More and more individuals and communities are struggling to cope with the psychological and emotional toll of environmental and social systems gone awry, with this trend likely to get more severe in the coming years and decades.
In this episode of the “Great Unraveling?” series, Leslie Davenport joins Laurie Laybourn-Langton to explore the emotional and psychological impacts of disruption and crisis for individuals and across societies, and what people and communities do and can do in the face of crisis to build resilience.
Leslie Davenport is a psychotherapist who specializes in interdisciplinary dialogues that advance creative and effective solutions to climate change. She’s a founding member of the Institute for Health and Healing, one of the U.S.’s first and largest hospital-based integrative medicine programs, and her extensive clinical and teaching experience have fed into her climate psychology model. She’s the author of a number of books, including Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change.
Transcript
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
In this episode, we explore the emotional and psychological impacts of disruption and crisis for individuals and across societies, and what people and communities do and can do in the face of crisis and to build resilience.
To do so, I’m joined by Leslie Davenport, a psychotherapist who specializes in interdisciplinary dialogues that advance creative and effective solutions to climate change. She is a founding member of the Institute for Health and Healing, one of the USA’s first and largest hospital-based integrative medicine programs, and her extensive clinical and teaching experience are fed into her climate psychology model.
She is the author of a number of books, including Emotional Resiliency In the Era of Climate Change. Leslie, welcome.
Leslie Davenport
Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be a part of this conversation.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
It’s very good to have you here. So, I’m going to kick off with a quite a large question to start with: what impact do societal crises have on mental health and wellbeing? And is there a difference between more acute, immediate crises–for example, like the coronavirus pandemic we’re experiencing now–and looming ones, like the climate crisis, your particular area of expertise in some sense?
Leslie Davenport
There are differences and there’s also a lot of overlap. Usually, when there’s an immediate crisis, it’s, of course, quite disturbing. It can kick up all kinds of stressful reactions. It also varies a lot depending on a person’s background–if they have a lot of trauma in their history, what kind of support they may have available to them.
But many people are able to rally for what they think of as a brief period of time, what they’re hoping will be a brief period of time. “Oh, you know, I can handle this. I can do this. I can make certain sacrifices or adjustments.” And it gets much harder when it gets stretched out. People get depleted, they get impatient, they start to feel a variety of kinds of losses to their, the rhythm of their life.
In the case of coronavirus, there’s social capital, which is so essential for our wellbeing. And what happens over time, or something looming, like the climate crisis, is that we are poorly equipped, emotionally and mentally, to deal with uncertainty that’s just chock full of threats.
And that’s how people perceive it reasonably. So, threat to our financial security, threat to our property, threat to our lives, and the people we care about, threat to our dreams, threat to the way we’ve known life and worked toward life being, and of course, even existentially threat to life itself.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Right.
Leslie Davenport
Of course, with the climate crisis, we’ve got layers of things happening. For some people it still remains largely this thing out there somewhere that’s going to touch us someday. We also know there are already climate refugees. There are already more and more people touched by extreme weather events and the real losses that come from that. And then all the emotional and psychological impacts of that which can be quite lasting.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
And those, as you say, those impacts are racking up more and more. People are experiencing the disruption that we we see already. That’s something that happens across the world, and often in parts of the world that often haven’t got a platform to broadcast that story to the whole world. How much do those communities that have already experienced what to many others is a looming crisis, how do they react and maintain resilience after they have experienced this increasing destabilization?
Leslie Davenport
That’s a huge question because there’s so many variables. But just to even focus in on a smaller one, something like Hurricane Katrina, because it’s easier to study with a little bit of time, you know. There are increasing remaining levels of PTSD, addiction levels go up, depression goes up, anxiety goes up, suicidality goes up.
Parts of that community have restored life, sort of as usual. But I’ve heard there are areas with mold issues, for example, that just linger. There’s the ongoing threat of something like that happening again. There are parts of the neighborhood that never recovered.
And so that’s just like such a teeny example. But it’s just kind of a bite-sized piece to recognize how complex it is. In fact, to truly have that resiliency, especially if it’s being conceptualized as returning to normal, which is I think something that needs to be redefined anyway. I don’t think that’s what resiliency is. In fact, let me say a little more about that.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Please.
Leslie Davenport
When it comes to emotional resiliency, psychological resiliency, the traditional definition has been how to bounce back from a stressful event and return to normal. But I don’t think that applies, especially in things like climate change, or much larger, systemic shifts, because not only is there probably not the option of returning to normal, and not sure that it’s something that we want to do.
So, I define emotional resiliency as building the capacity to have an emotional buoyancy, a kind of readiness to be able to remain present, rather than retreat, or feel overwhelmed, with empathy, with clear mindedness, with strong heartedness, with the aim to connect, and, I mentioned, social capital to build and value our diverse networks.
Maybe almost more important than anything else, is to have a creative frame of mind. We need to have an imaginative, creative frame of mind, because so much of this is being ready to face the unknown. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. We’re building possible models. But you know, it’s similar also to that, quote that’s often attributed to Einstein. I think it’s questionable who actually said it, but that we can’t create new situations having the same level of thinking that created the problem.
And so we can’t just only use our analytical piece of our mind to problem solve and tinker with them. I think it really is going to require that we use so much more of our capacities that largely have gone dormant.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Right. And so you’re saying then the models that we have often applied when it comes to grappling with this problem have been very limited. They’ve been very analytical because we’ve not plumbed, presumably, the emotional side and others here. That we have we have been playing this game with so much of our capacity underused.
Leslie Davenport
Yes.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
So within that, then can we can we inspect a couple of models that you often see out there? Let’s do two. The first is the model of complete doom. In short, the growing destabilization is going to lead to compounding crises that are completely overwhelming, and there is little to nothing that can be done. How, what is your approach to that type of model which has often been seen in the past, but often seems to surface itself quite a bit now?
Leslie Davenport
Well, I think a couple thoughts come to mind that we can apply to this kind of thinking. One is built into our neurology, built into our nervous system and our brain, the way it’s put together… what’s called a negative bias. And it’s something that is part of our survival system. It’s, you know, scanning the horizon for danger and problems, and they register much more strongly than the more neutral or the more positive responses.
Now, in saying that, I don’t want to diminish the severity at all, my eyes are quite open to how serious this is and how things could go. But, for example, if we apply this concept of negative bias into something simple, like relationships. If something, you know, conflicted or difficult happens in a relationship, you have to have five times the positive experiences to hit zero. It’s not like one bad thing, one good thing evens out, because of how our nervous system and how our brain is programmed. So it’s important to recognize that while there is difficult and scary news and very real challenges, it gets amplified in a negative light, simply by the way that our brains function.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Right.
Leslie Davenport
The other concept that I think is important is that when we become overwhelmed–when we feel small, powerless, some of the characteristics you said–it’s too much to bear, that uncertainty, for some people. That discomfort, that overwhelm. You know, “I can’t, I don’t know what to do, it’s too big for me.” We find all kinds of ways to check out. And the doom story is one of the ways of checking out. Like, you know, ” can’t do anything anyway, so I’m gonna go order a steak right now,” or whatever it is, whatever we do.
So there’s a relevant concept that comes out of trauma studies called the window of tolerance, or zone of resilience. The idea is that we kind of function in this window that expands and contracts. And within our zone, we can receive information, process information, integrate and deal with challenging situations pretty well.
When it’s too much, we start to feel overwhelmed, we start to move outside of that window of tolerance, a couple of things happen. We either get very reactive–kind of angry, can’t receive any info–or we check out and kind of dissociate, we shut down. And so I do think that sometimes the doom story, that resignation, I’m going to take myself off of any platform to engage, is a form of checking out.
The really, really good news, though, is that we can learn. There are practices of how to grow our window of tolerance. It’s not static. And I think honestly, that is one of the most needed things right now from the realm of behavioral science that could be offered is not just how to cope, you know, and some tools for self care, but how to truly create the capacity to be present with more. Because I think that’s what we need. And I think that’s what we’re going to need.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
Looking to the future then, Let’s take younger generations, and the experiences that they face, the challenges they face, the experiences that they’re going through at the moment range enormously around the world. But a growing sense of fear about destabilization, and not just environmental, but also social and economic and how they interact together. What would you say to those younger generations who are experiencing those kind of feelings and are looking into this future with their differing windows of resiliency?
Leslie Davenport
Interesting question, because I’ll just mention, I’m working on a couple books, one for 8 to 12 year olds on this topic and one for teens. So I’m kind of kind of looking at…
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
You’re on this at the moment.
Leslie Davenport
Yeah. Before we go to any kind of solutions, we need to make space for seeing, validating, acknowledging all those feelings and thoughts.
You know, it’s an important step not to just jump to how can we soothe things and make things better and feel okay. It’s like, “Yeah, I see you. These are very real challenges, these are scary times.” So it’s not to jump over it. And it’s also not to only be there.
But once that has happened, there’s something lovely that can happen when youth, and actually all ages, can start to feel like they’re going to use all this emotion, all this energy towards something–towards the possibility of meaningful change. See that’s what’s hard to bear.
There’s the doom story and we also don’t want to jump to the everything’s gonna be fine story with rainbows. But it’s that capacity to be in the discomfort, and excitement, and even joy, of creating something that again, calls for more of our humanity. Maybe this holds the potential of being a truly transformative time. Not without a lot of birth pangs and difficulty for sure.
I was gonna say… The other thing is how to understand how what can feel like a small contribution can have ripples. and I’ll give you a concrete example that I looked at with my own life.
Sometimes I function as a psychotherapist, as well as doing consultation and education. And so sometimes I think sitting one-on-one with someone in a room just isn’t nearly a big enough platform. But I had an experience of helping someone through a speaking phobia, who was in the environmental world, who was going to be standing on a stage with a very large audience, that was being captured by media that was going to have an even larger distribution. And it’s because of our work together that I became this significant link in what made this larger thing possible.
And so, I think if we function within the spheres of our influence, grounded in the gifts that we have, and everyone is encouraged to do that. It’s that inner connection that’s coming to light here that can also manifest in terms of this more forward transformative movement.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
So fellowship is at the heart of this, as well and being resilient to seeing that change.
Leslie Davenport
Yeah, yeah. And that every everything matters, you know, every contribution matters. Because if we get enough up and going, then it’s, yeah, it’s the collective.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
We sadly have run out of time, as we always do with these interviews. But if you’ve got any final thoughts that you would like to throw out there, when it comes to this question of how we can maintain a level of emotional resiliency, when it comes to looking into this uncertain future?
Leslie Davenport
Yeah, let me just add one more, which is, you know, we’re talking about the interconnectedness–socially and otherwise–but I don’t think we understand it fully until we include an understanding that the environment affects our emotions, affects our thoughts. Our thoughts affect our emotion, they shape our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our behavior. Our behavior affects the environment. The environment comes back to influence us.
So this idea of separating inner and outer, the way we used to think about it, it doesn’t work. We’re seeing interconnections in a biological way, in a systemic way. And we have to link it up with, the living ecosystem has to include the way those threads connect your thoughts and emotions and our bodies. It’s all part of it. And I haven’t seen too much of that in the conversations.
Laurie Laybourn-Langton
I think that’s a great note to end on. And Leslie, thank you so much for joining us today.
Leslie Davenport
Thank you.