A climate psychologist, Gestalt Psychotherapist, and IFS therapist with over 25 years of experience in systemic change and trauma therapy, Steffi invites a reimagining of our place in the web of life. She founded and directs the Centre for Climate Psychology and edited Climate, Psychology and Change, which has been called “awork of wisdom and radical ideas.”
In this excerpt, learn how systemic fragmentation exiled us from our relationship with the living world and why depression and anxiety may be grief in disguise. Hear the full conversation on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
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STEFFI:
I was six when my mother and three other family members were taken as political prisoners in East Germany. Now the country that imprisoned them doesn’t even exist. That early experience of a system that shapes, crushes and then vanishes sent me on a lifelong search for something Western psychology rarely offers: A way of understanding how the world outside us lives inside us and what happens when that world is broken. I searched for theories that combined the inner and the outer. What I found, or rather what I kept not finding, changed everything.
Psychotherapy is an incredibly young profession, just slightly over a hundred years old. And it wasn’t born in a neutral moment, but at the height of empire. It grew up through industrial and capitalist systems. Everything becomes mine. It’s my trauma; it’s my depression. Or is it? I needed to step outside the profession to find how humans have related to this interspace, between self and world, between skin and sky, which modern life has trained us to ignore. And the training begins early.
Francis Weller says we’re born as ‘stone age children,’ with an inherited blueprint that expects a rich, supportive, and communal environment—largely absent today. When we go to school, we learn to fragment life into component parts: geography, history, psychology, mathematics, biology… But we never learn how to put it back together again. This traumatizing worldview we get educated with becomes normal. That separation and fragmentation, and the numbing that comes with that… It’s a violence to life.
KEVIN:
The Irish language offers 40 words for a field, depending on whether it has a hill, or two hills, long grass or short grass… And thanks to this richness, both John O’Donohue and Manchán Magan use the Irish language to connect us to nature, to what it is to be part of nature. Other languages don’t recognize separation. When Amazonian tribes were asked about being in nature, they said, ‘In what?’ They didn’t have a word in their vocabulary to describe this thing that’s out there. Because there is no thing ‘out there.’ They just couldn’t understand why anyone would describe that as apart from themselves.
STEFFI:
This fragmentation shows up everywhere, even in rooms where we try to resolve it. I was invited to a COP preparatory meeting1 at Westminster Hall. When we came in, the conversation was warm and lively; people were talking and relating. When we entered this really imposing meeting room and sat around a table with microphones, it became more and more difficult to say the things I’ve just said. The rituals we perform in agendas and meeting protocols take the life out of us. For me, that’s a traumatizing ritual. How can we tend to life when everything we tend to is a death-bringing ritual?
That same fragmentation follows grief into the therapy room. Francis Weller said, “Grief is alive, wild, untamed, and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive. And still we move in jangled, unsettled and riotous ways. And when grief takes hold of us, it’s truly an emotion that rises from the soul. And that’s why we move away from grief. That’s why we push it away. That’s why we numb it, why we repress it.”
All too often grief gets expressed in a very polite tear in the psychologist’s office. Because there are the neighbours, the office downstairs, and this oppressive self-consciousness. But grief—and everything that is wild, loud, challenging, exuberant and big—gets exiled. However, when wild grief gets exiled, it doesn’t disappear. It just stops being recognizable as grief.
I think more and more people feel that the life that we’ve been sold is actually hollowed out. We start to feel… maybe not grief, but melancholy. Today depression and anxiety are almost epidemics, at least in the medical sense. We look for the answer internally. We treat it as a malfunction that needs talk therapy thrown at it to fix it. But what if it’s caused by the absence of meaningful relationships to something bigger than us? What if that is actually this fragmentation, this sense of grief? If everything my nervous system is built for, all that beautiful capacity to fine-tune, is not used, maybe there’s a shrinking until eventually I feel my life is empty, and I long for more.
KEVIN:
And maybe that rise in anxiety and depression is directly proportional to the reduction in the ability to grieve. Depression is the opposite of expression. And to grieve is to express. To be delighted by the wonder of a butterfly or a tree is also to express. And as we lose that ability to express, maybe that’s the grip of depression; we can’t express that love and loss of love and connectedness. Our system shuts down; it gets depressed or anxious. It is a malfunction—not of the individual—but of the environment that we’re trying to express ourselves in.
STEFFI:
Speaking about this publicly is not without risk. When I presented some of these ideas at a study day, talking about interbeing, it led to a public shaming, a seven-page personal attack in a global journal. Something akin to ‘witch hunts’ is still very alive in our DNA. I was publicly shamed—but I also sensed a collective story in there. This territory feels bigger. We need people who can talk about this across both worlds, because they’re so separate. And yet, most people are carrying exactly this grief quietly, privately, alone.
We need to have more courage and speak about these experiences that so many people have. We don’t tell each other in case we cancel each other, so we keep them in a secret cupboard. And it’s not just grief—it’s also being deeply touched by the beauty of something—something that is just more. Speaking is potent. But silence also has enormous power and is quite subversive. It gives space to feel and to notice, to be relational.
And after everything—the empire, the fragmentation, the exiled grief, the hollowed-out lives, the secret cupboards… The invitation is simply to stop. To feel. To notice. To be, for a moment, in that interspace between self and world that we were never meant to leave.
Footnote 1: A COP preparatory meeting is a high-level ministerial gathering held about a month before the annual UN Climate Change Conference (COP). It brings together select ministers to discuss key political aspects, iron out disagreements, and provide guidance to ensure productive negotiations at the main summit.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the full conversation, and if you like it, please subscribe, rate, review, and share.
Editor’s Note: This post is comprised of edited excerpts drawn from The Gifts of Trauma podcast transcript. Selected passages have been carefully woven together to create a cohesive narrative that speaks in the guests’ voices and faithfully represents their perspectives. – Rosemary Davies-Janes
