Why Are We Still Asking the Same Questions?

A bonus weekend read on complex trauma, and the science the climate and existential risk community keeps overlooking.

The act of Guiding (hence Becoming Guides) applies the science and evidence-based practice of how humans cope with, and navigate complex truths.

For years, my friend, colleague and mentor, the neuroscience educator and trainer Sarah Peyton, has been teaching neuroscience-based methods for working with trauma, both at the individual and collective level. Every time I talk with her, as I recently did for my new book So You Want to Change the World?, I come away exploding with excitement, like I’ve just been handed keys that would that unlock our entire climate and existential movement forward.

And then I am left wondering: Why are we not leveraging these keys? Why does the climate community keep asking the same questions, year after year, as though the evidence-based research from adjacent fields simply does not exist?

The questions we keep returning to will be familiar to anyone in this work.

“How do we get people to engage?” “What is the right narrative?” “What are the right storytelling devices?” “What is it going to take to reach people?” These are real questions and they are super complex. But we keep approaching them as if we are the first generation of humans to wonder how to move other humans, as if there is no body of research on motivation, on emotion, on social neurobiology, on the conditions that make care possible.

Meanwhile, the climate threat and existential polycrises are no longer something out there. They are here—in the body, in our collective nervous systems, in our communities, registering as threat response in millions of people who have never lived through a fire or a flood.

We need to understand that a threat response takes place when we register a form of threat, often unconsciously, and feel at once unsafe and yet unclear how to proceed. A form of communication or tone of voice can invoke a threat response. Heck maybe even this newsletter is! (But I do hope not!!)

Our kind of threat response today is no longer only about extreme, singular events. Polycrisis threat response shows up as rising grocery bills we cannot make sense of. It shows up as the home insurance renewal that doubles overnight, or that is hard to get (as in my case in Northern California). It shows up as an inability to sell a coastal property, or to insure it, or to know whether it will exist in fifteen years. Damn. These are not abstractions. They are the everyday economic and somatic registrations of a destabilized planet, and they are activating threat responses in people who would not yet describe what they are feeling as climate-related.

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we talk a lot about overwhelm, powerlessness. yet how do we navigate it? psychologists know a lot about this dilemma!

People are experiencing threat responses without knowing that’s what is happening. And those of us who work in this space, have a responsibility to name this, and become literate in trauma / existential psychology as a strategy, a programmatic practice and skillset. It’s not touchy feely, it’s science, it’s real and it’s now.

This matters if you care about doing something in time for our planet, because, as Sarah reminds me, threat response narrows everything. It narrows perception. It narrows the capacity to take in complexity. It collapses people into the brain’s emergency machinery, where dopamine rewards us for blaming, for resenting, for cycling in shame.

None of these states are conducive to the kind of long-horizon, collective work the climate transition actually requires.

So now I want to tell you about a book. (Not my book that will come soon enough and goes into all of this in much more depth.)

In 2016, MIT Press published Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism, by Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad. The book documents a substantial body of research linking corporal punishment in childhood, with punitive political ideology, and showing that when people are invited to reflect on how they were disciplined as children, they begin to think more progressively and less punitively.

Milburn and Conrad also document something that should stop us in our tracks.

Individuals high in authoritarianism are significantly more likely to deny that climate change exists, and significantly more likely to believe that technology rather than changing our use of fossil fuels will solve the problem.

Read that again and think about our climate impact spaces. There is a documented psychological pathway from childhood experiences of punitive discipline through adult authoritarianism to adult climate denial and a preference for techno-fixes over behavior change. That is precisely the kind of finding our field should have been organizing around for the last ten years. As far as I can tell, almost no one in climate communications has heard of this book.

This is the part where I get frustrated.

Because Raised to Rage is not a stray finding. This work exists in a much larger body of evidence about how human minds actually work under conditions of fear, scarcity, threat, and unmetabolized trauma. There are literal mountains of related research. As Sarah shared with me in a recent call, a study published in Psychosomatic Medicine in 2013 by Koschwanez and colleagues, ran a randomized controlled trial showing that expressive writing about emotionally complex experiences accelerated wound healing in older adults.

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When people are supported to name complex truths, the kind of layered, contradictory, simultaneously held truths that trauma works to suppress, their immune systems literally function better.

Dwyer and colleagues, writing in PLoS One in 2019, found that activism is associated with greater well-being, particularly when it is the kind of activism that connects rage with care rather than letting rage run unaccompanied. Sarah cites Panksepp on this, as well, drawing on The Archaeology of Mind. The linkage between the rage circuit and the care circuit is what turns rage from something toxic and frightening, into what we recognize as passionate advocacy.

Without that linkage, rage simply scares people. They shut down. They turn away. We lose them. There is a lot of climate rage happening right now. Think about that.

There is also a substantial literature, surveyed by the American Psychological Association, on the effect of perceived scarcity on cognition and political response. When the brain registers scarcity, the architecture of judgment shifts. Sarah described to me one striking study in which conservatives, asked to imagine a world of abundance and then to re-answer the same social policy questions they had just answered, gave responses indistinguishable from those of progressives. The whole edifice of polarization, on certain questions, shifts when the brain’s perception of scarcity shifts.

None of this is “soft” or “fluffy” or “touchy feely.”

This is not even about mental health—-another way we tend to cordon off climate psychology into an arena of feelings and grief circles, that has nothing to do with the REAL WORK.

None of this research is speculative. These are evidence-based, peer-reviewed findings, in some cases more than a decade old. And almost none of it shows up in the design of how we currently talk to people about climate.

So I keep asking. Why?

Part of the answer, I suspect, is that our field has not yet metabolized what it means to take adjacent expertise seriously.

We operate inside a hierarchy that privileges the technical, the quantitative, the engineering and policy disciplines. Psychologists, ethnographers, behavioral scientists, designers, social neurobiologists, the people whose actual subject matter is the human psyche in its social context, are still treated as fluffy, non-serious, extra, bolt-on, soft, optional, or supplementary. They get invited to consult on the framing after the strategy is built.

They are rarely in the room when the strategy is being built.

This is a missed opportunity at a scale I find hard to overstate.

Other fields have figured this out. The Dove Real Beauty campaign, masterminded by psychoanalyst and author Susi Orbach is over twenty years old at this point, and it shifted a cultural conversation by working with insights about shame, body image, and the gap between self-perception and how others see us. It did not yell at women to feel better about themselves. It built the conditions in which a different kind of seeing became possible.

Or take The Good Place, the Michael Schur comedy whose central reveal is that no one has made it into the “Good Place” in more than five hundred years because modern life is so morally compromised that even buying a tomato might implicate you in child labor or environmental harm. The show is doing exactly the kind of work Sarah and I have been talking about for years. It is naming the double bind. It is acknowledging the impossibility. It is doing it with wit, humor and warmth and an enormous amount of love for its viewers. And it is reaching millions of people who would never sit through a climate communications training.

These examples should not be anomolies. They are evidence that the methods exist, the science is real, and audiences respond when communicators stop yelling and start working with how human beings actually function.

The climate / regenerative / eco communities have a responsibility here. We have a responsibility to leave behind the assumption that we can keep solving for engagement by tinkering with narrative and storytelling at the surface level, while ignoring the deeper science of why people open or close, why they engage or shut down, why care turns into passionate advocacy in some conditions and into rage-tinged messaging that frightens people away in others. We have a responsibility to actually deploy the expertise that is sitting right next to us.

I will keep writing about what Sarah and other neuroscience educators and mentors teach me, because I think it matters that more of us can hear it.

And I will keep asking, with as much love as I can muster: when are we actually going to deploy this? When will we start turning to this body of work, and the practitioners who have spent decades developing this kind of expertise, to partner and join forces on the greatest existential threats facing our planet?

With care,

Renée