Landings: A Settler Descendent Relationship to Land
| aut.embargo | No | en_NZ |
| aut.subject.rainbow | healthcare | |
| aut.subject.rainbow | sexual orientation and identity | |
| aut.thirdpc.contains | No | en_NZ |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Woodard, Wiremu | |
| dc.contributor.author | Brett, Elizabeth | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-05-03T00:22:06Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-05-03T00:22:06Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2022 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2022-05-02T10:05:35Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | Mental wellbeing is influenced by relationships with nature and land. The climate crisis is increasingly recognised as impacting mental health. In Aotearoa New Zealand, ecological loss occurs against a colonised landscape; relationship to land is entangled with historical trauma. Practicing relational psychotherapy within this context requires attention to the way that relationship to land is experienced. This heuristic self-search inquiry examines the experience of relationship to land of a settler-descended psychotherapy trainee. Drawing on Moustakas and Sela-Smith, I use a six-phase process, driven by journaling, poetry, focussing, dreams, and reflective self-inquiry and self-dialogue, to explore my experience. The resulting creative synthesis explores ambivalence and covert hostility within my experience of relationship to land. Four themes are identified: the existential distress and resentment of inevitable death; my relationship to my colonising ancestors; powerlessness, trauma, and resentment in the climate crisis; and how gender and queerness shape my relationship to land. The distress, resentment, and covert hostility to land are uncomfortable to experience; relationship to land may hold defensive aspects of avoidance, denial, and disengagement. As a self-inquiry, this research is not directly generalisable to others; however, it demonstrates the potential complexity and ambivalence of relationship to land, with implications for ecopsychology, mental health, and climate activism. | en_NZ |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10292/15109 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_NZ |
| dc.publisher | Auckland University of Technology | |
| dc.rights.accessrights | OpenAccess | |
| dc.subject | Ecopsychology | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Ecopsychotherapy | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Relationship to land | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Settler colonialism | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Psychotherapy | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Ecofeminism | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Queer ecology | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Ecological affect | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Eco-anxiety | en_NZ |
| dc.subject | Climate crisis | en_NZ |
| dc.title | Landings: A Settler Descendent Relationship to Land | en_NZ |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en_NZ |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Auckland University of Technology | |
| thesis.degree.level | Masters Dissertations | |
| thesis.degree.name | Master of Psychotherapy | en_NZ |