When can we say we’ve done enough?

This week The Guardian released a short excerpt of ‘Our House Is On Fire’, the account of Greta Thunberg’s remarkable and very difficult childhood, as told by her mother.

*A four story high mural of Greta in San Francisco.*

If, like me, you haven’t yet had the opportunity to read Malena Ernman’s book, this excerpt gives a real flavour of the kind of battles faced and overcome by a ‘family and planet in crisis’. Ernman describes what it was like to watch her depressed, terrified, and very unwell daughter find a way through these challenges and begin taking on a leadership role in her own family, and then across the world. It’s a humbling read.

Ernman writes, ‘[Greta] saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO2 emissions with her naked eye. The invisible, colourless, scentless, soundless abyss that our generation has chosen to ignore.’

Reading that, it hits home to me how simple acting on climate change really is, and how complicated it has been made in order to make delayed action more permissible.

Which leaves me feeling guilty. It makes me want to get up and do something right now, which is what it’s designed to do. To turn the heating off, sign every petition under the sun, ceaselessly share the terrifying news with anyone who will listen. It makes me want to do everything within my power to know that I can say I did enough.

But, whilst most things are not difficult in themselves, constantly trying to shift culture and the sense of what is normal is a never-ending challenge.

We humans have a mindset that is wired for the collective, so it is particularly costly to us when we try to do things differently from others, even if it is right. And as a climate friendly life is not yet normal, it takes a great deal of personal intention, determination, and willingness to make mistakes to change. It takes its toll.

This is exactly how I ended up totally burned out in my climate activism in the first place. I didn’t know when I could give myself permission to say that I had done enough, and I didn’t know how to ‘switch off’ from what is happening in the world.

Essentially, I really struggled to understand and implement healthy boundaries around the climate emergency.

What’s So Amazing About Greta?

Greta attributes the clarity of her thinking about climate change to Asperger’s Syndrome. This lends itself to more ‘black and white’ type thinking which is clear throughout her book, ‘No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference’. She writes, for example, that ‘Sweden steals 3.2 years of natural resources from future generations every year’.

Greta, and the other young people leading the Fridays for the Future movement, now over fourteen million people strong, have inspired incredible change across the world.

Yet we know from years of climate communications research that strategies that invoke feelings of guilt, shame, shock, or fear are not an effective motivator for change in the longer term. It may grab our attention for a while, but for most people something that consistently makes us feel bad, inadequate, and eventually powerless will compel us to look away.

I recently saw a very helpful infographic from a Black Lives Matter activist, Dani Coke, which explains this brilliantly. She calls it ‘The Cycle of Inaction.’

The Cycle of Inaction describes the burnout cycle that comes with using unpleasant emotions, such as guilt or shock, to push us into action.

This is why vision setting, the topic of last month’s post On… Resolutions, is absolutely vital for sustainable activism. A vision of our desired future, of what things would look like if we succeeded in building a future of flourishing, instead pulls us forward and into action.

A push can give us a kickstart, but a pull will sustain us for the long-haul.

So why then does Greta’s approach continue to strike a chord across the world?

Perhaps it is not so much Greta’s message that has held such power, because there isn’t much that is especially new there, but instead her embodiment of the many values that we aspire to, such as integrity, courage, and determination.

Greta’s youth makes the combination of her message and her actions especially prophetic. And, like all true prophets, she inspires us to want to do better and to become better because she actually shows us, rather than just tells us, a version of what that looks like.

Greta is a vision of a human being offering themselves fully to the world, and she has captured the imaginations of millions of people worldwide because of it.

It’s also worth noting though that there are many young activists, especially in the global south, who have successfully fought even greater battles, and there is a brilliant article by the Guardian about the developing world’s inspiring activists which I would highly recommend for more on this.

Capacity and Cynicism

I listened to a webinar recently, run by the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) about how to work with our grief about climate change, and the topic of cynicism came up.

The CPA’s chair, Judith Anderson, spoke of cynicism as a sign that we are working outside of our capacity and it struck me that, whilst Greta often speaks with passion, she rarely speaks with cynicism (with the exception perhaps of a certain former political leader).

The definition of cynicism is;

The belief that people only do things to help themselves, rather than for good or sincere reasons
The belief that something good will not happen or that something is not important
The fact of being willing to do something that might hurt other people, if you can gain some advantage

Cynicism is a giving up of hope that we, or the world, is capable of change. It is when, psychologically speaking, we are moving out of a ‘fight or flight’ response and are approaching the freeze response; a succumbing to what we have now deemed inevitable.

It is when we reach our tolerance level for what is happening because it is too painful or scary.

I loved how Judith phrased this in the webinar; ‘[our engagement with climate change] is a question of how we can make our hearts big enough to inhabit all these difficult emotions, and still keep on going’.

Cynicism is just one of the many signs of activism burnout but I have chosen to hone in on this one because it’s such a subtle psychological change that can be very difficult to notice within ourselves.

And the immobilising impacts of cynicism is just one of the reasons why practicing boundaries is so important; if we have become so depleted or defeated that we are no longer capable of believing that real change is possible, how could we possibly keep fighting for it?

Brain FOG

I am learning that it is relatively easy to understand what our boundaries are. That is, in comparison to actually implementing them.

Boundaries are something that reside primarily in the realms of our bodies. Contrary to what I have believed in the past, boundaries are not something that I think of with my mind. They are instead something that I feel in my body, although I may also notice them with my mind, and they cannot be magically justified away by some kind of form of mental gymnastics.

Boundaries can be what we might call a gut reaction. A ‘no’ or discomfort or pulling away deep within us that we might experience as strongly as a physical impulse to run, right through to something as subtle as keeping on finding ourselves lost in procrastination. We might not be able to justify it with our minds, but we shouldn’t need to.

A boundary might be a feeling of being drained or trapped, or we might find instead that we cannot switch off to go to sleep at night or enjoy the things we once used to enjoy. We may even find we have lost the capacity to feel at all.

If we have overridden our boundaries for a long time, or have had them forcibly overridden by others, we may find it very difficult to ascertain where our boundaries lie. If this is the case, then professional support can assist you in reconnecting with yourself and finding healing for those experiences.

But for all of us, learning about our boundaries is like learning about ourselves; it’s a lifelong process and practice because we are constantly evolving.

After experiencing burnout it has taken me some time to reconnect with my boundaries, but the hardest thing by far, has been learning to implement them. In this respect, I have consistently found myself confronted by something I have come to know as FOG; Fear, Obligation, and Guilt.

An Occupational Hazard of Environmentalism

If you are reading this blog, then you are probably someone who desires to see something better for our world than what currently seems to be unfolding. That is a beautiful thing to give yourself to.

But it might also be that you fear, as I do, what will come to pass if we are not able to build something better. And perhaps that you feel guilty for not doing more, or maybe even obligated to push yourself harder.

But the problem with Fear, Obligation, and Guilt (FOG) as our motivators, is that they can seriously cloud our ability to connect with our natural limitations by forcing us to push on through what instead needs listening to.

The kind of superhuman strength that a threat to our survival can elicit from us can have incredible power in the short term, but if survival mode becomes our new normal we can find this mode of operating becomes ineffective, or even dangerous.

That’s why burnout is an occupational hazard for environmentalists; there’s a lot of FOG about in the work that we do, and our race against time is a marathon, not a sprint.

The Beauty of Our Limits

I recently heard a definition of boundaries that I liked a great deal; ‘boundaries are about communicating in a loving, responsible way who you are and what you are about.’

This speaks to the common misconception that if we were to impress our boundaries upon others simply as we felt them, then we would end up in some kind of toddler-like, tantrum state.

Instead, boundaries are about communicating our preferences and initiating a negotiation process.

The real challenge with boundaries, however, is that we don’t have much of a positive culture around ‘no’, and that the number of options available to us in saying ‘no’ can very depending on our levels of privilege.

Which boundaries are respected are in part determined by the strength of preference on either side, but also by the balance of power. So boundaries are personal, but they are also deeply political.

Much of capitalist culture, for example, encourages us to want and have it all, and is uncomfortable in acknowledging the limitations of our time, energies, and even lifespans. It has been especially poor in respecting our planet’s boundaries.

Whilst we’ve been told of the benefits of limitlessness, it is possible that many of us have forgotten the beauty of boundaries. So here are some of the reasons why boundaries are so brilliant, and should be practiced wherever possible;

· Setting boundaries is kind. It means others can trust your yes and no. You are being honest with them, so they can get to know you better. And it allows your heart to be truly ‘in’ what you do say yes to, enabling you to keep giving for the long haul when things are tough.

· Setting boundaries helps to cultivate trust; trust that others will accept you for who you really are, and that others are safe and comfortable to do the same with you.

· Setting boundaries helps us practice self-love. When we do not communicate our boundaries we say to ourselves ‘other people matter more than me’. This can leave us isolated because we might avoid people, physically or emotionally, due to our fear of abandoning ourselves in this way.

Dani, mentioned previously, advises that it is empathy and compassion which breaks the Cycle of Inaction, and I believe that must start first with ourselves. We practice on ourselves so that we can offer that same love and empathy to others.

So to set boundaries is not to pander to our needs, but instead to take responsibility for our own wellbeing, and to allow others to do the same.

And if we are going to face these enormous challenges together, we will need to be realistic and up front, both with ourselves and others, about our capacities and preferences. Otherwise things can get very complicated indeed.

Your Commitment to Yourself

Practicing boundaries in relation to climate change might look like reducing time spent reading distressing climate news. It might be noticing intrusive thoughts about climate change and deciding when you will give them space (for grieving/ processing/ taking action), and when you will choose to set a boundary by focusing on something else (perhaps enjoying the gifts that are here today).

It might mean doing less activism (which can be anything from campaigning to personal lifestyle changes) in order to bring a greater quality to what you do give yourself to, or perhaps giving yourself permission to take a break, including an extended one, as I did during my sabbatical last year.

As I have heard several wise people say, ‘we do not need a few people protecting the planet perfectly, we need many people doing it imperfectly.’

And if you find that FOG is creeping in, I have found there is a question I ask myself regularly which helps bring me back to clarity of thinking;

‘What of your commitment to yourself, Jo?’

There is very little that we can control in the world right now, but our responsibility to our own emotional states, responses, and needs, does reside within our sphere of influence. From that point, we can extend that influence outwards.

So if you take anything away from reading this post, I hope it will simply be that it is ok to put limits on what you will give out to the world based on your own capacity levels. Saying ‘no’ is not bad, in fact, it can be deeply good and the world needs you to take care of you.

It is precisely in our difficulties respecting boundaries that we have found ourselves facing the consequences of an overstretched planet, and it is therefore in our humble return to the natural rhythm of giving and receiving, of action and rest, that we can find healing personally and globally.

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Thanks for reading!

**About Me** I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.

Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.

On… Boundaries