The information age provides people with more knowledge and a greater understanding of the world and its challenges than ever before. When facing intractable problems like the climate crisis, structural inequality and corruption, emotions like anxiety, overwhelm, hopelessness, grief and anger are common for students, professionals and communities. From the perspective of education for sustainable development, a lack of proper emotional support and skills training can lead to burnout, disengagement and conflict. With the advent of this new level of understanding comes the need for tools that build people’s capacities for long term engagement, effective social action and well-being by supporting them to process challenging emotions.
A 2017 article in the Atlantic, Constant Worry Won’t Save the World highlights the tension between creating awareness about world issues, the overwhelm and anxiety that comes with this awareness, and people’s abilities to engage with these issues effectively and for the long run.
In response to chronic stress about the state of the world, Renee Lertzman, a psychologist who studies climate change communication, shared that “people get overwhelmed. They burnout and short-circuit and turn their backs on the very issues that they care most deeply about.”
Symptoms of burnout include markers of well-being, such as depression, headaches and substance abuse, as well as markers of effective action, such as concentration, loss of productivity and decreased working memory.
“Emotions are wired into us by eons of evolution,” says Dr. Diana Fosha, psychologist and founder of the therapeutic modality AEDP (accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy).
“[T]heir purpose is to help us cope with our environments and enhance our adaptation.” In the foreword of the book It’s Not Always Depression, she goes on to explain that, “Processing core emotions [such as sadness, anger, fear, joy, and disgust] leads to resilience, clarity and improved capacity to know what we need in a way that can inform our actions.”
Dr. Fosha’s words are important to reflect on in the pursuit of developing tools that meet the emotional, psychological and spiritual needs of 21st century change agents. At We Heal for All, we take modalities that are designed for individual healing and adapt them to group settings in order to address challenging, personal experiences related to world issues.
Frameworks and tools that have been effective are:
Permissioning emotions in the classroom or workshop setting. This can be done implicitly by modeling healthy expression of emotions as the facilitator or acknowledging and thanking the presence of emotions in participants as they come up. This can also be done explicitly by introducing the class/workshop as a space that welcomes emotions and seeks to work with them in constructive ways.
Dyadic and small group shares that emphasize connection and healthy relating. Opportunities for participants to authentically share about their experiences in an intimate setting undoes aloneness, which is a key step in emotional healing. Specific tools that support this are storytelling and resonance practice, as well as a co-created community agreement on healthy relating.
Trauma-informed visualization exercises that calm the nervous system, invite participants to access the felt sense of their body and emotions, and encourage the use of imagination to process and explore complexity.
Exercises that address moral injury. Exercises consist of acknowledging and accepting the ways we all feed into world problems, creating constructive space for feelings about this reality, and forming a new relationship with this reality by using it as fuel for being of service.
As the nascent field of education for sustainable development continues to grow, it is important to take a whole-systems approach to the way we nurture and develop change agents. This means expanding the literature, research and practices of self-awareness competencies to include psychological resilience and emotional buoyancy. We Heal for All seeks to be a pioneer in this pursuit and looks forward to more opportunities to develop and pilot curriculum geared to this end.