E50: The Environmental Domain of Grief

Welcome back to the "7 Domains of Women's Health." We are continuing the 7 Domains of Grieving. We've talked about some other aspects of grieving, which include the physical domain and the emotional domain, but we're going to talk now about the environmental domain, because environmental cues are very important in people who have grieving in their past or are currently grieving.

So what might be environmental cues? I mentioned in the first podcast on the physical domain that when I lost my daddy . . . And it's a little embarrassing now as a 72-year-old woman to call this person that she lost 50 years ago her daddy, but he's my daddy. He was my daddy. And I mentioned that he always wore Old Spice deodorant. So the smell of Old Spice, which is kind of a unique men's deodorant, is just a wonderful one for me.

Luckily, for me, it's not something that many men wear anymore. I tried to get my husband and my son to wear it, and I probably shouldn't have because I didn't want to keep being remembered of my daddy because they're their own people. They're not my daddy. I had to go into therapy about that one, how my husband was not my daddy.

There are scent cues that can bring you back to a place or a time or a person. And scent cues are some of the most powerful physical cues because they go right into your limbic system. They go right into your emotional system.

Maybe it's the scent of a hot dog, and it reminds you of the baseball games that you used to go to. Or maybe it's the scent of the forest, and you remember the walks that you used to take. Maybe it's the scent of the ocean, and you had great vacations with your loved one on the ocean.

But there are environmental cues. Environment is not just scent. It can be a place. So the place that you used to go with your loved one, whether it was a vacation place or you lost someone. Maybe you broke up with your fiancé on the No. 9 train, and now trains bring it back.

So when we're grieving or when we've lost someone in the past and we're no longer grieving, those memories have been hardwired, they've been laid down firmly in our mind. And anything that is part of those memories can call up that grieving process.

It could be a favorite place, it could be a favorite food, it could be a favorite song thinking about romantic loss. It could be any of those things.

And it's important to recognize when, all of a sudden, you feel overwhelmed and you say, "Oh, it's because it smells like this," or, "That was my mom's favorite dish that she made," or whatever it might be. It's when you feel overwhelmed because the nature of grief, the emotion, is that it can come so quickly that you don't always understand where it came from.

But try to say, "Is there an environmental trigger, a sound, a scent, a vision that brings me back to the person I've lost and the grieving process that I experienced?"

There's also grief for a place that isn't the same anymore. You can be homesick for a place that has changed. There's a word for it, and it's called solastalgia. And it's described as a form of homesickness while you're still in place. It's a kind of grief over the loss of a healthy place.

I certainly have solastalgia over my husband's family's place at a lake, which when I first went there 50 years ago was peaceful and quiet and there weren't too many people there. And now it's filled with noise and motorboats. I'm grieving this place where I am because it's not the same.

It's a very common phenomenon when people live in a little neighborhood that now has become overrun with either traffic, or maybe it's got air pollution. And you say, "I am so sad. This just isn't the way it used to be that I remember."

So solastalgia is a term for missing . . . it's a homesickness for the place that was home where you are, but it's not the same anymore.

My guess is that many listeners can come up with a place that they loved which has changed, and the change isn't welcome. It may make you sad. It's a grieving for a place that's changed, and it's called solastalgia.

Well, on that theme of grieving for a place that's changed, there is something actually called climate grief, which is mourning the climate-change-related losses. And certainly, this is experienced specifically in some whole nations. It's been studied in First Nations, people who live in the Arctic, and it's been studied in Australia in farmers who have lived through profound drought and have lost really their whole way of living because of such profound drought.

It's a sense of feeling sad, angry, or hopeless about the declining health of the environment. And some people have called it climate grief. So climate grief is a sense of loss or mourning that people may relate to environmental destruction, or a sense of a loss of connection to the natural world, or you are leaving a place you haven't even been.

I've never been to the Arctic, but I can watch a nature video where a starving polar bear can't find enough ice to hunt from to get the food that they like, which is little seals, and it makes me so sad. But I've never been there. And the same thing is true for rainforest when I hear of rainforest destruction.

And here in the west, we think about fire. We think about flooding on occasion, but it's more fire. And to watch a beloved forest that's been completely destroyed by fire may give us a sense of grief. Paths we used to walk on, the trees we used to love, the flowers, and the groundcover we saw.

So climate grief is a real thing. And in fact, particularly for young people, there's a sense of despair that the world will never be the same.

Environmental grief, climate grief, ecological grief, all these are words that are now growing in the psychological literature about the fact that people are grieving the world as they believe it should be and the world that they believe they knew.

This kind of grief, anticipatory grief, meaning you're expecting things to get worse, is not unlike the grief of someone who has cancer or has a dementing disease, where you're watching them, loving them, decline day by day by day.

That anticipatory grief that the world as we love it and we know it, 50 years from now, won't be the same. Maybe the same birds won't sing, maybe the same butterflies won't come by, maybe the forest will have burnt down.

So this is a real thing, and it actually has a link to the solastalgia, meaning the yearning for the surroundings that once were in the face of what is now.

Now, what do you do with climate grief if that's what you're experiencing? You may experience anger or hopelessness or guilt. So if you're flying all over on a big jet and you're spending a lot of your money on jet miles, please know that yes, you are contributing to the end of the planet as we know it. But I'm not trying to lie too much guilt on anybody.

Nevertheless, there's sadness, despair, even appetite changes, and changes in the sense of yourself as a future. There are people who are young couples who are choosing not to have children because they feel that the world their child will inherit won't be worth inheriting. That's a loss. It's a loss of the hopes and dreams of a family because of a future sense, which may or may not actually happen that way, but people believe that might be the case.

So climate change is increasingly recognized as a threat to human health, but it's also a threat to human mental health. And what do you do with the sense that certainly from the media, and particularly from the environmental media, you're told that Earth is dying, and you are grieving that this beautiful blue planet that we live on may be the only source of this amazing life as we know it in the universe?

Am I getting a little maudlin? I am getting really maudlin about this because I'm experiencing, in my own way, a little climate grief.

What do you do about it? Well, for me, it always helps to go back and think in geologic time. This planet has been through some very hard times over its last three billion years, and life as any creature might have known it profoundly turned over. Not maybe as quickly as it's turning over now. There were mass extinctions, and the climate change was enormous over thousands of years. So it always helps for me to think in geologic time.

And in Utah, you can do that because there are those huge red rock cliffs down in southern Utah where you can see 250 million years, and every layer is a profound climate and geologic change, and something big happened.

So I feel better when I go down to southern Utah and look at layers of rocks and say, "Something really big happened between that yellow rock and that red rock and that maroon rock and back to yellow rock." So think in geologic time.

Another thing that can be helpful is walking out in nature, because, in fact, it ain't dead yet, and it's right there in front of you looking amazing and beautiful. Green things happen every spring if you live in a climate that actually has a spring and seasons and a summer and a fall and winter. So going outside to see the world as it is and appreciating it as is, rather than living in the future where it's not there yet.

Action is also important for any grieving process. For people who are having prolonged grieving or they're watching someone they love or something that they love decline, taking some action can be helpful.

And that's true for people with depression and other mood disorders. So going out and helping someone else or taking some kind of action in your community can make people feel that they have a little bit more control over their life.

So having a little bit more control over the life and contributing things to the environment in which you're living to make it a little bit prettier, to make it feel like there's a little bit more hope.

Whatever those triggers might be that make you feel that you have climate grief, or ecological grief, or you've lost the place that you love that you grew up because it's just changed. Recognizing that change is part of living and part of growing, and doing what you can to make it a lovely place where you are right now can be very important in healing and coping with the 7 Domains of Grieving in the environmental domain.

Now, I want everyone to think about what you might do in your own backyard, if you have a backyard. Or do you have a porch that you might put a pot on and watch things grow? Do you have a black thumb? That means everything you grow just dies. Well, try something else or get some help, because everyone can grow something.

Watching something grow and go through their paces is very reassuring as you watch some other living thing live out their life form, their lifestyle, their life plan. So think about what you can do in your own domain.

Now, getting back to environmental triggers that might remind you of grief or loss of a loved one, embrace those things as you recognize them, going back and saying, "I know why I feel so sad. It's because my mom loved that song," or, "I broke up and lost the love of my life on that platform, on that subway." Recognize it, look at it in the face, and let it go by, and realize that you had this chance to love someone who is wonderful and important, and you live in a world that's complicated.

Those are the ways to embrace the environmental changes that bring on a sense of grieving, but still manage to thrive in your own life and in your own body.

So join us again. We're going to continue on the 7 Domains of Grieving in some other domains coming forward. If this is the first one you've listened to, go back and check out our beginning on this session of "7 Domains" and go to the physical domain, which is kind of an introduction to grieving as it is, or skip to the end and have a quiet time with the 7 Domains of the spiritual part of grieving.