Ecopsychotherapy

Ecopsychotherapy is the psychotherapeutic view of Ecopsychology that takes the definition of mental health to wider frontiers than usual, because it understands necessary to repair the repression exerted by our civilization on the relationship with the natural world, both external and internal. According to Theodore Roszak, “this form of psychic mutilation, which is the most crucial for the advance of industrial civilization, is the assumption that the earth is a dead and servile thing, that it has no feelings, no memory, no intention of it”.

We believe that there is an environmental reciprocity that is healing by itself, an intrapsychic relationship with nature that is maintained despite repression. Humanity spent more than 90% of its evolution in close contact with the earth and the memory of this experience can even be found at the genetic level. Ecopsychotherapists are those who, starting from the psychotherapeutic tradition, pave the way back to the consciousness of this reciprocity.

Ecopsychotherapy asks the following questions:

How much does this repression influence our psyche?
What is its incidence in the symptoms that most psychologists see in our practice?
What is the beneffit to the individual to repair this alienation?
How much does this psychic repair influence the community and the ecosystem where the individual is inserted?
Is it enough to live experiences in nature to repair the alienation or do we need other types of internal processes?

The ecopsychotherapeutic approach is much broader than outdoor work; it is the gaze placed on all the defensive and creative dimensions of the client (infantile, interpersonal, transgenerational, etc.), with the purpose of providing the opportunity to integrate aspects of oneself that might give unsuspected sources of satisfaction, that do not depend exclusively on the usual cultural sources.

We understand that ecology needs psychology and psychology needs ecology. We believe the change of people to be fundamental to keep nature as we know it, and give ourselves the opportunity to survive our excessive consumption. Ecopsychotherapy provides the tools so that each one can create a bridge that reestablishes the lost connection.