2026-09-25T00:52:18Zhttps://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/server/oai/requestoai:openrepository.aut.ac.nz:10292/151092026-07-31T04:04:50Zcom_10292_16164com_10292_3col_10292_16165col_10292_476
AUT Research Repository
advisor
Woodard, Wiremu
author
Brett, Elizabeth
2022-05-03T00:22:06Z
2022-05-03T00:22:06Z
2022
https://hdl.handle.net/10292/15109
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
Ecopsychology
Ecopsychotherapy
Relationship to land
Settler colonialism
Psychotherapy
Ecofeminism
Queer ecology
Ecological affect
Eco-anxiety
Climate crisis
Landings: A Settler Descendent Relationship to Land
Dissertation
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URL
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BrettE.pdf.txt