Season 1, Episode 1: Climate Change and Happiness

Written By Climate Change And Happiness
 

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Season 1, Episode 1: Climate Change and Happiness

Welcome to the Climate Change and Happiness podcast. You’ll meet hosts Dr. Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala. Panu talks about his books and workshops on climate feelings, drawing on his background in eco-theology. Thomas speaks from the front lines of research into the mental health impacts of climate change, and shares insights about coping from his counseling practice. In this and future episodes, listeners learn a new vocabulary for climate feelings, drawing from different languages and insights from mental health therapy. “Climate Change and Happiness” is a provocative title. What does it mean to be happy at this time? We invite you to join us on this journey. 

Links

Upcoming Episodes

In Episode 2, Thomas and Panu talk about “holding space” for climate feelings, including “standing one’s ground,” and practicing “climate cosmopolitanism” by having a wide sophistication about other’s climate feelings and beliefs. In Episode 3, they explain “eco-anxiety,” the history of the concept, how to manage eco-anxious feelings, and how to understand climate anxiety as a primal emotion, a cultural idea, and a mental health diagnosis. Also, look forward to guests like Québécois psychologist and ecotherapist Karine St. Jean, noted conservation psychologist and IPCC author Susan Clayton, and global women’s health researcher Jade Sasser.

Transcript

Season 1, Episode 1: Climate Change and Happiness

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.

Thomas Doherty: Hello I am Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, the show for people around the globe who are thinking deeply about the personal side of climate change, particularly their emotional responses and their feelings.

I, Thomas, am a clinical psychologist based in Portland, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Panu is a climate emotions researcher with a background in theology, based in Helsinki, Finland - or nearby there. In this podcast we talk about our research and our activities and our personal experiences and our families and ways we cope with climate stress and build capacity for hope and happiness and how you can too as the listener. Today I want to get into the “why” of this podcast, you know, why this provocative title, Climate Change and Happiness, what is a climate emotion, how are we qualified, Panu and I, to talk about this, and why should people listen? So I’m going to turn it over to Panu to chat about this and we’re going to play off this idea. Morning for me and evening for Panu.

Panu, how is it going?

Pihkala: Thanks for asking, Thomas. In Helsinki, we are at the borderline between summer and autumn while we are recording this episode, so there’s already yellow and red leaves on trees, but still more green. That’s going to change relatively soon and autumn has for a long time been one of my favorite seasons - well practically I like all four of them or eight of them. It’s also interesting how various cultures have different numbers, they have given names for seasons and so on. But regarding our subject, climate emotions and climate feelings, I think autumn is a sort of special time for that also because it so starkly reminds us that things are changing.

Doherty: Yeah, so Panu, tell me about this - what draws you to this podcast? How does this help you personally, why do you think this is important for people?

Pihkala: In this podcast, we are exploring climate emotions and feelings from many angles. Of course, we can’t escape some facts - we are white males in rather privileged positions, but we really try to take an open view towards various experiences that people have in the world. Also, perhaps some experiences that the more-than-human-world have.

Emotions and feelings are on one hand sort of everyday subjects. Everybody knows roughly what we are talking about, but then actually when people really start researching emotions and feelings -- or affect as the one term that is growing in popularity--  it’s rather complex.  Also myself, coming from a background in religious studies, theology, interdisciplinary environmental studies and moving more and more into studies on emotion and anxiety; I’ve been surprised how complex and, at the same time, fascinating the area of emotion and feeling is. That’s a richness and it’s also a difficulty and complexity especially when talking about emotions related to such a complex phenomenon as climate change, or the climate crisis.

But how about you, Thomas? What’s your sort of starting thoughts about climate emotions and climate feelings?

Doherty: Well Panu, you know I was really drawn to work with you because of your research. You’re one of the leaders in the world in terms of researching climate emotions and you’ve got this depth in your background of theology and eco-theology. Myself, a clinical psychologist, who was drawn into this climate work some years ago and have been immersed in it now for, you know, almost 20 years. People, I think, need a place to be with climate emotions in a public forum and it is so rare. I know I get a chance to do that with people through my personal -- my clinical work and my counseling and therapy and through teaching that I’ve done and through public groups. But it’s so rare.

I would joke that this is a show for “climate and emotions nerds” and I say that in the best way possible because we - you know you and I - are of a handful of people that can, you know, not only spell “solastalgia” but also define it and also differentiate from other kinds of feelings words and that’s really fascinating right? Solastalgia being a neologism, coined by Glenn Albrecht in Australia, you know, this stress about the changing environment around us. So, I think it is really important to have a place for people to sit and be with and hear people talk about this, right? And, you know, and to break this down, you know? What’s the difference between an emotion and a feeling, for example? Or you know, affect as a jargony word that academics use, but why would we use that term instead? So these are all things that we can get to.

You know emotions are physical manifestations of our living. You cannot be alive and not have emotions. All sentient beings have emotional responses to the world around them and feelings is the language that we developed to talk about our emotions and that’s limitless. There are so many different feelings words and feelings vocabulary. So I think I want to make sure that people come away from our talk with an increased feelings vocabulary about their experience of climate change. That would be a really great deliverable for us and I hope listeners are curious about this and starting to think about their own thoughts and feelings about climate change.

Panu say a little bit about your most recent - well you can talk a bit about, I know you’ve written book in Finnish about climate emotions and you’ve done some research; so what are some of the climate emotions that you’re talking about in your research and what are you observing and then I can share a little bit about what I see.

Pihkala: Yeah, I did these two popular science books in Finnish. The first one about eco-anxiety and hope, the second one about ecological emotions - Ympäristötunteet - for those many of you who know the Finnish language. When I did the first one in 2017, I already realized the different feelings of sorrow, sadness and grief are a big part of those experiences when one speaks roughly about eco-anxiety or climate anxiety and also, feelings of guilt, inadequacy, sometimes bordering on shame. I did mention many other emotion and feeling words in that book especially the varieties of hope, despair, hopelessness and so on were a very important part there. But, I also realized that there’s so many other shades and tones in emotional experiences and that led me to do this whole handbook of various ecological emotions and feelings, and it was a journey of exploration for myself also. I was meeting a lot of people through my lectures, leading workshops around Finland mostly - some abroad - but mostly in Finland and as a result of that, I learned to appreciate the multi-colored-ness of people’s climate feelings, or climate affect.

Doherty: Yeah, so I mean what are some juicy climate feelings words that you’ve worked with.

Pihkala: Anger is a very important emotion of course, and one of the challenges when talking about emotion and feeling, including ecological or climate emotion and feeling, is that if only one term is used for a major affective dimension such as anger or sadness, then many things tend to get lost or obscured. If we think about anger, for example, there’s a sort of silent rage that many people are feeling because of all the injustices and losses related to the climate crisis. Then there’s sort of aggressive rage over social media, for example, related to the psychosocial difficulty of these issues. But then there’s also a good kind of rage. I’ve called that “vima” in Finnish language.

Vima is an old Finnish word and [William Faulkner’s] The Sound and the Fury that was translated with the word vima. So it's kind of good fury and that’s one interesting aspect. And I see that for example in many young climate activists, for example. So they are really making an effort to be non-violent, but channel their thumos, as the Greeks would say, coming back to the nerd issue, their vima or positive climate outrage or fury into constructive action. So that’s one dimension that I’ve been fascinated about.

How about you Thomas? I bet that you meet a lot of different climate emotions or feelings as part of your therapy work, so what’s some that come to your mind?

Doherty: Yeah, well I really love this and we’ll capture the theme, this good fury. What I think is helpful, Panu, is that you’ve - again, you’re getting more nuanced in the vocabulary. You know, feelings vocabulary when it’s limited we have just a few words - it’s like a watercolor paint set and we only have, you know, five basic colors, you know, red, orange, black, blue, green — and so our painting is going to be relatively in primary colors and simplistic. Anger is a primary color kind of emotion. But there’s so many nuances in anger and you’ve been able to find value in anger and actually parse that out so, you know, because anger can be very toxic for our mind and our body and for our relationships. And anyone who’s done environmental work knows that when you get too stuck in anger it’s not good for your work or for your outlook and things like that. So you’ve been able to find this kind of righteous anger which is a very healthy and evolutionarily adaptive emotion to feel anger and to stand up for yourself. And I do think we need to hold close to that kind of healthy anger and knowing it’s very powerful and very hot and very fiery, so it’s dangerous in its way.

My work with climate feelings comes out of my work in general with my clients around all kinds of feelings about their life, and I tend to do both descriptive work with feelings where I help people to kind of name what they are feeling and the spectrum. Someone might feel stressed or fatigued, for example, but within stressed or fatigued, just say that word stress, eco-stress, climate stress, life stress. You know I might feel somewhat anxious; I might feel burned out; I might feel cranky, depleted, edgy, exhausted - I’m reading off of my feelings vocab list that I use. You know, I am overwhelmed or rattled; suspenseful, tense, tight. These are all pieces of stress and fatigue and some are more neutral like weary. To be weary is just to have a busy, full day and to be weary at the end of a day whether it’s good or bad. And it’s quite normal and healthy to feel weary if you’re living a full life and so it’s certainly normal to feel weary about climate change and weary about environmental issues and just weary, worn out, depleted. You know our battery is tapped out.

I tend to try to reserve words like burned out or things like that because that’s a more final kind of feeling. When a house is burned out, you have to basically tear it down and rebuild and so we don’t want to get to a place where we’re burned out. So we’re both working with feelings, but we’re also trying to find an optimal level and be very nuanced in our language. And I try to get people to come at some more what I call neutral or sort of middle-ground feelings like feeling “vulnerable,” for example. I think is a great word that I like to work with with clients and really sit with our vulnerability because that doesn’t imply an ultimate direction it just means that we’re vulnerable. Then once we get to that point then we have a little more choice.

And then of course we can think about feelings that we want to be feeling, you know like that good fury, or maybe present, curious, engaged. You know you talked in another conversation about togetherness and so there are other feelings that we want to cultivate. So for me it's about describing, sitting with, expanding, and then cultivating you know the feelings that we want to be feeling.

What are some other kinds of feelings - you know cultivating kind of feelings - that are coming up in your research that people might want to feel about climate change?

Pihkala: Yeah, that's a very important method in my mind what you just described. Helping people reflect about what they are seeing about what they see others feeling. I came across similar methods in a project I was doing with the Finnish Mental Health Society. It is an old organization which promotes sort of proactive mental health skills — so trying to avoid any pathologization of mental health issues -- and we had shared interests because that’s been my focus related to eco-anxiety, because fundamentally it's a very rationale reaction and it may turn up into a problem if it gets too intense.

But I really want to stay clear of this pathologizing tendency and sometimes emotional feeling words are used also for those purposes. For example, if our only word for sadness is grief and then we see even grief in a sort of medicalized way that’s highly problematic and again seeing the different shades and learning to appreciate emotions and feelings as part of life. So what you talked about you know trying to find different tones and sort of acceptance also that we have feelings and there’s fluctuations also and then there are all sorts of things that we can do to work towards the goal, where we can sort of surf better with the waves of emotion.

That’s a metaphor coming from Miriam Greenspan, a therapist from the [US] East Coast. Her book Healing Through the Dark Emotions is one of my favorite emotion books actually, and this metaphor of having recognized the force of emotion, the wave - to use the surfing metaphor, I know Thomas you are on the West Coast so I thought this might be appropriate - actually some people surf even in Finland it’s pretty cold here but yeah! So, surfing on the wave you have some control, but you don’t think that you can control the whole sea either. So that metaphor has some strength in my mind.

Doherty: Yeah, exactly and we do go surfing here. You can surf. There’s no such thing as bad weather only bad gear. So if you have a good enough wetsuit you can surf anywhere. And I love that and that’s something that all of our listeners can sit with for a moment. You know we can control our behavior on the wave but we cannot control the ocean. You know we can come into harmony with the swell and the wind, and we can certainly pick better or worse days to go try to struggle with the breakers in the ocean. And that’s what surfers do. They become very wise about timing and they’re patient. So all that said, such a deep metaphor. Some years ago I was involved with a whole seminar at the American Psychological Association at the meeting in Hawaii, we did a whole workshop on surfing and psychology. And we had several different researchers talking about surfing and there’s a rich literature on surfing about connection with nature and consciousness and all of that.

But the surf metaphor is helpful in our daily life, exactly. You know that’s another image for feelings is we have this curve, this despair and empowerment curve. We’re going to be up; we’re going to be down. As we become interested and excited about a project and taking action we get inspired and we have energy and then once we realize how complicated the project it is and how difficult sometimes we get fatigued and we lose our inspiration and even come into a despair place. Anyone who has done a project — and Panu you and I, we talk about our writing — I’m in a bit of a despair place in a project I’m trying to finish up so I feel like I’m on mile 23 of a marathon here and I just need just push it out this chapter on climate change for a clinical psychology textbook — which is great that we’re writing about this in a clinical psychology textbook. So it's a great project, but it’s also tough to pull this stuff together.

So, surfing the wave, you know I think this summer [Summer 2021] - the IPCC 6th assessment report, the 6th cycle is coming out and we’re getting the physical basis report coming out and you know with climate change we have direct mental health impacts from disasters and storms and problems, and we have indirect as all this washes over our society. Then, we have the subjective impacts of just bearing and sitting with this global problem, this global hyper object of climate change, and so we really need feelings skills. That’s why we have this podcast. We need some concrete, daily feelings skills.

You know the IPCC 6th cycle there’s nothing particularly — if you follow this and many of our listeners probably are experts on this more so than myself — but there’s nothing particularly new in the 6th cycle; there’s nothing particularly new in any of these. They’re simply becoming more clear and there is more consilience in the science about climate. Global warming exists. We know that it’s caused by human activities and not just natural activities, we know that it’s having impacts, social, humanitarian, economic impacts. Now we’re having attribution studies where we can actually link a storm or a flood to climate change and we can kind of tell how much it’s been amplified due to, you know, human centered climate change.

This research is scary to people and so I think one practical skill is to work on working with our fear. There’s a difference between being afraid, being anxious, being apprehensive, being frightened, being nervous, being panicked, paralyzed. So people have this kind of spectrum and I try to help people move from that to a place of alertness and presence and vulnerability and awareness, centering, breathing, all of these kinds of therapeutic things that we can talk about in upcoming episodes. We can have the capacity to sit with looking through an IPCC report and gleaning what we want to get out of it that is new and notable and potentially helpful for us, not simply living in fear of this knowledge that we’re creating. I mean it’s unprecedented, the knowledge that we know of climate change, we don’t want to live in fear of it.

Pihkala: Yeah, exactly. The different shades of fear and anxiety and worry. Ranging from panic to very constructive worrying which is related to proactive action also so that’s another very important topic and the workshops that I’m leading often together with various experts, many of the people who come there have a long history with environmental issues. Then there’s some more common features in those kinds of people’s experiences. For example, the danger of burning out or becoming clinical because if you love the natural world and know what’s going on there’s so many losses around and it’s difficult to make changes and sometimes it's difficult to read the good news. Media and communication is another big subject here. For some other people it may be guilt and shame are more central emotional issues and that’s made more difficult by different structural things and political action or inaction where often the responsibility is left too much for the individuals, and causing complications of guilt and shame, for example.

But despite people having very different situations and feelings and emotions, some dynamics are similar like the need for emotion skills that you, Thomas, mentioned and also, the desire to be validated by safe others in one’s emotional experiences. Validated, recognized, sometimes even, you know, held, holding in the psychological sense or containment to use another term from psychology. So that’s what I see happening a lot in these workshops also. Even though that might not be a very thorough investigation of all the emotional tones, there might just happen enough validation and holding so that it becomes beneficial for people and let’s hope that this podcast at least sometimes could function in that way also for people.

Doherty: Indeed Panu, I second that emotion there. I mean being validated and I hope everyone who is listening to us, no matter where you happen to be. You know Panu and I are separated, you know, around the globe and we do expect people are going to be listening in from any place on the planet and, you know, I do want people to feel validated and, you know, as we get this podcast set up and running, climatechangeandhappiness.com, I look forward to hearing from people and hearing questions and things that people might want us to explore.

But I do want to validate. It is just the basic point. As a clinical psychologist, I can tell that it is totally normal and sane to be concerned about issues like climate change and, you know, environmental degradation and toxins in the environment. And it's very normal to feel sadness and grief around extinction and things like that. These are a sign of health actually and a sign of values. So as we talk more, you know, we realize that we’re in pain or we’re hurting because we have values. We can get into these words and get really strong with them and really get creative with these climate words. You know one thing that Panu and I like to share is different cultural terms and words and we have fun with this. That’s where this title comes from Climate Change and Happiness. We are — it’s a provocative title I know — but we are playing with the idea of what would it mean to be happy in this world and can we claim some legitimate happiness and how new is this anyway? We talk about - you know one of the words I love is the Portuguese word of saudade and we’ve talked about weltschmerz, you know, in German. Saudade you know that sort of longing, that kind of delicious longing for something from the past, a very sensual kind of feeling of longing and missing something. How do we differentiate words like saudade or weltschmerz which is “world weariness” and “world pain"?  How do we differentiate some of these words that we’ve known and lived with for years? These are parts of the human experience and how does that relates to climate change, for example?

We have neologisms like solastalgia which is a very kind of painful word. It really describes a pain and a loss and almost a ripping away. You know, of course, the term comes from Australia where those massive coal-mining projects have been tearing up the environment and people are seeing their places, you know, landscapes destroyed. So that’s a very painful kind of emotion. It’s a victimized kind of feeling. But how do we claim this and move past victimhood to more of a fully-feeling self. I know Panu, you have great Finnish words that come into play here.

Pihkala: Yeah, one example of that is haikeus which is sort of realizing that you will miss this when it’s gone and also realizing that the process is ongoing. That’s sort of related to many existential themes deep down, haikeus, and then we also have a combination of suloisen and haikea which means it's not exactly bittersweet but almost so it's sweet and haikea at the same time. That’s one of the mixed feelings that the climate crisis brings us and also one sign of health and one sign that the process has gone a bit forward. There’s always many factors affecting these emotional processes and it's not just up to the individual but luckily the individual also can do a lot in many cases and we know that people’s circumstances are very different here. So if one can also feel happiness or even bittersweetness in addition to sadness and solastalgia and all the trouble, that’s already something and testifies to the human ability for meaning-making even though the times may be very rough as they have been in human history many times.

Doherty: Indeed. So I hope this gives people a taste of what we’re coming after in the Climate Change and Happiness Podcast. Again, this is a show for people around the globe who are thinking deeply about the personal side of climate change including their climate feelings. I think we were able to get into a bit of the why of this podcast and why we would title it “Climate Change and Happiness.” The difference between climate emotions and climate feelings: Emotions are in your body, you all have them. Not everybody has feelings though until you grow them and explore them so we’re going to explore them in this podcast and we’ve had a lot to share and I think it’s a great resource for people. So, Panu I’m going to start my day here, it’s actually Labor Day here in the US so it’s a holiday - a national holiday and there’s some beautiful weather here in the Pacific Northwest and I’m going to spend some time with my daughter and I’m going to spend some time on my writing today and my life, and you’ve got an evening and some children that will be coming up to see you soon.

Pihkala: Yeah, that’s true and in our house on Monday there’s the public sauna also for house inhabitants so that’s up on my list after the boys go to bed, I’ll go to the sauna and talk with the old guys who regularly come there.

Doherty: That sounds very civilized Panu and very Finnish and I would love to be there with you, so you have a great evening and I look forward to more of these conversations in the future. Take care.  

Pihkala: Likewise, Thomas and thanks for all the listeners.

Doherty: Take care everyone.

[music: “CC&H theme music”]

 
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