Framing policy around death is legitimate---working through is key to overcome powerlessness.

The move to a wider ecological sense of self is in large part a function of the dangers that are threatening to overwhelm us. We are confronted by social breakdown, wars, nuclear proliferation, and the progressive destruction of our biosphere. Polls show that people today are aware that the world, as they know it, may come to an end. This loss of certainty that there will be a future is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. Over the past twelve years my colleagues and I have worked with tens of thousands of people in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, helping them confront and explore what they know and feel about what is happening to their world. The purpose of this work, which was first known as “Despair and Empowerment Work,” is to overcome the numbing and powerlessness that result from suppression of painful responses to massively painful realities. As their grief and fear for the world is allowed to be expressed without apology or argument and validated as a wholesome, life-preserving response, people break through their avoidance mechanisms, break through their sense of futility and isolation. Generally what they break through into is a larger sense of identity. It is as if the pressure of their acknowledged awareness of the suffering of our world stretches or collapses the culturally defined boundaries of the self. It becomes clear, for example, that the grief and fear experienced for our world and our common future are categorically different from similar sentiments relating to one’s personal welfare . This pain cannot be equated with dread of one’s own individual demise. Its source lies less in concerns for personal survival than in apprehensions of collective suffering – of what looms for human life and other species and unborn generations to come. Its nature is akin to the original meaning of compassion – “suffering with.” It is the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part. And, when it is so defined, it serves as a trigger or getaway to a more encompassing sense of identity, inseparable from the web of life in which we are as intricately connected as cells in a larger body. This shift in consciousness is an appropriate, adaptive response. For the crisis that threatens our planet, be it seen in its military, ecological, or social aspects, derives from a dysfunctional and pathogenic notion of the self. It is a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries, that it is so small and needy that we must endlessly