Building Inner and Outer Resilience – Letter From a Youth in an Uncertain World
Image credit: Adam Victor
Dear CPA community,
As one of the young members of the CPA circle, as well as the Climate Majority Project (climatemajorityproject.com),[1] I write to you today reflecting, as a youth, on the psychological dimension of helping to address the climate and environmental crisis (or at least that’s the intention!). While naturally I won’t be able to speak on behalf of everyone or even a small fraction of people my age, I do believe some of the threads that come up in this reflection are likely to resonate with others, and hopefully prompt further thought.
Why I got engaged
Yes, it’s like I’m married to my job. My partner and I are in the same organisation, a lot of our friends are collaborators, and many are the days in which we wake up and go to sleep with the constant drumbeat of CMP! CMP! CMP! And I haven’t been on vacation for two years.
It also feels that it’s the sort of marriage that God sneakily arranged when deciding I would be born here, in year 2000, and that despite my grand childhood ambitions of becoming an ethologist and horse riding instructor, the feeling that the world is falling apart from an early age compelled me to devote my life to taking care of it, of us.
It has to do with the sense that “we are born for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14).[2] Often I wish I lived in a stable world and I could choose to devote myself more to the things I like…but our house is catching fire, and damage has already been done. While we may not ideally choose to be the ones to put out the fire and begin a multi-century repair job on the soon-to-be collapsed foundations of our society, it undeniably has to be done.
Image credit: Adam Victor
Sometimes I fall out of love
While being on the frontline of building the foundations for a new society is incredibly exciting at times, there are times in which I feel swallowed up by doubt, the burn of responsibility, the feeling that things aren’t happening quickly enough. I get annoyed with colleagues and people in the wider environmental community. People competing for funding bids, taking credit for other’s work, being attached to bad creative outputs, elbowing each other to get in front of cameras, or simply being unreliable. It’s a human mess!
This, combined with the widespread experience of being overloaded, also means that after too many days of work! Work! WORK! I begin to lose myself, and to lose touch with why I am here in the first place. And I want to give up. Fantasies take hold of returning back to my homeland, Italy, growing my patch of vegetables and making a living as a therapist – retreating to a beautiful little life sounds amazing … until I remember that in a decade or two that little garden might become a patch of desert, go up in flames, or undergo severe flooding.
In approaches to our crisis I often notice a dichotomy which is reflected in myself: go all in and try to change the world until one burns out, or try and embody the way one would like to live within our current societal boundaries. This can also be found in the way psychological work (inner change) often remains far from action, and action is seldom guided by inner transformation. Mainstream clinical psychological approaches focus far too much on our individuality, which can be paralysing.
What life demands of us is Meaning
Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy is the psychological approach I have found most helpful in reconciling inner and outer worlds. In Man’s Search for Meaning, after years in the depths of a concentration camp, he came out saying ‘each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible’ – in other words, he believed that the way we must find meaning in our lives is by being receptive to what life demands of us, that there is no meaning which is not in relationship to another person or mission in the world, no meaning which does not lead towards self-transcendence.
So how does Frankl’s work relate to burnout? Firstly, by reconnecting with meaning, the burden of climate action becomes much lighter. Furthermore, it is a psychological framework that breaks down the conventional misconception that all the psychological issues we need to solve are in our heads and don’t extend into the material world. From the perspective of climate action, it helps make the case that material action must go hand in hand with inner transformation and openness to the will of God, or whatever you may call it. And, for young people especially who feel the burning urgency of bringing about actual change, taking action while also tending to emotional distress feels to me most right.
Image credit: Adam Victor
Teaching Transformation
At work, along with some people within CPA (notably Siobhan Currie), I help organise the Climate Courage Campaign (climatemajorityproject.com) which focuses on providing resources for inner resilience in the context of climate education. As we know, more and more young people will soon have to face the trouble we are in, and hopefully schools will be helping to prepare them. As CPA members might very well imagine, the emotional shutdown that will predictably ensue on a large scale needs to be held. This way, young people would be invited to listen to life’s call to us all, and be guided to their own path and meaning in response to it.
When that time comes, many will be facing similar challenges to what I described above. There is a shift already happening within certain organisational cultures, including, thankfully, my own, by which reconnecting to life’s (inner-outer) guidance is understood to be absolutely crucial to doing meaningful work – for, as we know, it is practically impossible to arrive at new ways of being using the same logic that got us here, and it’s a logic we are all steeped in. And one of the fundamentally wrong dichotomies we operate on is the complete separation of spirit and matter, body and mind. Our psyches shape our world and the world shapes our psyches, and effective climate action requires us to tend to both, together.
Notes
[1] The Climate Majority Project (CMP) aims to mobilise citizens from all walks of life to take meaningful, effective climate action wherever they have most power, and advocates the resilience measures and practices needed to face the difficult truth about climate. We envision a political culture where decisive action on mitigation and adaptation becomes crucial to electoral success, and we’re working to transform climate and ecology from polarising issues into unifying drivers of collective action.
[2] Book of Esther, book of the Hebrew Bible (britannica.com) and the Christian Old Testament (britannica.com). It belongs to the third section of the Judaic canon, known as the Ketuvim (britannica.com), or “Writings" <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Book-of-Esther>
Bio
Jadzia Tedeschi is a recent graduate in clinical psychology who is deeply convinced of the symbiosis between mind, society, and environment. While she was born and grew up in central Italy, where she currently lives and studies, she attended boarding school and the beginning of university in the United States. Within the Climate Majority Project, she takes care of outreach and manages operations. This year, she also became a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.
