Close your eyes and ease into yourself, gently. Get comfortable where you’re sitting.
And spend the next few minutes reflecting on the last time you felt connected to yourself, to your feelings or to those around you, the world around you.
When was that?
Feel that moment. Be in it.
How does being back there now make you feel?
Was it a while ago, or recently? What were you doing, and who were you with? Maybe you were on your own.
Maybe you can’t remember the last time you felt that way.
How does that make you feel?
When you’re ready, gently open your eyes, and come back to me here.
Now spend the next few minutes writing about how you felt being back there. Maybe you liked it, maybe you didn’t? Whatever you felt, however you feel now, is fine.
Be aware of how you feel while you write.
This is what first drew me to reflective writing, and what draws me back time and again. The lure of being allowed to use the process of my own writing and creativity to be with myself and my emotions, and to explore how I feel and why I may feel the ways I do. And then to share my feelings and my writing with myself and others without having to worry about being judged.
Climate work: what do we carry on behalf of others?
Working in the climate space as a researcher, policymaker, journalist or in communications, can be rewarding and demanding. Researchers and support staff work hard, often putting in long hours, juggling heavy workloads with competing priorities when researching, analysing and communicating to others information that is both technical and can be emotionally demanding. I’ve worked as a climate communications specialist for more than a decade and for a long while I’ve wondered about the emotional side of our work in the climate sector.
Carrying out climate research can take its toll. A lot has been written about how Vicarious Trauma (VT), or experiencing change as a result of repeated exposure to and empathetic engagement with people who have experienced trauma, can affect people working in the medical and mental health professions. VT can present in various ways, including - but not limited to - feelings of anger, sadness, guilt, distancing, avoidance, cynicism and keeping busy. But we know far less about how people in the climate sector can be emotionally impacted by their work.
Our awareness of the complex relationships between climate and public health is growing. Yet there’s still little opportunity to be open about how working in climate science makes us feel and affects our emotional wellbeing and mental health. Certain myths continue to hog the air space:
I recall a conversation I had with adaptation expert Dr Susi Moser about this a while ago. Her answer to these (maladaptive) responses cut to the chase:
Neglecting your feelings makes for bad science
Shoving my emotions in a suitcase and hiding it under my bed
Clearly, we need more candour, with honest conversations about how our work in the climate sector makes us feel. Only then can we re-imagine and together work towards ways that climate research can have more of, or a different, impact on ourselves and the world around us.
Burnt out.
Tired.
Angry.
Disillusioned.
Lonely.
These are all emotions I’ve had about my work in climate communications. At times, I continue to ask myself:
Is this work making enough of a difference?
Are we doing enough or do we need to do more?
Why aren’t we supported more?
This is not easy to admit to you, much less write about. If I’m honest, part of me wonders if there’ll be any fallout for me and my work by saying that there have been times when working in the climate space has made me want to run into the long grass and howl at the moon. Saying this here to you is cathartic, but what could I lose by you reading it? Momentarily, I think about deleting these lines. Self-censorship.
Terms like ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ litter climate science. But rarely are we open about our own vulnerability and what we need to look after ourselves and those around us, to be resilient. Could being more honest about how our work makes us feel and the difficulties we face help us to explore and re-define new ways of working, different ways for our research to have impact?
I’ve been lucky. Speaking with colleagues – some of whom have become friends – has shown me that by feeling this way I wasn’t going mad and I wasn’t alone.
I wasn’t alone.
Reaching out brought us closer.
Reflective writing for wellbeing
I trained to be a reflective writing for wellbeing facilitator and set up my own practice, while continuing to work in climate communications. I’ve had a love of writing and being creative since I was a child, and I became a journalist and photographer specialising in human rights, conflict and development in south Asia. This brought together my passion for learning, travelling and writing – listening to and then telling the stories of others. My work in climate communications felt like a natural progression, supporting researchers to share some of the most important stories to tell. But during this time I also began to reflect on how I missed my creativity and the process of writing, and how they could be used together to nurture wellbeing.
I began to use the process of my own reflective writing to create a space in which I could build my self-awareness and resilience. My practice allows me to reflect - to be, to peel away the many layers that make me who I am, and to look at me. And then to share my writing and feelings with myself and others who won’t judge me. Only since I began to do this did I start to understand how and why I may feel the ways that I do and to build new relationships with myself, others and my work. This can get a little ugly. Sometimes I may not like what I see or how I feel, but that’s ok. I am human. Other times, what I see makes me feel that anything is possible and I smile. And that too is ok. I also began to design and facilitate writing workshops for others working in the climate sector after colleagues began to tell me that they would value the chance to be open about their work and the many ways it makes them feel without fear of being judged.
Reflective writing isn’t therapy, yet it can have therapeutic value. It’s a flexible approach that uses the processes of individual writing and reflection, and then sharing what we feel comfortable sharing from our writing with others in a confidential space, to support self-awareness and an awareness of our relationships with others. In this way, it can nurture our emotional wellbeing. (If you’re wondering, it’s not about writing the ‘best’ poem or story, policy brief or technical report or worrying about grammar, punctuation or spelling.)
Importantly, it’s also about relaxing and having fun – allowing ourselves to be creative and expressing ourselves in our own ways, on our own terms. In my sessions, I use arts-based methods like sound, music, movement, breathwork, still and moving images, objects, poetry and prose as ways into reflective writing. This includes, for example, inviting workshop participants to use objects and visualisation, or looking at artwork or photos and being aware of how they respond to the images, as prompts to guide them into writing and reflective activities.
Here, I’m going to stomp all over the idea that some of us ‘just aren’t creative’: we all think, we all feel and we all have imaginations. Accepting these different parts of who we are, and allowing ourselves to be creative, is key to nurturing our awareness and finding ways to use this insight to tap into our own resilience. So…
If anyone tells you you’re not creative – or you tell yourself this – don’t listen.
You are creative.
Remember that last daydream?
Reflective writing and climate research: a tool to re-define impact
Reflective writing is a relatively new, and growing, field. It stems from the ‘expressive writing’ method first coined by social psychologist James Pennebaker in the 1980s. He encouraged his clients to use the process of writing about traumatic events to gain awareness and resolution (Pennebaker, 1990, pp. 94-97; Pennebaker, 1997). He found that expressive writing helped people to structure their thoughts and feelings, and provide perspective, which could then nurture self-awareness (ibid.)
On an individual level, the processes of writing about a challenge and reflecting on how it makes us feel can allow us to reflect more deeply about potential ways to respond to it (Pennebaker, 1990.) This can open up opportunities for new ways to perceive and respond to difficulties (Adams, 2006a in Ross & Adams, 2016, pp. 25-26), challenges that we in the climate sector need to face if we want to re-imagine and re-define our relationships with our work, the way it affects us as people and its broader impact.
The process of reflective writing can also support researchers, and their research process, by encouraging them to be reflective and reflexive:
“Reflective writing is the reflective process, rather than recording what has been thought…In writing we pay deep attention to parts of ourselves we do not listen to often enough. We get beyond our assumptions and obedience to social, cultural, organisational rules, in order to pay attention properly, and learn.” (Bolton, 2014, pp.115-6)
Being reflexive, or the “…capacity of the researcher to acknowledge how their own experiences and contexts (which may be fluid and changing) inform the process and outcomes of inquiry.”, (Etherington, 2004, pp.31-2) holds potential to enrich research across the social sciences (ibid, p.15) by allowing researchers to gain distance from themselves and their experiences, provide perspective and highlight ingrained assumptions that shape their work (ibid, pp.31-2).
In doing so, reflective writing can provide us with insight into our relationships with ourselves and our work, the impact our work has on us (Bolton, 2014, p. 116) and how to develop strategies for self-care (Bolton, Field & Thompson, 2006, pp. 69-70). It can also support the research process and academic writing (Bolton, 2014, p.116), and improve memory (Klein & Boals, 2001; Klein, 2002 in Lepore, S. J., & Smyth, J. M. (2002.)
The power of being heard and of listening to others
In groups, the processes of individual and collective reflection, being listened to and listening to others in a non-judgmental space can strengthen collective wellbeing by increasing our understanding of the experiences of others, as well as illuminating our own. Group reflection can support teamwork and communication, as well as collective action to address challenges and build on opportunities (Moore, 2012). The sharing of our reflective writing with others in a safe space can play a powerful role in overcoming challenges:
“The writing and discussion processes facilitate frankness and openness when a safe-enough environment is created for elements of relationships and organisations to be faced and reconfigured.” (Bolton, 2014, p. 186).
Echoing this, a senior climate researcher who joined one of my reflective writing workshops said:
“The most valuable and meaningful part of the experience was hearing what my colleagues had to say about the work they do, and how it affects them. On the one hand it deepened my respect for and understanding of them as human beings, based on the valuable opportunity to talk about topics that are often avoided in the workplace.
“But it was also very liberating to hear that my own doubts, fears, and anxieties were shared and reflected by others, and made me feel that recognising this shared experience made us collectively stronger.”
Changing the script: re-defining the impact of working in climate science
One way that reflective writing can support wellbeing is through the agency that it, and the sharing of our writing, can provide. We make sense of our world, and our experiences, through stories – or narratives. Reflective writing can guide us to re-define, and then share with others, potentially harmful individual and shared stories into more balanced, alternative ‘counter-narratives’ (Andrews, 2002; White & Epston, 1990). This collective sharing of our reflective writing can allow our growing self-awareness and awareness of others to develop into changes in thinking and behaviour (Bolton et al., 2004; Bolton, 2014; Ross & Adams, 2016).
Crucially, reflective writing itself also holds potential to provide us with rare insight into the impact that working in the climate space has on the emotional wellbeing and resilience of climate researchers and support staff. The practice isn’t a silver bullet. Much depends on how comfortable people in workshops feel being open about their experiences and emotions, and how committed organisations, employers and funders are to support them to do so.
But if facilitated well, and with workshops held over a period of time, reflective writing can help us to explore how our work affects us and then work together to look at how it could have more of – or a different – impact on ourselves and others. This is much-needed if we are to collectively re-define what ‘resilience’ means, and what it means to work in this field. We are, after all, human.
References
Rajeshree Sisodia is a climate communications specialist and a qualified reflective writing facilitator at Well Through Words. She is also a daydreamer and meditator. Follow her on Twitter.
