomes fearful of being bitten, unsure if he can pass. He proceeds carefully and discovers what he thought was a snake is actually a rope, perhaps dropped by a previous traveler.
All fear reactions are initially helpful because they alert us to possible danger. But perceiving a rope to be a snake is ultimately an unhelpful fear—which we can also call an irrational or unrealistic fear—because it is a misperception of reality. This causes us to recoil and react unnecessarily, expending valuable energy and ultimately limiting us. Conversely, fear reactions in response to real danger—which we can also call rational or realistic fear—are ultimately helpful. Encountering a snake or feeling scared of a quickly moving avalanche are real threats that produce helpful realistic fear. Helpful fears propel us to immediate action that keeps us safe.
Fear is hardwired in us, meaning we don’t have conscious control over it when it first arises. In the moment, we can’t think our way out of it, nor would we want to. We are wired to react with fear to all possible danger because it’s not adaptive to stop and analyze whether a threat is truly dangerous or not. By the time we figure it out, we could be dead. Failing to jump away from a rustle in the brush or crouch when we hear a loud noise doesn’t maximize our survival chances. So, when immediately threatened, we react to save ourselves from possible injury. In fact, such fear reactions (similar to reactive anger) shut down our capacity for conscious reflection, rendering us unable to think clearly or do anything but instinctively react to save our lives. As soon as this initial fear response subsides, however, our reasoning faculty returns and we can assess the danger. The immediate knee-jerk mechanism is valuable because expending some time and energy reacting to a potential fear is a small cost compared to the alternative of being seriously harmed.
Because we are not evolutionarily equipped to immediately distinguish between ultimately helpful and unhelpful fears, we must fill in this missing aptitude with conscious discrimination. We do this by intentionally reflecting as soon as possible—but only once we are safe from danger—to determine if the threat is real or not. This way we conserve energy and learn the truth about the threat, which informs our next actions. So, while we can’t prevent our immediate, prerational (hardwired) fear reactions, we can choose not to exacerbate them. This allows us to respond more than merely react.
If we don’t learn to surmount our unhelpful fear of ultimately harmless threats, the fear can also leave us with false beliefs about reality. This leads to more stress and more inefficient behavior that exact a toll on us and on the environment. Had the monk fled in the opposite direction the moment he saw the “snake,” rather than investigating from a safe distance and learning there was no real danger, he might have experienced excess, unnecessary stress every time he walked that path in the future. By stopping to observe and apprehend reality, the monk saves himself from perpetuating false beliefs about the rope and feeding irrational fear. We can do the same for any fear we experience by not assuming or coming to a conclusion until we have had the opportunity to check the facts.
When we carry unrealistic fears about climate change, submit to knee-jerk reactions, and persist in acting on false beliefs, we render ourselves similarly ineffective in responding to reality and behaving in helpful ways. Let’s look at both a personal and a climate example of irrational, unhelpful fears and how to manage them.
Imagine yourself in the following personal and climate situations.
Personal Fear: Your spouse doesn’t come home one night and the next day you ask where they were. You spouse responds, “I slept with someone else last night.” Your initial reaction is fear, then maybe anger. As you imagine your partner with someone else, where they might have absconded, and who this lover could be, you find yourself becoming even more fearful and incensed until you totally freak out.
Your initial fear is your hardwired reaction, which you can’t help. But the sooner you can notice yourself reacting, the more pain you can save yourself. Once the initial rush subsides and you take a few deep breaths, you have a golden opportunity. This is when your awareness comes back online and you can check for a rope or a snake, in this case to make sure you heard your spouse correctly. If you never bother to learn they actually said, “I helped someone else last night,” you dig your own hole and fill it in quickly! This is why we check the facts before getting carried away by initial reactions based on false understandings.
Climate Fear: You open your front door, walk outside, immediately smell smoke, and see a lurid orange color in the sky. Because you’re living in the age of climate chaos, you assume a wildfire is nearby and coming fast and furious toward you. You panic, pack your bags, and drive as fast as you can out of town.
You can’t control your initial fear reaction once you assume fire is on its way. But if you don’t pause to fact-check what incited your escalating terror, you could end up in Timbuktu with no gas left in your car—or your adrenal—tank. Bothering to discover that what you smell and see is actually smoke from the neighbor’s barbecue and an unusually colorful, but benign, sunset saves a lot of fossil and physiological fuel. Can you think of similar situations where you assumed incorrectly, reacted with fear, and it cost you dearly?
The aforementioned fears are not “snakes” but “ropes.” Accurately apprehending reality and checking assumptions saves lots of stress and suffering over nothing. Similarly, being forever afraid to ask a special someone out on a date, or to shrink from giving an important climate change presentation, are not helpful fears. Confronting them feels scary but isn’t truly dangerous. While you might endure some initial stress, persevering through these types of fears—by feeling the fear and doing it anyway—often results in worthwhile encounters with valuable benefits. The more we face our irrational, unhelpful fears—however gradually—the better we become at dissolving apparent limitations so we can live more freely, fully, and effectively.
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One reason climate disruption is so difficult to apprehend is because it is part rope and part snake. It requires we pay attention, mitigate unhelpful fear, embrace helpful fear and other uncomfortable emotions, skillfully discern and face climate facts, dismiss climate lies, and not run and hide unless we are in immediate danger.
Ironically, irrational fear and unmanageable anxiety can also result from denial and insufficient knowledge about climate crisis, stymieing our ability to act. Complacency founded on not recognizing a real threat (wrongly perceiving a “rope” instead of a “snake”) leads to inaction, just as that frog stays put in a pot of water slowly coming to a boil until it’s too late to jump out. This dynamic parallels one form of “convenient” climate change denial whereby deniers misconstrue helpful, realistic fears (snakes are indeed snakes) as unrealistic fears (snakes are just ropes). Deniers try to lull us, and themselves, into complacency by falsely discrediting climate science, which has unequivocally demonstrated that climate change is severe, and we are causing it.
Climate deniers’ arguments might stem from:
1. A need to allay their own fear.
2. A wish not to be inconvenienced by mobilizing for climate crisis.
3. An unconscious desire to perpetuate their own privilege and lifestyle.
The antidote to this denial is the courage to:
1. Face the facts, feel, and work with the fear.
2. Take effective action and embrace the inconvenience.
3. Accept that sacrifices and big changes are needed.
Fear-Mark
When our irrational, unhelpful fears remain unconscious or unexamined, they gain control over us, govern our behavior, and limit our ability to be honest, courageous, and caring. I call the threshold at which fear disables us our fear-mark. It is analogous to the visible mark water makes against a hard surface when it persists at a given level, such as on the inside of a barrel or on the wall of a dam.
Our fear-mark is the degree of fear we can tolerate while remaining rational and skillful in our response to information. Said another way, it is the degree of fear beyond which we will not pay attention to helpful information. The more emotionally intelligent and gritty we are, the higher we can raise our fear-mark. The higher our fear-mark, the more effective we are at interfacing with climate chaos. Such courage grows with practice and support. If, however, we surpass our fear-mark without sufficient resilience, we shut down and go into denial and/or fight-or-flight reaction.
Our fears are often unconscious. We are not specifically aware of what we fear, nor of our underlying perceptions and beliefs that generate the fear. Until we develop awareness, our fears rule us. When we fear feeling the pain necessary for self-transformation, our fight-or-flight reflex is triggered. We may try to escape the pain (flight) or fend it off (fight). Flight can take the form of denial, and fending off can manifest as rage and violence onto others. This is one way that fear leads to genocide and ecocide. We also can’t engage in deep emotional healing such as grief work, or take meaningful action—which both necessitate being with the challenging emotion or experience—if we are afraid of the pain we believe we will encounter by doing so.
Disarming unconscious, irrational fear first requires we notice when we are hindered by it—discerning that a rope is not a snake. Then we can choose to tolerate feeling the fear, ascertain its source, discern its veracity, and decide on an appropriate response. The way forward through irrational and unhelpful fear is, when we are ready, to “feel the fear and do it anyway.” In contrast, when facing realistic, helpful fear, we want to heed its warning with appropriate action, as calmly, quickly, and efficiently as we can.
The Neurobiology of Fear
Fear arises from our midbrain, from a region called the amygdala. The amygdala is part of the limbic system, also referred to as our “emotional” or “mammalian” brain. Confronting and moving through unhelpful fears is difficult because doing so is counterintuitive; we have to act against powerful instincts telling us something horrible is about to happen. Our bodies may tighten, knees quiver, throats constrict, hearts quicken, and our palms and brows become sweaty. All this screams to us, “Get ready to fight for your life!” Or “Stop, don’t go there, run away!”
Instinctual fight-or-flight reactions can include fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning (“playing possum”). Fight-or-flight inhibits our neocortical conscious awareness (a higher, frontal brain function), placing us at the whim of instinctual reactions (lower, midbrain, and brainstem functions) which are only helpful when facing immediate peril. When our lives or welfare are truly at risk, our fear is adaptive and helps us survive. When our lives are not at risk and we have misperceived a threat, we fare better when we muster the courage to face and overcome our fear of “ropes.” Our capacity to thrive—whether we get that date or deliver that climate crisis presentation—depends upon our ability to proactively confront our irrational, surmountable fears.
Fear and anxiety have archaic origins in our brain’s tri-tiered architecture. We evolved neural fear wiring to increase our chances of survival in the face of mortal danger, as when our ancestors mounted an empowered adrenal response to fight off predators. This hardwired fear response enabled immediate, knee-jerk, lifesaving reactions that are still helpful today when we encounter real dangers. Unfortunately, identical fear reactions are triggered whether we’re avoiding a snake, giving a public talk, or courting a new romantic interest.
We have not adapted a more discerning response system to different classes of threats. Industrial machine noises, for example, are like ancient, alarming rustles in the brush. Our amygdalae don’t distinguish buzz saws, leaf blowers, and trucks’ reverse bells as ultimately nonthreatening because these grating intrusions didn’t exist when fear became an adaptive facet of our neuroanatomy. Today, our nervous systems perceive these stressors as dangerous, spiking our adrenaline levels (even if we don’t realize it) and reacting to them as, for example, prehistoric undulations in the grass, falling rocks, charging animals, or lightning strikes. In excess, all such reactions exact a toll by way of energy waste, oxidative stress, and hormonal dysregulation. This constant wear and tear on our bodies wears us out, which is part of why quiet environments are restorative and healing. Silence itself has a downregulating effect on our nervous systems and has been shown to grow new neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with the amygdala that is involved with emotional memory.48
Neocortical critical thinking helps us regulate our midbrain knee-jerk fear responses. Using our intellectual faculties for insight into our emotional responses allows us to work skillfully with them, as well as not suffer unduly at their behest. When we consciously determine that a false-alarm fear reaction (fearing a rope) is just a feeling, not an actual threat to our lives, and that overcoming it might improve our lives, we can begin to move beyond our current fear-mark. Acting counterintuitively, we can move beyond our gut, fear reactions. This is also just one example of how relying on our intuition and gut feeling is not always in our best interest; if we did, our unhelpful fears would win out every time. We’d be perpetually defeated, and our world would shrink to a small corner. Recognizing that an irrational fear is surmountable gives us the extra confidence to feel the fear and act anyway.
Irrational fear is real until it isn’t. Anyone who has suffered trauma and healed through subsequent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) knows this. A caveat: anxiety disorders—with their perpetual manifestation of sudden, unhelpful fear—require specific treatment and support. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mentioned previously in the context of clinical anxiety and depression in Chapter 3, are particularly helpful to overcome unhelpful fears. Employing a technique called “exposure therapy,” our nervous systems can habituate to and normalize anxiety. This way we learn that we are bigger than our irrational fears. So, as we courageously and skillfully face our fears, let’s remember to be patient with ourselves and others along the way.
Overcoming Climate Fear
Fear is the primary emotion underlying climate denial and inaction. We are afraid of the anxiety we would feel if we paid attention to climate news, and are also afraid of feeling sad, angry, and despairing. We fear responsibility, and the comfort we would feel obliged to sacrifice if we stepped up to action. We might also fear feeling guilty and remorseful for having not done enough previously to mitigate climate breakdown, and for the pollution-making we cannot yet renounce.
Working with fear is therefore the linchpin for coping through and engaging with climate crisis. And while we cannot control feeling afraid, we must face our unrealistic fears. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right. In his famous speech of 1933, he said: “… the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” 49 He delivered these words on March 4 (“march forth”), the only day in the calendar that’s a marching order! Roosevelt’s insight is as apropos for climate emergency as it was during the Great Depression.
When we have wisdom, tools, and support to work with fear and other difficult emotions, we don’t have to fear the fear of feeling them. When we no longer feel compelled to avoid challenging emotions at any cost, we can become more climate-engaged. Further, when we realize these emotions contain the seeds of our better selves, we have every reason to say yes to growing from them. Fear is then not an obstacle but a portal into regeneration.
Despite popular belief, fear and love are not mutually exclusive. When fear motivates us to right action, this is love in action. A healthy dose of fear that does not permanently scare the bejeezus out of us can be just the emotional spice we need to stimulate fulfilling change, especially since so many of us still don’t know just how dire our climate situation is.
Working through fear, and both seeking support from and offering support to others to face reality, raises our emotional intelligence. In the face of environmental and political chaos and mounting natural disasters, many are paralyzed by fear that, unless consciously worked with, can defeat and sabotage what could help us protect what we love. And when we lack sufficient care, as is collectively the case today, wisely channeled fear can work in a pinch to rouse us.
• Exercise •
Fear-Mark Challenge
On a fresh sheet of paper, list three or more climate-related fears you have. These can be anything from being afraid to live close to the ocean or read climate science news, to being afraid to talk with your climate denying relatives or march in a climate strike. Rate each fear on a severity scale from one to ten. Now think rationally, trying to ascertain how realistic each of these fears is; how much danger does each truly entail? Next, for any that are unrealistic fears, imagine doing what you fear. If it’s too scary, begin with the least severe fears. Write out a first-person account of actually doing it, or you can try painting, acting it out, or telling the story of your fear to a friend as if you were doing it now. Do this several times and then rate each fear again. Compare these values with those from when you began the exercise; notice if your fear-mark increased or decreased.
Climate Warrior
I wonder if fear dominates the cultural climate change narrative because it’s so easy to disseminate, whereas building robust care requires challenging engagement with fear. In his essay, “Grief and Carbon Reductionism,” Charles Eisenstein dissuades us from climate fear when he writes, “People are not going to be frightened into caring.”50 This polarization, however, presupposes fear and care to be mutually exclusive. They are not.
When skillfully worked with, fear can provide the spark in our hearts for the fuel of love (Resource 2: Weber, “Coronation”). Fear—as the fundamental, implicit will to survive—is integral to care. In a New York Times Opinion column about climate change titled “Time to Panic,” author David Wallace-Wells proposes that fear may be the only thing left that can save us from climate catastrophe.51 Fear, as a component of care, is needed for climate cure: enough fear to wake us up and even more passion to live meaningfully, join forces, and incite positive action.
Helpful fear keeps us focused on reality and guides us to right action. An activist colleague of mine attributes her waking up and getting involved with climate action to being scared. Fear has also helped me to care and engage with climate justice. Again, we don’t have control over getting scared, any more than we do being sad, mad, or glad—unless we shut down our hearts. Not shutting down means welcoming heartbreak and becoming wounded climate healers.
In his video, “Amazon Rainforest Fires,” Eisenstein mischaracterizes anger and doesn’t acknowledge it as an honest response to harm. He, therefore, also fails to illuminate anger’s crucial role and importance for activism generally. Instead, he encourages we favor grief.52 But this separation of grief and anger illustrates another false dichotomy. We must not only feel anger, but mobilize its energy full circle in service of compassion and justice for all. As we learned in the previous chapter, anger—one of the well-known “five stages” of grieving—is a valuable component of grieving and part of our natural response to loss. Anger also helps us to keep excess grief in check, exacts justice, and protects us from more loss.
Understanding and experiencing firsthand the surprising, invaluable benefits of anger, grief, fear, and all of our difficult emotions, require deep insight and courage. While we don’t get to pick and choose which emotions we feel in the face of climate breakdown, we can decide which emotions we feed. We can infuse the wisdom inherent in every emotion through our actions. We are better off working with broad emotional intelligence for whatever shows up than we are ignoring essential aspects of our hearts. In the face of climate crisis, we can’t expect to activate our full selves unless we work with and are transformed by what pains us.
We can—indeed, we must—skillfully employ fear, anger, despair, and remorse for climate resiliency. Think of it this way: fear (and some care) will get you to the emergency room to save your life, but care (along with a modicum of existential fear) is needed to live well. Fear is more helpful for treating the branch stage of climate crisis (the acute stage when concern spikes). Care is more important for the longer-term, root solution (the chronic stage, or how we can cultivate enduring love in action). Each emotion has its place and each is needed for both the acute and chronic phases of climate illness. Each is essential to our whole hearts, which we wildly and beautifully craft through the work of courageously welcoming initiation into climate warriorhood.
We should not shrink from fear, but embrace it for its holy function of alerting us to danger and to help us heal ourselves and the world. Ironically, one fearful and inaccurately polarizing perception of fear is that we must either surmount it or be paralyzed by it. But this view is distorted; there is another option. We can choose to carry our fear, as we do some love wounds, so we neither deny nor become overtaken by it. We can also cultivate resilience to be with rational, helpful fear rather than hide or run from what scares us.
The amalgam of fear plus care produces passionate compassion—the Yin and Yang, the urgency and love—needed to heal through climate crisis. Fear alone doesn’t have the heart to regenerate. Care alone is usually too mild and not acute or urgent enough. Fear wakes us up and mobilizes us, while care provides the genuine desire to heal what’s been injured. To become sanely afraid (to save our lives), I invite you to read the climate science in the Appendix I, listen to experts speak on the issue, and discuss concerns with others who are climate-aware. This will keep your survival fear stoked—which, with practice, you can skillfully manage—for we are cognitively biased to forget climate crisis exists at all! You can also find support for this journey in your triangle of resilience relationships. All this can help you courageously embody your fierce love, fueled by healthy fear, to join others and protect what matters to you. This makes an integrated climate warrior.
Counterintuitively and methodically inoculating ourselves against what scares us, by biting off small bits at a time, makes fear easier to manage and integrate into our climate-ready tool kit. This strategy is part of exposure therapy, mentioned previously. It is also a form of emotional titration, discussed in Chapter 3, that helps us gradually metabolize stress. Faced in small, measured doses, the fear no longer feels so overwhelming. For example, we can face the scary prospect of learning about alarming climate change news by exposing ourselves to it a little at a time. Preparing like this for stressful future events is also a way to “cope ahead.” It’s wise to begin this process now, instead of waiting for the probability of being overwhelmed by future circumstances. Gradually learning about how bad the climate situation is allows us to maintain psychic balance over the long run and mount a more effective, informed response.
We can take inspiration from heroic examples of working with fear, seen in those who act for the greater good even when the threats are real and their lives are truly at risk. As activist and film producer of Art of Courage Jon Quigley says, “It’s every moment where a human being faces a fear and they stand up for something that they believe is more important than their own safety.” 53 Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and the many valiant souls who worked secretly to save Jews during the Holocaust are examples. Modern day whistleblowers and indigenous activists protecting native habitats, as well as climate scientists Jon Box and Michael Mann—who have risked their lives to publish outspoken climate change findings despite death threats and financial ruin—are shining, contemporary exemplars of this bravery. 54
Room for the Dark
Environmental changes and personal revelation go hand in hand because we are a part of—not overlords of—the natural world. When nature hurts, we do too. Emotional intelligence is the keystone that determines our capacity to face difficult inner and outer realities. Overcoming our fear of feeling bad—sad, angry, scared, remorseful, despairing, or anxious—is the portal into broad-spectrum emotional intelligence. It is to say yes to benevolent, fertile darkness; yes to heartbreak and more wise Yin-Yang transformation.
Saying no to facing our fears means saying yes to the consequences of denial. Denial and intellectual dishonesty forged from fear set in motion all manner of calamity, especially evident in the myriad interconnected positive feedback loops contributing to climate chaos. Below are six compelling follies to deny climate crisis exists or to believe “everything will be okay.” Curiously, these same denialist “benefits” or “unjust privileges” (if one’s goal is to “feel fine”) are also conferred when we embrace denial’s opposite polarity: climate doom. Either extreme of doom or denial (as we explore in detail in Chapter 5) provides ample justification to not care enough and allows climate disease to progress without our helping touch.
By denying climate crisis, we:
1. Escape healthy and adaptive climate anxiety, grief, outrage, fear, worry, and despair.
2. Justify polluting as much as we want.
3. More easily justify abandoning compassion and empathy for others’ suffering.
4. Allow the burden of repair to fall on others making heartfelt sacrifices.
5. Continue business as usual and not be inconvenienced.
6. Preserve the privilege of greed and financial gain by way of continued pollution and exploitation.
The totality of all these follies has delivered us to the precipice of extinction. This is the consequence of ignoring the truth so we can avoid feeling pain and continue to unsustainably enjoy ourselves. Instead, we could muster the courage to face the truth and not soft-heart ourselves into illusions.
• Exercise •
Climate Denial Reflection
For this exercise, we remember that we are all in denial of climate crisis to some degree and that some of this denial can be helpful. So, there is no judgment here, and if you judge yourself, let that go.
Referring to the Six Climate Denial Follies, which in particular motivate you to stay in the dark, to any degree, about climate crisis? For each that you choose, write a few lines about your fear and what motivates you to justify your denial (again, no judgment here). Note: you don’t need to change any of these motivations; this exercise is simply to be honest with yourself. No one has to know but you.
Confronting and acting on climate change means that we face our deepest collective shadow, our deepest fears. We are challenged to relinquish what is most difficult to give up: our comforts, luxuries, and wishful idealism for a bright future. The etymology of “sacrifice” derives from the root sacer, meaning “sacred or holy.” Understanding sacrifice this way transforms our sense of privilege into humble respect. Climate awareness, activism, and sacrifice of our standard of living affect every aspect of our psyches. Best-selling climate change author and activist Naomi Klein believes our fear of sacrificing privilege pertains primarily to “the radical redistribution of power and wealth necessary to heal the planet.” 55 The prospect of degrowth (creating a “lower” standard of living for the privileged) confronts us with what is most threatening, what would ensure contact with our existential angst and despair, and what we would have to face absent our familiar defended power and imaginary dominion over nature. The disavowal of this universal responsibility becomes the displaced angst the rest of us have to grapple with on a daily basis, in good part because we can’t, and won’t, live in as much denial.
Climate crisis is the current form of our centuries-old and ignored fear-driven shadow, and it’s knocking on all our doors, imploring us to emerge from the dark. It asks we relinquish our unsustainable fear of ourselves and malevolent control over others. Because climate crisis challenges us in our most vulnerable places, it is as commensurately difficult to heal as its underlying causes in the form of our inner, psycho-spiritual deficiencies (which our finer jewels fulfill when we liberate them through shadow and death-and-rebirth work).
You and I add to denial when we defend against, instead of surrender to, what is painfully true. Yet, even for those of us who are climate-aware and have faced a good share of our darkness, the task is still monumental. We therefore all need some denial. The devil in the details, however, is the degree to which we are, and remain, in ignorance.
Depression
I include depression in this chapter because fear and depression share the poetics of darkness. When we fear and do not face our darkness, it consumes us—internally, externally, or more commonly both. Depression (a Yin imbalance) and its sibling, anxiety (a Yang imbalance), are currently the most common mental illnesses in the United States. As environmental collapse and fear escalate, so do eco-depression and eco-anxiety. While depressed feelings are a natural, even sometimes adaptive, response to climate crisis, it’s important not to attribute depression caused by other factors to the state of the world. This can disempower and distract from seeking proper treatment, because depression has many etiologies (causes).
Depression and loss are a taste of death. Some don’t survive the dark depths of major depression, and end their lives as a result of not receiving needed support and timely, appropriate treatment. My personal experience with clinical (severe) anxiety and depression several years ago was the most harrowing challenge of my life. I didn’t think I would live through it.
Even though I had worked with patients suffering from anxiety and depression, it wasn’t until my own experience that I truly understood how horrific these conditions can be. Personal collapse through anxiety and depression forever changed me (Resource 2: Weber, “Anxiety”). There is no longer an intact, previous version of myself. Instead, I inhabit and reckon with a new version of myself: part old, part new, part unknown. Sometimes I feel homesick in my own body, longing for times past, a kind of body-mind solastalgia (feeling homesick when home). This post-collapse state bears resemblance to that reported by some inhabitants of Greenland, where climate change has proceeded more rapidly than in other places on the planet, leading to devastating changes. They no longer trust the land (part of their extended “body”) and acknowledge that much of their heritage will never be the same. It rains in winter, when it should be snowing, and snows during the summer. Greenlanders can no longer rely on the ice, their solid ground. In addition to eco-anxiety and eco-depression, they also experience eco-grief, eco-PTSD, and solastalgia, all due to climate change.56
A common feature of depression (and sometimes anxiety) is anhedonia, defined as the absence of pleasure or an inability to enjoy what once gave joy. One may lose the capacity to feel and give love, experience beauty, vitality and happiness. All these qualities are essential for a meaningful life. Anhedonia is just one aspect of why clinical depression and anxiety are so devastating. I invite you to pause for a moment … and imagine being unable to experience beauty, love, and joy. Perhaps you have even experienced it in real-time?
My collapse into depression marked the only time in my adult life I wasn’t inspired to write, and it was writing that had helped guide me through many previous devastating descents into grief. Depression sucked the life out of me in a way I’d never experienced. Anxiety freaked me out to the point I thought anything I wrote could be misleading or harmful. Support from others was essential to my getting through this dysregulated phase. The importance of community has been embedded into my heart as a result.
If you have passed through inner collapse due to significant anxiety or depression—and especially if you have learned successful self-care for how to get through these states—this may serve you well through outer collapse further along the climate crisis pipeline. Your wisdom can also help support others who suffer. In this vein, I have assembled a list of psychotherapist-reviewed and vetted depression coping tips (Resource 2: Weber, “Healing”).
The degree to which we experience future collapse—and this is not currently, precisely knowable—could resemble that of apocalyptic movies such as Mad Max or Children of Men. To whatever degree greater cataclysm comes to pass, learning how to persist through dark times when nothing looks bright will help you. Glitz-addicted, happy-crazed, and drug-abusing modern culture prepares us not at all for this darkness descending upon us now. Ironically—and as I’ve tried to communicate throughout this writing—these death-wishing-in-disguise cultural norms have created and perpetuated our current climate calamity.
One of the best-known accounts of grappling and surviving through atrocious darkness—and therefore its relevance for climate resiliency—is Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. I also highly recommend depression survivor and psychologist Andrew Solomon’s TED Talk, “Depression, the Secret We Share.” Dr. Solomon describes depression as the “flaw in love” and a “slow way of being dead.” 57 He also alludes to life in a concentration camp, as well as global warming. As discussed previously, Greta Thunberg fell into depression upon learning about climate crisis. Her rise to greatness from those depths is a testament to overcoming adversity for us all, not to mention doing so while still a child—deep bows, Greta.
Anhedonia—characteristic of both depression and to a degree, societal collapse—seems ironic given the Western obsession with worshipping and consuming pleasure and beauty. But when we plot this dynamic along the spectrum of Yin and Yang, it’s not surprising. The beauty and pleasure our culture worships are largely superficial and non-regenerative, surrogates for more meaningful experiences in the form of fulfillment. When either Yin or Yang is excessive, the other polarity also soon accumulates, unless healing intervenes. As a result of our linear, aggressive pursuit of superficial pleasure and beauty (Yang), we are now experiencing a death (Yin) resulting from an absence of the enduring and soul-affirming versions of these virtues. Underlying this collapse is fear, especially of facing our pain, which is what’s required for creating regenerative pleasure and beauty.
While grief is difficult and can be harrowing, depression is a different animal. Grief is a healthy response to loss, which often eventually renews us.58 Severe depression is usually not so fertile or renewing. Depression is widely misunderstood and has many etiologies. Its unique message, if there is one, depends on its causes, and these are not always identifiable. For me, anxiety precipitated my depression and neither held a significant, curative message. Yet, when lifestyle issues or past trauma cause depression and one is able to heal and make changes, the disease can be transformational and even life-saving. Equally, depression can be little more than an imbalanced disease state from which we need to rally and recover by any means possible—just as we would from diabetes, the flu, or a heart condition. Any part of the human body can malfunction or fall ill, and this also applies to our brains.
Absurd Medicine
To face the challenges of dark times and allay fear, the importance of having a sense of humor, especially for the absurd, is crucial. Celebrating absurdity can break us out of mental and emotional ruts and help us to live outside the prison of our usual patterns, if only momentarily. In this freedom, we can discover alternative perspectives that ease the weight of woe.
Humor can also be an indispensable coping tool and antidote for anxiety and depression. While what we have done to the planet is utterly tragic—and it is devastating—we can also inhabit a polar opposite, Yin-Yang perspective in the midst of it all. We can stand back and view our experience here as a comedy of the absurd. In Man’s Search for Meaning Dr. Frankl says, “It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.” 59
Humor, then, is another honest psycho-emotional tool to maintain perspective and emotional regulation. This is not humor used for the wholesale denial of difficult reality or to minimize the urgency of climate crisis, but rather to lighten our psychic load as we heal and mobilize. My own kinship with absurdity helped carry me through my losses in Hawaii. I grieved heavily and at the same time was able to bust out a chuckle now and again after the lava destroyed all that I’d built and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it.
It’s absurd, and a bit insane, how we live—what we create and lose, how we start over, and how we convulse over what really doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. While this overarching perspective does not dismiss or diminish in any way the pain of loss, the point is we can hold enlivening, uplifting qualities in dynamic tension with our pain. We ought to carry a hearty dose of absurd and irreverent humor into the future along with our gravity. It’s possible to view the unraveling of everything as a ridiculous movie, and temporarily escape the realm of “reason” and believability. To keep our physical and psychological heads above water through turbulent times, employing all and any helpful faculties toward facing helpful fears and cultivating radical resilience is good medicine.
• Exercise •
Chapter 4 Journaling
Please also refer to the additional in-text exercises for this chapter. Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and write out your responses to the following prompts.
1. List three of your greatest helpful (rational, real) fears and three of your greatest unhelpful (irrational, surmountable) fears.
• How does each affect your triangle of resilience relationships (with self, nature, and others), both positively and negatively?
• How does each influence your engagement outwardly and inwardly with regard to climate crisis?
• Recalling the wisdom in fear discussed previously, how has each of your rational, helpful fears served you and the world at large?
• Write out a brief strategy for how you might skillfully face your irrational fears, such as by gradually exposing yourself to them and procuring any support to move through them.
2. On a scale from one to ten, how compassionate are you with yourself regarding your fears? Do you judge yourself for having them? How can you become more compassionate toward the part of you that fears?
45. Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 12.
46. Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 12.
47. Chu, “The Snake Rope: Essential Buddhist Teaching in a Simple Story.”
48. I. Kirste, et al., “Is Silence Golden? Effects of Auditory Stimuli and Their Absence on Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis,” 1221–1228.
49. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933,” in The Public Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume Two: The Year of Crisis, 1933, 11–16.
50. Eisenstein, “Grief and Carbon Reductionism.”
51. Wallace-Wells, “Time to Panic.”
52. Eisenstein, “Amazon Forest Fires - Avoid This Trap.”
53. Art of Courage, film directed by Kellee Marlow and Véronica Duport Deliz.
54. Richardson, “When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job.”
55. Reese, “Naomi Klein: We Are Sleepwalking Toward Apocalypse.”
56. McDougall, “‘Ecological Grief’: Greenland Residents Traumatized By Climate Emergency.”
57. Solomon, “Depression, the Secret We Share.”
58. Save, for example, in what is called “complicated grief,” in which grief becomes protracted and comorbid (co-occurring) with other conditions, such as anxiety and depression.
59. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 63.