Environmental Expressive Therapies

Nature-Assisted Theory and Practice

Alexander Kopytin, Madeline Rugh, Alexander Kopytin, Madeline Rugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315310435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Environmental Expressive Therapies contributes to the emerging phenomenon of eco-arts therapy by highlighting the work that international expressive arts therapists have accomplished to establish a framework for incorporating nature as a partner in creative/expressive arts therapy practices. Each of the contributors explores a particular specialization and outlines the implementation of multi-professional and multi-modal "earth-based" creative/expressive interventions that practitioners can use in their daily work with patients with various clinical needs. Different forms of creative/expressive practices—such as creative writing, play therapy techniques, visual arts, expressive music, dramatic performances, and their combinations with wilderness and animal-assisted therapy—are included in order to maximize the spectrum of treatment options. Environmental Expressive Therapies represents a variety of practical approaches and tools for therapists to use to achieve multiple treatment goals and promote sustainable lifestyles for individuals, families, and communities.

Part I
The Emerging Paradigm and Theoretical Constructs of Environmental and Ecological Expressive Therapies

1
Nature-Assisted Art Therapy

Technique or Transformation?

Madeline Rugh

Introduction

At a time of planet-wide environmental crisis, it seems both outrageous and irresponsible that so few mental health clinicians connect the epidemics of mental distress in industrial societies with the devastating impact of our suicidal destruction of our own habitat and eco-cidal elimination of whole species that used to share the Earth with us. Many therapy clients also don’t realize that the grief and fear they struggle with may be natural responses to the death of so many living beings and the ongoing distress of earth, air, and ocean life all around us. Because we are not being informed about links between mental health symptoms caused by the way we live and the accelerating inner and outer devastation, we remain mystified about why we feel so much pain.

(Buzzell and Chalquist, 2009, p. 19)

Harsh words, yes. Hard to hear, yes. Time to hear? YES! This chapter seeks to facilitate a direct look at how we as Western people and especially we as mental health clinicians participate in our ongoing environmental devastation and subsequent denial. I am addressing our behavior not to cause guilt, remorse or despair but to free the way to bring our considerable gifts to the service of person—planet healing. There are two major characteristics of Western culture especially related to therapy that have contributed to our current environmental crisis and continue to affect our ability to respond. The two characteristics are:

1. The notion of an isolated, independent ego, our “split” consciousness and general perception of the world (split consciousness refers to our preference for dualistic awareness where the body and mind are split, the person and nature are split, spirit and material are split, etc.).
2. The dominance of the left hemisphere and hyper-rationality and objectivity of positivist science.

The reason for exploring our nature/human split in this way is to suggest there is a need for radical transformation and to encourage a deeper examination of those aspects of psychology and therapeutic practice that may inadvertently be supporting the very mindset that is destroying the biosphere. There exists a plethora of excellent books and articles exploring the topic of this chapter from many different disciplines. This writing cannot do justice to the abundance of ideas available; rather, it seeks to briefly synthesize a few basic examples from the literature to alert the reader to the possibility that something deeper and greater is at stake in “nature-assisted art therapy,” which requires more than “using” nature as another technique. It points to the necessity of a complete transformation of the fragmented Western consciousness starting with our own.

Who Needs Healing?

To turn our dangerous situation around fully … we must heal the underlying sickness—our relationship with the planet, our worldview. This means literally changing how we perceive the world around us, and that requires the alteration of our consciousness.

(Devereux, 1996, p. 17)

Many years ago I was hired as an art therapist to help a group of staff members who routinely worked on intense deadlines, to “de-stress.” I spent several sessions with approximately eight professional grant writers and evaluators who happily and readily participated in my arts-based interventions. However, as we came near the end of our time together it became apparent that the main cause of the intense stress had much more to do with the person who hired me, the head of the department. This person enjoyed the adrenaline rush and drama of working right up to the deadline and so did not help manage the workload effectively or provide adequate support. This made me very uncomfortable, as I realized that my work with the staff to ease their stress meant I was merely helping them to accommodate to a “sick” system.

The healers of mind and spirit, too, are caught up in efforts to enable their patients to fit comfortably and drowsily into an insane world careening toward the abyss. Ahead loom destabilization of climate, the loss of one-third of the species presently on Earth, and the ongoing destruction of whole ecologies. Such things are not just problems or accidents but symptoms of a deep mental derangement that can be cured only by a correspondingly deep healing.

(Orr, in Buzzell and Chalquist, 2009, p. 15)

This is basically the perspective I take on nature-assisted art therapy. The focus must be a transformative one that includes the very structures of psychology upon which we form our healing practices and upon which our culture, as currently envisioned, was also formed. So it is that “using nature as a mere tool for human healing perpetuates the very self-world splits responsible for both our ecologically resonant maladies and a deteriorating biosphere” (Buzzell and Chalquist, 2009, p. 20).

As persons responsible for assisting with healing and helping, the healing of our dysfunctional worldview, the “alienated consciousness” could not be more critical and represents a different orientation to our usual understanding of “therapy.” It finds its resonance with the idea of cultural healing that is seldom, if ever, part of the training in therapy.

Suzi Gablik, in her book The Re-enchantment of Art (1991), admonishes artists to take up the cause of “cultural healing,” or worldview transformation. I agree with this wholeheartedly but also feel that art therapists hold an especially valuable key in this regard. Art therapy has as its focus bringing the arts to bear on human life in the ancient way, through the ritual of art making in the service of healing and wholeness. However, as has been stated, therapists including art therapists largely operate from a Western worldview that leaves them (us) serving traditional psychological constructs that do not recognize the deeper or wider dimensions of “Self” or soul (transpersonal psychology, depth psychology, some expressions of cognitive behavioral therapy [CBT], and ecopsychology being notable exceptions) and the recognition of an ecological aspect to our identity.

There is then a powerful and unavoidable spiritual dimension to this terrain. At the time of this writing, Pope Francis issued his encyclical, placing care for the environment (our “common home”) at the center of his spiritual leadership. This is a radical and unprecedented direction set by a spiritual leader of his magnitude. He states that we need to “hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” In a materialist/consumer culture, these are two cries we really don’t want to hear. When looking at our worldview, of who and what we think we are as human beings existing within a living planet of diverse life forms, we can no longer afford to abandon or shun the spiritual dimension and the numinous qualities of nature.

Our ecological crisis is a crisis of imagination, challenging our limited ways of seeing and calling forward much ancient wisdom that we abandoned in our search for security and control through a science based on hyper-rationality and objectivity and secularism. As Aristotle stated so long ago, “the soul never thinks without an image” (Aristotle, On the Soul, 4th century bc from Arnheim, 1969, p. 12). The expressive arts therapies, then, should be or could be at the forefront of facilitating this radical shift in awareness and perception. And psychology, as so many have recently stated, championed particularly by James Hillman, needs to return to its original meaning, the study of the soul.

It should be clear then, that I am not advocating for merely adding nature to our therapeutic strategies; rather, I am advocating first and foremost for a deep shift within ourselves and a challenge to the very structures of our training. The many practices and suggestions for implementing nature-assisted art therapy are all very valuable, but it is my contention that these suggestions, to be most effective, need to be situated within a transformative vision. Depth psychologist Mary Watkins makes the following critical observations in this regard:

Reliance on unquestioned traditional structures, especially in the face of issues for which those structures are inadequate as currently practiced and imagined. The issues for which traditional psychotherapy seems unprepared are the now all too familiar environmental ones … the rapid extinction of animals and plants, the depletion of soils, toxicities in air and water. Most traditional psychological theories operate in the absence of acknowledgment of our interdependence on the natural world and have formulated their theories of human health as if the natural environment were a backdrop to our dramas. This, of course, was not true of Indigenous people but reflects a profound disconnect peculiar to Western consciousness.

(Watkins, in Buzzell and Chalquist, 2009, p. 224)

Ego, Self and Soul

Our conditioned reliance on psychological systems that do not include the natural world in human development and that are based on the notion that we are a disconnected isolated ego is part of the construct that supports Western violence toward nature, which we as therapists can change, indeed must change. Furthermore, we cannot talk about an expanded notion of self or ego or reconnecting with nature (inner nature and outer nature) without also addressing the spiritual dimension.

Most world religions and wisdom traditions recognize that there is a distinction between the “small self”—the ego—and the soul. One is seated in the “head” and the other in the “heart.” For example, Franciscan priest Father Richard Rohr (2003), referring to the writings of Father Thomas Merton, identifies two aspects of self: the “false self” (ego), which is not the “bad” self except when it is seen as the ONLY self, such is the case in the Western personality and culture. Whereas the “true self” can be understood as the eternal soul or spirit. The false self is concerned with appearances and popularity, is fearful and seeks security through acquisition of things, property, cars and money (for example), which clearly links this conception of “self” with our economic orientation of consumerism and materialism. The false self is overly identified with work, with its reputation and with things it owns. The false self is easily offended and often defensive. It is bored, isolated, and lonely, seeking distraction and entertainment. It needs to be “right” and therefore needs and seeks out someone or something else to be “wrong.”

Living in the world as though this were all we are and where the only thing that matters is our acquisition of things, money and reputation that we must then protect at all costs, is a life of “not-enough,” of competition for resources, of winning and never losing. This life does not make sense, it isn’t even LIFE!

On the other hand, the “true self,” or Self with a capital “S” (from Jungian or depth psychology), can be understood as the Soul, the divine life-force in every person AND in every sentient being and natural form. The Soul or true self resides in communion and connection within the soul of the natural world or anima mundi. When we live with an awareness of this deeper aspect of being and learn to listen to the voice of the soul as expressed in imagery, then the soul works more easily with our personality, our false self, and gives it depth, equanimity, meaning and joy. “Nature is not matter only, she is spirit” (Mazis, 2006, p. 14).

Health From a Planetary View

In his book, The Great Work (1999), Father Thomas Berry and Sister Miriam McGillis have brought the writings of Jesuit priest Father Teilhard de Chardin to this matter. In a synthesis of the biological sciences and spiritual principles they identified three aspects of ecological integrity the planet requires to support its natural healing functions, such as maintaining the life-sustaining ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in our protective atmosphere. Those three aspects are (1) maintaining diversity; (2) individuality and subjectivity; and (3) communion. Our culture currently violates all three of these biological/spiritual necessities for planetary wellness. Clearly, diversity is violated when we suppress the voice of other people and ideas, or when we grow food with massive single-crop factory farming methods; these are violations of the first principle. Individuality and subjectivity refers to the awareness that each living being needs to be itself in order to serve its function in the interconnected web of life. It does NOT mean individualism as we currently understand that word, which is another word for our isolated ego where “individualism refers to the supposed right of an individual to act alone, in disregard of other individuals” (Berry, 2000, p. 32). More remarkably, each life form (including rocks and rivers) has an inner spirit, that is subjectivity. So every life has a deep inner direction and purpose that needs to be recognized and honored. Furthermore, subjectivity supports the third element, communion. This inner subjectivity, or soulfulness, supports communication, communion and thus deep connection. In this, we as Western people have not only forgotten how to listen, but stand in profound resistance to the very idea of communion that will be discussed shortly. Recent research from the Heartmath Institute (Buhner, 2004) clearly indicates that our heart is an organ of perception, not a mere pump. In this role, the heart is continually sending information out from us and receiving information back from the more-than-human realm. Cultivating awareness of the heart in this expanded role will be critical to reconnecting with nature in a transformative way. “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects” (Berry, 1999, p. 16).

Depth psychologist Robert Romanyshyn applies this understanding of subjectivity and communion to another critical aspect of Western psychological conceptual terrain, the nature of the unconscious. Romanyshyn suggests that we need to reimagine the meaning of consciousness and unconsciousness in the following way.

The notion of the unconscious in depth psychology is too limiting. It is an anthropomorphic prejudice inescapably yoked to a definition of ego consciousness as neurotic. It is the product of cultural-historical circumstances which have led to planetary crises and which we can no longer afford. From the point of view of greenness … we need to reimagine the unconscious as another frequency of range of consciousness. In effect, we need to re-tune the frequency of our ego consciousne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Foreword: Artistic Expression as a Force of Nature
• Introduction
• PART I The Emerging Paradigm and Theoretical Constructs of Environmental and Ecological Expressive Therapies
• PART II Nature-Assisted Expressive Therapies Practice
• About the Authors
• Index