Eco-Psychotherapy
Taking therapy outside – Reaching for a vital connection
This presentation will sound some of the keynotes and associated elements involved in moving psychotherapy out into natural environments. Referring to personal experience and case material, we will take a metaphorical walk through an outdoor therapeutic space, engaging with the significant considerations that arise through working in this vital setting. Along the way, attention will be given to matters such as relational vitality, expansive relating, and embodied process, all of which can promote a deeper internal connection with personal traumas and ways-of-being in the world. In exploring this unique therapeutic process we will also visit the concordant potential for profound attachment to the places that sustain us, and the implications for both their future and our own.
This presentation has provided much clear instruction on how to begin to shape work in nature, and how to examine my own intentions and relationship with nature as I do this work. I appreciated Hayley’s view on nature as a dissociative space, a protector, and the splitting off of nature and human from that root. This greatly informs my work, as I begin to migrate my in-office therapy into an ecotherapy practice, and inspired every part of me. Thank you!