Who can benefit from Psychodynamic in Nature, Outdoor Therapy?

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

Mary Oliver

Wild Geese (1986)

Who Can Benefit from Psychodynamic in Nature, Outdoor Therapy?

Working outdoors in psychotherapy or counselling can provide extra stimulus for insight, creativity and growth. The natural environment may also be restorative, emotionally regulating and relaxing. For any one client and in any one session, the natural setting and the experiences we encounter there might incorporate any or all of these elements.

What each of us brings to the natural space and what we encounter there is unique to each individual therapy and boundless. The therapeutic benefits of working outdoors may involve the following, although it must be said these cannot be guaranteed and are not always felt to be beneficial. Sometimes, the encounter may be beyond words, expectation or definition.

The Outdoor Therapy Experience

Having a sense of our eco-centricity - belonging, place, feeling rooted

Seasonal cycles of loss and regeneration

Reverie - a way of mentally relaxing in nature which allows the freeing-up of sensory, emotional and associative experiencing, helping stimulate or recover under-utilised, intuitive, unconscious or other “lost” aspects of ourselves

Being revitalised by contact with nature - sensory re-awakenings, bringing deadened parts of ourselves alive

Systemic or emotional regulation - being soothed, grounded and restored by nature; our innate limbic survival mechanisms’ psycho-physiological response to the natural setting

Rhythms of movement and bodily experiencing, combined with the rhythms of nature

Psychodynamic in Nature Therapy

May Help With;