Eco-Psychotherapy

Wild Therapy

The Wild Therapy project is about bringing therapy into the wild, but equally about bringing wildness into therapy. Working outdoors in comparatively undomesticated settings encourages us to bring the other-than-human and more-than human – animals, birds, plants, trees, hills, rivers, winds, dreams, ghosts, spirits – into the therapeutic process. Spending time ‘in nature’, as we say, can help us appreciate that we are never anywhere else, always inhabiting and encountering our own nature. In living, working and creating community together, and meeting other species in the outdoors, we may come to a stronger recognition of the interdependence of all beings: moving from a more hardened, human-centric view to a softer recognition of the value of all that lives. Bringing these experiences back indoors, we discover how they change our therapeutic work, moving us to work in a less constrained and habit-bound style when we are in the therapy room, as much as when we are outside.