Creating psychotherapy for a sustainable future

Abstract

This paper asks how psychotherapy needs to change in the service of creating a sustainable future. It examines the meaning of sustainability and explores the concept of self in relation to nature and culture, with the help of descriptions from an indigenous cosmology. The paper asks how we identify with the larger whole, and why we disidentify and disconnect from it, and suggests that psychotherapy is a powerful tool for reconnection with our world, but that it would benefit from expanding beyond its human‐centredness, to embrace our relationship with the other‐than‐human world. This would involve relating to nature as subject and embracing our anthropocentrism. The paper questions how this might play itself out both in our everyday lives, and within our internal worlds.