Would you like to feel a greater sense of belonging or connection? 
Do you feel a sense of despair and helplessness around climate change or other environmental issues? 
Do you have a sense that nature could help with your healing, but you don't know how to start?

What is ecotherapy?


Ecotherapy is an approach within counselling, psychotherapy, and psychology that recognises the importance of our environment. This is different to psychological approaches that understand humans as isolated from our environment, such as viewing people solely as a product of early childhood experiences, core beliefs, or from a reductionist medical perspective. Despite this prevalent split between humans and our environment in psychology, many of us intuitively recognise how affected we are by our environment. It is not uncommon for people to have places that feel special to them, hold a unique personal meaning, or that serve a purpose such as calming or inspiring us.

As well as intuitively making sense, ecotherapy is informed by a wide variety of disciplines. These include indigenous traditions, transpersonal (spiritual) therapies, deep ecology, adventure therapy, body based therapies, eco-psychoanalysis, ecopsychology, social ecology, Jungian psychotherapy, Buddhist mindfulness and meditation practices, neuropsychology, and more. From this vast range of influences, ecotherapy gathers together understandings and practices that use the power of our relationship with the natural environment to assist with personal healing, or to help people respond clearly and effectively to environmental issues, or both.    

Let’s look at the first of the above applications of ecotherapy – utilising our relationship with nature to assist with personal healing. Whether through an outdoor or indoor therapy session, the numerous psychological meanings that nature holds and evokes for us, can unlock healing. For instance, connecting with natural cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death can help us to accept, grieve and heal losses that we have experienced.

The second application of ecotherapy of responding more clearly and effectively to environmental issues, harnesses psychological insight for sustainability. Environmental issues are not solely technological or political. They involve complex, often unconscious processes that lead humans to irrationally destroy the ecological basis for our collective survival.

Ultimately ecotherapy understands that personal and environmental health are interdependent, and cannot ultimately be separated. 

Is ecotherapy for me?

Ecotherapy can be an effective treatment for a wide range of people as nature is proven to increase health and wellbeing in numerous ways such as reducing symptoms relating to anxiety, depression and stress. It is particularly relevant for those who feel they have a strong connection with nature, or who have a longing for this. If this sounds like you, your relationship with nature could be a powerful ally in personal healing, or could be personally worthwhile for you to develop further.

If you are an activist, scientist, sustainability and environmental worker, you may find ecotherapy particularly helpful to sustain you in the face of despair, grief, setbacks, isolation, or burnout in your work.

Ecotherapy is also for people who have tried other styles of therapy and found them ineffective, especially if they have the sense that this alternative way of working, which includes nature, may be a better fit for them.

What are the benefits of ecotherapy?

Over the last ten years the benefits of connecting with nature have been increasingly researched and recognised by mainstream medicine and science, to the point that doctors are now giving “nature prescriptions” not only for mental health, but also to help treat a variety of medical conditions. These conditions range from post-cancer fatigue to obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. That said, working with a skilled ecotherapist has more to offer than simply being advised to go for a walk in the bush, or to do some gardening. Below are some of the benefits that you could experience from ecotherapy.

  • Naturalness. We strive to control our bodies, our feelings, our relationships, and our environment – often to our own detriment. The natural world can teach us a lot about how to live, grow and die without getting in our own and each other’s way.

  • Perspective. Sometimes stepping away from our everyday environment is the best way to get perspective on our lives. Most of us know this already, and do this by taking trips and holidays, often to places of natural beauty. Why not make your therapy more effective by getting perspective through including a physical change of space?

  • Effectiveness. This is particularly relevant for activists, scientists, researchers, advocates and others involved in working on environmental issues. Gaining psychological perspective on issues such as climate change denial can help us to be more effective and less frustrated in our work.

  • Belonging. Modern urban stresses and artificial environments can contribute to a painful sense of alienation that may be powerful yet largely go unrecognised. Ecotherapy can help us to feel belonging to this world, with all its beauty, fragility, and limitations.

  • Personal sustainability. In the urgency of sustainability work often personal sustainability is missed or sacrificed. Ecotherapy can help us develop meaning, pleasure, and a sense of empowerment that sustains long term environmental engagement.

  • Connectedness. Many people's relationship with nature has a spiritual or religious aspect. Developing this aspect of our lives more fully through ecotherapy can help us to deepen our spiritual or religious connection and path.

What's the next step?

The therapists at Lucid are passionate about working in this way, and have specialised as ecotherapists. We believe that therapy doesn't need to stay inside office buildings and many of our clients not only enjoy having regular outdoor sessions in the nearby Royal Botanic Gardens, or in Centennial Park, but notice the benefits of being in a different environment. 

Why not try a unique form of therapy that integrates the healing power of nature with psychotherapy? For more information or to book a session, contact us here.

Ask us about our reduced rates for those who are active in environmental work, and check out our events page to see what eco-workshops we are currently running. 
Lucid Psychotherapy and Counselling, Christchurch provides affordable and effective individual, couples and group psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, counselling, ecotherapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), mindfulness for stress, panic and anxiety disorders, and minfulness mentoring, servicing the area of Christchurch, New Zealand. We also offer online Skype therapy sessions. Lucid's counsellors and psychotherapists are experienced and qualified practitioners.
© 2017 Lucid Psychotherapy & Counselling.