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The natural world supports both a collaboration with and a competition for life, creativity and growth as well as an avoidance of and protection from threats. We know that trees form communities as do multiple plant species, not to mention other mammals. Within these communities there is strife as well as nurture; but often this battle wages between relatively equal players. Human groups often differ.
In particularly urban communities some members of the human population have a ravenous drive to control the dynamics of the natural world by accumulating power through wealth. This hunger and unequal accumulation of resources distorts our political and economic systems. It cleaves human beings into stratified groups based on gender, sexuality, race and class. It separates people from the natural world of collaboration and competition. The very forces that induce and perpetuate climate change have induced and perpetuated a new kind of human - people disconnected from the validity of their own sensations, memories and mentalizations. We have become mere consumers of each other, our planet, and ourselves.
A young nonbinary person of fifteen from this urban environment started therapy shortly before the pandemic. They had difficulty with sensory stimulation. They became overwhelmed and depressed. Sometimes a whole session was too much. Zoom felt like a “piercing volt of stimulation aimed” at their face. Their intelligence and sensitivity opened them to the world. And what they took in jolted them. “Stop,” they said. “Don’t talk to me about Ukraine. I’m still dealing with COVID. And our sexually assaulting former president. And mass shootings. And fires. And the emptiness of chasing college when it’s just a game. We aren’t learning anything. It’s all about how you seem - not who you are.”
They didn’t suffer from parental neglect or issues outside the ordinary range of neurosis that makes us human. They haven’t experienced trauma. They come from a stable but unremarkable upper