Therapy Is Not a Cure for Climate Disaster

Therapy Is Not a Cure for Climate Disaster

Lydia Millet

Pulitzer-prize finalist and author of A Children’s Bible

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Therapist by Lydia Millet

“That’s just the new normal, folks,” said a radio host.

She heard it constantly. Everything bad was referred to, with a jocular glibness, as the new normal.

ADHD. OCD. Depression. Agoraphobia. Xenophobia. Paranoia. Antisocial personality disorder. Most of the diagnoses in the DSM-­5. Albeit often at a subclinical level.

Abnormality was the new normal.

“You know what it is?” said Stephanie over breakfast. “It’s a long, collective moment of TI. Tonic immobility. A state of body paralysis induced by stress. A stress adaptation.”

“I’m familiar with TI,” Anne told her.

In humans, it was brought on by war. And rape.

“With some species,” said Stephanie, forking up scrambled eggs, “it happens when they’re about to be eaten by a predator. They may be simulating death as a defense mechanism. If the predator in question prefers live prey. Or they may be submitting. A neurological shutdown. Possibly for pain avoidance. I haven’t read the scholarship. I’m just spitballing here.”

“Really? But what’s the evolutionary advantage of submitting to your own death?”

She struggled to chew a bite of slimy egg. Stephanie liked to under­cook them.

“Passivity’s kind of a stress adaptation, too. Right? Cynicism. Denial. Even despair. As a biologist, if I were observing a particular organism or population, I’d look at the behavior. And I’d see certain behaviors as a response to a survival threat. Maladaptive, in some cases. Such as the group behavioral response to global warming. The response, so far, is maladaptive. It won’t prolong survival.”

“So the culture’s like a prey animal. In its death throes.”

“Well, I mean, the animal does escape, sometimes. Occasionally the TI strategy works.”

“But it won’t work. In this case.”

“Yeah, no. This is a fight-­or-­flight situation. With the climate. And there’s no possibility of flight.”

Anne pushed her eggs around on her plate.

“They’re too wet. Aren’t they.”

“Kind of.”

“I’ll eat them. You want a slice of sourdough?”

In her practice she’d offer up coping techniques. When other interventions weren’t called for or agreed to. Rituals of self-­care. Open the window. Take deep breaths. Put on music.

But lately she’d lie in bed, unable to fall asleep, thinking of crowds. The patients in their great ranks, like a sad army.

Clients, she was supposed to call them, but she preferred the word patient. Always had. It wasn’t that she wanted to position herself as an MD. More that client sounded transactional. Applied to tax-­preparation customers and real-­estate buyers alike.

While patient was a good word. Since it also meant forbearing. Forgiving, even. Therapy took time.

She saw them in hospital gowns, staring toward the horizon. The patients everywhere. In institutions and outside them.

Maladaptive.

Because if you multiplied that prescription, for acceptance and accommodation, and made it into policy, you’d have systemic failure. On the macro level, acceptance of the normal would mean death.

It had started to seem to her that, as she counseled her patients on how to live better within that new normal—­or the abnormality that passed for normal—­she was delivering therapeutic euthanasia.

With her head on the pillow, feeling the warm air sweep over her skin as it moved the curtains, she pictured herself walking along the rows of patients. Who stood watching and waiting and never moved. Dosing each one with a sedative and a painkiller.

Palliative care.

Stephanie tried to make her feel better.

“You know the drill,” she said as they lay there. “Your job isn’t about systems. It’s about individuals. Helping them know what they can control and what they can’t.”

“But it isn’t just my job. It’s everyone’s job. Is how it feels to me these days. Everyone’s going around saying, Feel better. And here’s how to do it. Surrender your agency. Be at peace with catastrophe.”

“Listen,” said Stephanie, swiveling onto an elbow. Propping her head on her hand. “Do you have any idea where this is coming from? I only ask because historically, when you’ve been distressed like this, it’s usually been transferred to you by a patient. Where your clinical detachment has partially failed. No offense meant.”

Anne shook her head. “It’s ambient. It’s obvious.”

But after Stephanie turned onto her other side and started snoring, she went back over her patient interactions. There was someone. A kid. Well, a young man. His bleakness was persuasive. The fear, he said, was common sense.

It shouldn’t be healed, he argued. It shouldn’t be erased.

The compulsion to normalize, he said, was the real pathology. Being enacted on a grand scale. A sociopolitical scale.

She’d sent him to Stegman for an SSRI.

In their last session he’d told her about a dinner he’d been to at his girlfriend’s house where one of the other guests seemed to be made of plastic.

Uh-­oh, she’d thought. For a second her association was Capgras. Impostor syndrome. She’d had an elderly patient who believed her husband had been replaced by a copy. And the copy was a murderous android.

Janet, had been the patient’s name. Sweet woman. Far too eager to please.

She wondered if Janet was still alive. It had been years.

Here, though, it turned out to be a metaphor.

“And the thing is, I used to have a crush on his girlfriend,” he said. “Back in high school. She’s the older sister of my girlfriend now. Smart and attractive. But, so, maybe you’re thinking, I had a vested interest in not liking the guy. Territorial. But it wasn’t that. He just, all he could do, in the conversation, was recycle these stale talking points. These pieces of pat received wisdom from business school. He has this smug certainty that all the systems will keep functioning. Systems of wealth and power. The way they always have.”

“Maybe they will. And that was what threatened you.”

He was silent. In the Zoom window, she watched him pick up a thermos and drink from it. Hoped it was water.

When he set it down he nodded. “It does threaten me. But it also threatens you. It threatens us all. And everyone after.”

“When you say it,” she said, “what does that mean?”

“The complacency. The pretense. That all this climate and mass extinction shit isn’t a five-­alarm emergency. That what we need isn’t a worldwide revolution. Yesterday.”

She sat with that a minute. Her turn to be silent.

“Let’s get back to this guest. Your feelings about him.”

“Sure. Let’s get back to talking about a dinner party.”

“You were the one who brought it up. Isn’t there more to unpack there?”

“This is what I’m referring to. The dinner’s trivial. My feelings about it are trivial. They just don’t matter, Anne.”

“So everything has to be about the need for a revolution?”

“There you go! Unpacked! That’s what I’m saying. Everything, everything, everything. Should be about that. From now till 2050. And beyond.”

“OK, then. If that’s how you feel, why are you spending your time working at a bar? Helping your customers self-­medicate?”

“Uh . . . because I need a job? And I’m no one?”

“You’re no one?”

He sat back in his chair. Threw up his hands.

“You know what I mean.”

“But you’re not no one.”

“I am. And, sorry, so are you.”

“You’re saying we’re similarly powerless.”

“You’ve got a career and I don’t have anything, but we both listen to people complain all day. And we both drug them, too.”

Behind him was a poster of a pretty actress wearing a vest that looked like armor. Her long hair flowed around her wildly. Like Medusa’s snakes.

She felt like saying, It’s hard to take you seriously. With Xena the Warrior Princess in the background. Or whoever.

She didn’t say it, of course.

Anyway, they’d already gone over fifty minutes.

Radicalized. That was another term she heard all the time that she didn’t remember hearing so much when she was younger. It had been used in the sixties—­mostly around Vietnam protesters, if she recalled right from her reading, and maybe Malcolm X—­but then it seemed to recede until 9/11. When it turned into a radio and TV staple.

And it was never a positive. Back in the Vietnam era, you could be a radical for peace. Or justice. Now a radical was only a terrorist. It was Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol. The violent extremists.

She read practitioners who specialized in radicalization. There were networks. Radicalized youth were spread across the demographic spectrum, rich and poor, single and in relationships.

But neglect, psychological abuse, and abandonment were strong predictors.

On those fronts Nick was a piss-­poor candidate, in her opinion.

Still. You never knew. A worldwide revolution, he had said.

Red flag? Or standard existential angst?

He wasn’t talking about taking up arms. No history of violence. No suicidal ideation, as far as she knew. He wasn’t socially isolated. But then again, it often seemed to come out of nowhere.

“I’m not sure how to help him,” she said to Stegman on the phone.

They were both in their kitchens. Making dinner.

“Sounds like you’re pretty enmeshed,” said Stegman. She could hear the pop of his bourbon cork. For a neuropsychiatrist, he had some old-­school vices. “In his rationalizations.”

“I guess so.”

“When in doubt, take a step back. Go to trauma and repression. Have you spent enough time on ECD?”

“His childhood was uneventful. Is how it sounded to me.”

“Impossible.”

She heard cracking—­a tray of ice cubes being twisted, that was it. And then the glug-­glug-­glug of him pouring the whiskey.

“Come on, Lou. Can we get real? Relatively. Stable, protected, no upheavals. He’s got married parents who’ve lived in the same upper-­middle-­class neighborhood for more than twenty years. He was never bullied, molested, or sidelined by his peers. First sexual experience at age sixteen. No issues of gender or sexual identity. Academically, and in sports, some moderate successes with a few minor failures. A decent balance for resiliency. He does some pot. That’s it.”

“Don’t be reductive. Dig deeper.”

He sipped.

His earbuds captured ambient sound too well.

Nick wasn’t resistant to talking about his childhood—­he enjoyed it. Got caught up in the narratives. A bike he once had with a banana seat. It had been his father’s before it was his. In the seventies. A cousin teaching him to ski at Big Bear, all expert and condescending, then falling flat on his face. His little sister hiding his underwear. When the school bus was already moving along their block. His mom giving him bowl cuts in fifth grade because he refused to go to the barber. Didn’t like how it smelled in there.

The barber had halitosis.

“No repressed trauma,” he said near the end of a session. “Except for, maybe, that barber. Man. Someone should have told him. His breath was a biohazard. And that was way before COVID.”

“You were a golden boy.”

He smiled. “No. I just had a golden life.”

“But, somehow, you’re not a golden man.”

The smile vanished.

“The guy at the dinner, say. Is that what a golden man looks like?”

He made a grunt of irritation. “I wish I’d never mentioned it.”

“But you did. There must have been a reason.”

“Sure, yeah. In the eyes of MAGA voters who refused to wear a face mask or get vaccinated, and vote against solar and wind, that man would probably look golden.”

“What about your parents? Who gave you that golden childhood and sent you to a golden university? Would he seem golden to them?”

He sighed. “I doubt it. They’re registered Democrats.”

“So what would golden look like for them?”

He cocked his head. Fiddled with a pen. “Maybe Luis. My brother-­in-law. He’s DACA and studying to be an immigration lawyer. From a Guatemalan family who were refugees but never got citizenship. His father’s a farmworker in the Central Valley. Probably has off-­the-­charts chemical exposure. His mother works at a bakery. Luis is a good guy. He’s, like, pursuing the American dream.”

“But you’re not pursuing that dream. You used to be, but you’re not anymore. So your parents are disappoint­ ed in you.”

The poster of the warrior princess, she noticed, had been taken down. Either that or he was Zooming in from a different room.

“I had the dream,” he said quietly. “Then I woke up.”

“And now you can’t remember it.”

“Not true. I remember it perfectly.”

“But it doesn’t motivate you anymore.”

“Anne. It was never real life. It was only a dream.”

His monologues had a youthful poignance. They stayed with her for their earnestness.

A dream gets implanted in you, he’d told her in an early session. A dream of the heroic individual, tall and powerful as a god. The monomyth! A dream of infinite selfishness. But instead of liberating you, it binds you to the wheel. The great wheel moves the plow. And the plow tills the field.

“And far away,” he said, “always ahead of you but never reached, there’s a shimmering mirage. That they call happiness.”

She agreed to go on a field trip. Over a weekend. It wasn’t Stephanie’s own study but the project of a new colleague that she’d been invited to observe. Had to do with insects and the waterbirds that ate them.

“We could do a hike, right?” said Stephanie. “It’s been a while.”

“A hike-­hike?” asked Anne. “One of those death marches that call for trekking poles and a heavy pack? Or a pleasant, relaxing walk? With an elevation gain under a thousand feet?”

“Huh. I wonder what your vote is?”

“I’m not in the mood for a death march.”

“It’s a wetland. Like elevation gain is maybe two feet.”

“But with mosquitoes.”

“I hope so. No mosquitoes would be a bad sign. For the study.”

“And we’re not allowed DEET. Because it’s so toxic.”

“Correct.”

So they drove out of the city. Across the state line, into Nevada. It was a rare kind of wetland they were headed to, said Stephanie: a wetland in the desert. Shrinking every year.

Along the freeway they drove, past car dealerships and outlet malls and onto smaller roads. They passed a ranch flying a Trump flag almost as big as the farmhouse itself.

“Are you supposed to have a flag with, like, a person’s name on it?” she asked Stephanie.

“You’re the shrink,” said Stephanie. “You tell me.”

On the barn was painted America First. Just to be clear.

A few miles on they picked out another sign, tiny and barely visible in a brushy patch of wildflowers. Black Lives Matter. On a rainbow background faded by the sun.

“In the war of the signs, I guess we know who’s winning,” said Stephanie.

They stopped at a modest, low building, the refuge headquarters. Stephanie talked to a ranger while Anne used the restroom. She didn’t like to pee behind bushes.

For Stephanie it was an occupational hazard. Not for her. She’d picked a job with flush toilets.

“He was wearing a hat like Smokey the Bear’s,” she said as they got back into the car.

It made her think of a bygone era, when the park rangers were everyone’s friends. And no outlaw ranchers faced them down with armed militias.

“Smokey was a real bear,” said Stephanie. “Did you know that? There’s a museum to him. Next to his grave. Near Lincoln National Forest. I went there once on a road trip.”

“I thought he was invented in World War II,” said Anne. “So people wouldn’t leave their campfires burning and destroy the lumber supply.”

“Yeah but a few years later they found a baby bear in a tree. Badly burned from a fire. They called him Hotfoot first but then changed his name to Smokey and sent him to live at a zoo in DC. With Ham the space chimp. When he died they sent the body back to New Mexico. To be buried in his old forest home.”

“Sweet.”

“There was another Smokey after him. Smokey II. But he wasn’t as popular. When he died they burned him.”

After a while on a bumpy dirt road they came to a place where the road got wet. Reeds all around them, rustling and scraping against the car when the road was narrow. She heard mud spattering into the car’s wheel wells.

“He said we’d see the survey flags.”

“Like, Day-­Glo pink?”

“You see one? OK. Look for a pullout on the left.”

A Jeep was parked. And a pickup truck.

A woman in waders and an orange vest approached as they were getting out their hats and water bottles. “Steph! Hi! You found us!”

They started discussing the fieldwork. Something with plots and water samples.

“Inverts,” the colleague kept saying.

Association: Krafft-­Ebing. The sexologists who used to call gay people inverts. Gay men had a feminine soul in a man’s body, they had suggested. Lesbians had the reverse.

But the colleague was referring to invertebrates.

“It’s looking grim,” she told Stephanie. “The densities are even lower than we expected.”

Drought was a factor. Water withdrawals from the nearby river. But pesticide-­spraying was also a likely culprit.

“They spray pesticides? On a wildlife refuge?” asked Anne.

“Oh, absolutely,” said the colleague. “To subsidize the farmers.”

Stephanie’d forgotten to introduce them. She wasn’t always on top of the niceties.

The colleague offered to take them both into the swampy water—­she’d brought some extra pairs of waders—but Anne demurred.

“I’ll just go look around with her a bit,” said Stephanie. “Maybe for half an hour. We can do the hike after. OK?”

“If you stand in the bed of the truck, you’ll be able to see us,” said the colleague. “There’s a cooler with water and beer. And lemonade.”

“I’m Anne, by the way,” said Anne.

“Nice to meet you,” said the colleague.

Still no name.

Task-­oriented. And far more interested in arthropods than people. Stephanie was an outlier in her department—­focused on the big picture. Commonalities among lifeforms. Most of the rest of them saw the world through smaller windows. Shied away from anything they thought might be viewed as anthropomorphic.

We were us, to the biologists, and the others were the others.

Not so different from shrinks, actually.

But the colleague was considerate. She set up a folding chair for Anne in the pickup bed. The ground was too muddy, she explained. Its legs would sink in. She spun it over the tailgate one-­handed, then flicked her wrist to open it. Deft.

Stephanie pulled on the waders and a vest and the two of them went forging off into the reeds. Anne popped the tab on a beer and tried sitting in the chair. But sitting down, she couldn’t see anything but the pale-­green grasses.

So she perched on the cab of the truck instead. Cross-­legged and sipping. Looked for the high-­vis vests and made out five of them.

They were counting insects. And she was counting people.

They bent over, moving forward a few shuffles at a time. The work was painstaking. Slow and painstaking. Someone wearing a bug net over his face, not too far from the truck, lifted a container of yellowish water up to the light.

When there was a light breeze, it was pleasant up there on the truck cab. A sea of grasses waving before her. Here and there, a stretch of glittering water.

Far above, sometimes a plane.

But when it was still it was stifling. She almost felt claustrophobic. Though surrounded by air.

Mosquitoes began to descend. She slapped at them. Mosquitoes had always been drawn to her. Stephanie they ignored.

She wished Stephanie would come back.

The longer she waited, the more she thought about her patients. Still Nick, but also Brent and Helen. All three of them preoccupied by the looming state of emergency.

If they were here, would they be comforted by the sight of those orange vests? Moving through the muddy water, dedicated to the granular detail of insects? Performing their careful measurements?

Maybe Helen. She believed in science and hope. Local solutions. Resistance.

But not Brent. Brent was a hardened cynic when it came to his fellow humans. On the spectrum, plus OCD. He said the summer sea ice in the Arctic was already a ghost. A foregone conclusion. Only a handful of years more. And as went the Arctic, he said—­bobbing his head in a constant rhythm—­so went Greenland. When Greenland melted, he told her, that would be about 23 feet right there. Sea-­level wise. And it was melting fast. Faster than previous projections. So, there went the coastal cities. Antarctica would lag, but still melt too. On down the road.

230 feet, he said. When all the ice was gone.

He had no children. Would never have any.

A sound decision, certainly. Though not a sociopath, he exhibited low empathy. To him the future was of little personal interest. It was a problem for others to deal with.

He did regret how it would end up for the animals. And the plants and trees. He had a soft spot for those who didn’t speak and kept a spreadsheet of confirmed extinctions. Sometimes he’d use up a whole session discussing a tree frog or a butterfly. The last attested sightings. The animals’ natural history.

During a frenzied OCD episode, he’d text her dozens of pictures of Hawaiian snails. Or mussels in Appalachia.

Rest in peace, brothers and sisters, he would text.

RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.

She’d noticed clouds but hadn’t paid much attention. The forecast had said cloudy, but no rain. By the time it started she’d been reduced to propping her sunglasses on top of her head and playing a game on her phone. No signal, so she couldn’t read the news.

The game was so basic Stephanie made fun of her for playing it.

“Mindless,” Stephanie would say.

“Exactly. It’s a form of meditation,” she’d claim.

You sorted panels of color into vials. That was it. She was on level 1,228.

Recently, she reflected, Nick’s affect had shifted for the better. Partly the Lexapro, no doubt, but also the girlfriend. She situated him in his life. It was a good match—­the bond was surprisingly strong.

To her, he was golden.

Anne’s guess was he would go, eventually, the way most upper-middle-­class people went. Toward the domestic. Ensconce himself in a smaller world he could control.

Maybe he’d stay on the Lexapro long-­term. It was possible.

And go forward, like so many, with despair held at bay by comfort. Nestled in affection.

The first drop she saw was on the screen. Then, rapidly, rain was beating down on the truck. Hollow, tinny pings on the metal. Far off, a spidery bolt of lightning.

She gazed out over the sea of reeds. Were the biologists coming in? Or would they keep on working?

She saw the orange vests draw closer to each other. She couldn’t tell which one was Stephanie. Faintly, she heard their voices.

She thought of signaling to them. Waving her arms.

But what would she be signaling? It’s raining? And I’m here?

Stephanie already knew these things.

With the lightning, she should get down from the truck. The bed was slick with water.

She picked her way across it, folded the camp chair and propped it on its side, and stepped over the tailgate. Down into the slippery mud.

Oh! But the car was locked. The keys were in Stephanie’s pocket. No reason to lock it, out here, but the car locked itself if you left it unattended.

“Dammit,” she said.

The rain was coming harder. She was getting soaked.

She leaned against the side of the car, folding her arms. Her fault, too. She could have asked for the keys. It hadn’t occurred to her.

Her clothes were sodden and her hair was plastered to her scalp, dripping down her face and onto her shoulders. She wiped a tickling drip off the back of her neck.

Around her the rain made a vast pattering sound in the reeds. So many small sounds she couldn’t track them.

So you’re wet, she told herself. Big deal. That’s done. At some point, you’ll be dry again. Just listen, why don’t you.

The sounds went on and on. Spread about her in their inseparable millions. A symphony of water and plants. If she listened without resistance, the sounds would take her beyond the shivering.

Beyond the inconvenience. Into the elemental.

It was hard to believe the elements would fail us, she thought.

Less hard to believe we would fail them.

All around, all around, all around.

The rain is coming down, she said to herself.

She raised her face and closed her eyes.

Let me be liquid. Bathed in the clouds.

Right now, here in the home that made us, we still have the rain.