Season 1, Episode 7: Inadequacy & the Upside Down Pyramid
image credit | Garidy Sanders
Season 1, Episode 7 | Inadequacy & the Upside Down Pyramid
When we face a challenge like global climate change, none of us is “enough.” Thomas and Panu center this episode’s conversation around naming feelings of inadequacy [in Finnish riittämättömyyden tunne: the feeling of not being enough or doing enough]. They share ways to work through this common feeling, balancing acceptance, action and rest. Panu differentiates various shades of anxiety in relation to feeling inadequate in the face of the climate crisis, including anxiety of responsibility, anxiety of freedom and anxiety of guilt. When we work toward sustainability, it’s not just an ideal or a policy. We also have to make it personal with concrete actions. Panu shares his experience at Omavaraopisto [The School of Self Sufficiency] in Finland. Thomas echoes the the importance of hands-on activities, adding “some concrete things to our very abstract worlds.” He shares the image of an upside down pyramid that he uses with his clients — a tool for restabilizing ourselves when overwhelmed and bringing our focus back to healthy daily activities — to give us energy and meaning for the long haul. Take a moment, when you can, to give some honest feedback when you notice you or someone else is being enough.
Links
Hickman, Marks, Pihkala, et. al. (2021) Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey
Omavaraopisto, The School of Self Sufficiency
Tara Brach & The practice of Radical Acceptance
Thomas’ “Upside Down” Pyramid lesson
Transcript
Season 1, Episode 7: Inadequacy & Upside Down Pyramid
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
Introduction voice: Welcome to Climate Change and Happiness (CC&H), an international podcast that explores the personal side of climate change. Your feelings, what the crisis means to you, and how to cope and thrive. And now, your hosts, Thomas Doherty and Panu Pihkala.
Thomas Doherty: Well, hello. This is Thomas Doherty.
Panu Pihkala: And I'm Panu Pihkala.
Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, where we talk about… climate change and happiness. And climate change and other kinds of emotions. So, this is the show for people who are feeling and thinking deeply about climate change and how it affects them in their personal life. And in their families and communities. And their roles as citizens. And so we're back at it here. It's morning for me. It's evening for Panu. I'm getting going here on a fall morning here in the Pacific Northwest. How're you feeling today, Panu? How's life going for you?
Pihkala: Thanks for asking Thomas. It's getting [to be] late autumn in Finland. So we are approaching what we call marras. That's the title for our November: marraskuu. Which means sort of the time when everything in nature looks dead. So that is the time before the relief of the snow comes. Or at least it used to come. So, it's time to think about how to maintain one's energy. And for me, for example, the time to pick up the bright lamp. Which I have on actually also; now the sun is just setting in Helsinki. How are you doing on the West Coast, Thomas?
Doherty: You know, we're doing pretty well. I love that Finnish word for November. Marraskuu. Yeah, yeah. I was celebrating some of the fall season with my daughter. My daughter age 14. And we went — what we do here in Portland, there's a farming region right outside of Portland that you can go to to go and get pumpkins, which we celebrate. And one of our traditions for the Halloween season is getting pumpkins. And taking a hay ride. And being out and on a farm. And so we were enjoying the autumn season. And so that's I'm glad you bring that up because that is a positive piece of it.
I do love this autumn season myself and our weather. We've had some really, as you know, crazy weather here in the Pacific Northwest recently, but we are having a fairly calm autumn season. [A] more traditional feeling one. And the leaves on the trees, the deciduous trees, have become really beautiful colors, bright reds. And so we're feeling that. And the leaves haven't fallen yet either. So we haven't gotten to that dead season that you described yet. So yeah, yeah.
And, you know, I was thinking about our conversation. And this idea of our podcast, you know, feelings. Climate emotions. Emotions are our primal physical sensations that we have. Feelings are the language that we use to speak to our emotions, right? And that's different all over the world. Different languages, different cultures have different words for those deep, these deeper emotions. A feeling that I came to just the other day was inadequacy. Unfortunately, that was a feeling that I was feeling which, as we'll talk [about], isn't necessarily rational. I'm doing a lot of really good work and I know you are as well. But I was feeling inadequate to the task of climate change and just doing work in the world. And I don't actually remember what prompted it in particular. It was probably an interaction of my personal to do list and, you know, my family work. And then my idea of writing and my duty. I mean climate change as a huge hyper object is interacting with my sense of my personal destiny—and what I should be doing on the planet. And so it leaves me both inadequate.
I also paradoxically felt like a “know-it-all” in a sense. That's an American term. Know-it-all. But I felt like sometimes I was trying to tell people about all the different connections with climate change. And it's partly what I do for a living. I am training counselors and I am doing this podcast. But I also felt—it wasn't so much a know-it-all. I felt the need to make these connections clear for people that weren't obviously made clear. And so that was sort of the, you know, the impulse like you and I know that people have been working on this for years. There's great ideas out there. And whenever someone invents something for the first time today as if it just happened, I say, well, that's not actually the case. People have been talking about this concept and that concept for many years. So I can be a little pedantic. But it's also this urge to name the elephant in the room in many ways. Even with justice.
We've got a senator in the US that's holding up the climate change legislation here. And it's about the coal industry because the senator is part of the coal industry. And the coal industry in West Virginia is holding up climate legislation that could change the entire, you know, trajectory of the planet. And the media doesn't talk about this. It talks about just some senator with some fiscal policy. And they're not telling the whole story. And so I think there's also that inadequacy. Like, no we have to get all the truth out, so to speak so. But anyway, it sounds like you were also resonating with that feeling from the Finnish side.
Pihkala: Yeah, definitely. I strongly resonate with that. I actually have been putting forth in Finnish a[n] emotion word or feeling term called riittämättömyyden tunne. Now, that takes some unpacking. Tunne is the word we use in [the] Finnish language for feeling and emotion. So we don't separate them in Finnish language. And riittämättömyys, it means both not being enough and not having done enough. And that may sound like a sort of ultimate shame position, but it's actually between guilt and shame. And we use the same word riittää, for example, if you pour some water into a glass, then somebody says that’s riittävästi. That means that it's enough. So it's sort of context dependent, being enough.
And I've noticed that many people, including myself, very easily feel this, riittämättömyyden tunne, inadequacy, because the ecological crisis and climate crisis simply challenges us in so many ways. It's very difficult to feel that you've actually done all that you should do or could do. So I think one of the actually most important emotional skills in the era of the climate crisis is the sort of learning to accept the ambivalence and limits but also trying to keep going. So it's a really tricky issue.
Doherty: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's important for listeners. I mean, I know many people listening around the world will be resonating with this. I can just guess it. If we're feeling it, we're human, other people are feeling it, too. And so you might you, as a listener might feel like I'm not even, I don't even know anything about this area. And I'm just listening in as an amateur. And I don't feel like I'm being enough. Well, even the experts don't feel like they're being enough, either. That's the nature of the hyper objectness of climate change. It's ultimately always bigger than our perception. And it's just a huge, multifaceted area, multifaceted issue. So yes, because you are working really hard. And I know you're tired, Panu, from traveling and doing all these interesting things you've been doing. So you wanna, let's flip this over a little bit and say, why? In what way have you been being enough? What have you been doing? I know, you mentioned some interesting travels and your paper in Lancet and all this stuff. What's some of these adventures you've had recently?
Pihkala: Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking, and sort of turning it around. And sort of how to be enough. And I've actually been using for the last couple of weeks this very simple anxiety-related exercise. Or it's sort of anxiety of responsibility -related exercise. But I think that that's a very fundamental part of what anxiety fundamentally is, you know. Wanting to do something in the midst of the problems. And then anxiety of freedom. Anxiety of responsibility being a major part of that. And then the possible anxiety of guilt also. So I've been writing lists, you know, to-do lists, and then very manually, just overlining things that I've been doing. That's an advice I picked [up] from some psychologists at some point. And amazingly, because we are what we are, that also helps. You sort of get a bodily signal that you've done something when you overline it. And I just noticed another tip, which I haven't done yet, but I plan to do. Which would be to sort of write down all the things one has done in a day. I don't usually do that. But that might be another trick. But [is] this one familiar for you Thomas? Have you been doing — I'll talk about the travels more soon.
Doherty: Yeah, no, what we'd say is crossing it off the list. And, you know, there is a funny thing where I'll make a to-do list and write things I've already done just so I can cross them off. Yeah, the idea of inadequacy versus enough. But do tell me about your adventures there. I know you've been traveling. So yeah.
Pihkala: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah definitely. So because of the Lancet's “Children and young people climate anxiety and their views about government climate inaction” paper, there's been lots of speaking assignments and media issues related to that one. And one of them led me last week to the Ministry of the Environment in Finland. They're very interested about the paper. And one of these very high level experts, actually recommended me [to be invited]. He sort of shared a very emotional thing and said that when he read the results of the paper, the first gut reaction for him was that, “what could I do more?” So it really sparked again, something related to this feeling inadequate. And I know him pretty well. He's a person who sort of does what he can, reasonably thinking, and he knows that too. And after a couple of days, he was able to, of course, analyze them, the feelings that he got. But I think that's telling, you know, that people care about these states of the world and children and young people's reactions. And would like to do more. And are sort of struggling because there's only so much one can do and stay functioning. That's a real challenge among these times.
And then the sort of other end of my adventures was a train trip, and a bus trip to a place called Valtimo, which is Northern Karelia, quite close to the Russian border. And really in the midst of forests. It actually also already snowed a bit during the weekend there. There's a group of people who have built what they call “School of Self-Sufficiency.” A couple of old farms. And they are sort of keeping on the tradition of these ancient skills related to growing food and building houses from wood and so on. So, they were also interested about environmental emotions and climate emotions. But it was a totally different crowd and space, compared to this high-tech conference room in the Ministry of the Environment in Helsinki. And then this old, farming house in Valtimo. So that was, in many ways, rewarding and nice. But I do find myself a bit tired after the travels, I have to confess.
Doherty: Yeah. Well, that's a great example of climate cosmopolitanism, right? This idea that, you know, you can move between different climate subcultures. This is a very concrete example of that. And, you know, listeners can know that. And I've done that as well. I've done [it] in my outdoor therapy background. You know, there's subcultures of outdoor therapy that are back to the land kind of approaches. And, you know, indigenous living skills and, you know, making fire by, you know, friction fire by rubbing sticks. And making arrowheads and tanning hides, and trapping animals and things like that. And so that's a very different subculture of sustainability than your academics, you know, or policy subculture. And so, it sounds like you are able to move between those yourself fairly well. So you're, you know, practicing and exhibiting climate cosmopolitanism. And you know, you're, you can, you know, “when in Rome do as the Romans do” kind of thing, you can kind of tap into this kind of thing.
Pihkala: Yeah, that's a nice way to put it, Thomas. Thanks for that. I think cosmopolitanism can happen also in the countryside or in the woods. So it's not related to the polises [a reference to the greek word, polis, meaning a city], so but —
Doherty: Yeah, exactly. It's different cultures. That's the way I think about it. It's different cultures. And then I think you're tired. And, you know, like I say, you know, despair is fatigue in disguise. And so I think when we're tired, you know, we lose that. I guess we get “adequacy fatigue,” right? You know, our ability to feel adequate, gets fatigued. Or when we're fatigued, we start to feel like we can't do enough, because our battery is low. And so, you know, everyone listening has to think about this. When your battery's low, you know, you're going to feel fatigued, and then you're more prone to despair. And then that's the signal that you need to rest and take time out from the game. To reconnect with yourself and work on the foundation of your pyramid. You know, rest, exercise, family, diet, sleep, and things like that.
Pihkala: Yeah, Thomas, I've sometimes heard you speak about sort of the pyramid metaphor. That sometimes, you know, you're sort of building the foundations and sometimes it's like, the pyramid is weighing on you. Do you want to open that metaphor for the listeners also? I thought it was rather nice.
Doherty: Yeah, it's something that I use with clients. And, you know, Panu has been able to join my therapy training groups that I'm doing right now with mental health therapists. And we were talking about that as a coping [strategy]. And I shared that with some high schoolers that I spoke to last week as well. The image is, if you imagine a large pyramid that's upside down, so its apex is pointing toward the ground. And so it's really top heavy, it's really hard to balance and we have, you know, we feel like the world's like this pyramid over the top of us. You know, we have a very small little triangle of resources, and this huge pyramid that's infinite. It just keeps going. And there's all these different issues and things we're thinking about. You know, politics and sustainability and social movements and our lives and things like that. And it's just really an overwhelmed kind of inadequate feeling in general. And one of the mental reframes is to flip that pyramid over onto its base so it's nice and stable. And then we just focus on the foundation.
If someone I'm working with, you know, is really tired, burned out, fatigued, depleted, discouraged, you know, we say, let's get back to the foundation. You know, and everybody has similar bricks in their foundation of health. Sleep, eating good food, social relationships, their home, maybe their daily work, family, their pets, or whatever things around their home. It's a very human exercise. And then if people have unique bricks in their foundation, so they might have a certain hobby, or they might be a musician or artist, or certain daily things that they do every day. And then we try to get clear on what your foundation is. At least in theory.
Some people have a lot of missing bricks in their foundation. Like they're not doing certain things that they want. Or they just haven't been able to manifest yet. They might want to be in a relationship, and they don't have one or something like that. So it provides some goal setting conversations as well. So it's all about this idea of personal sustainability is what I call it, you know, like, let's get sustainable in your own base of your own pyramid. And then the idea is organically, you'll have more energy and ability to reach up toward the top, which is where those issues are. And there's a number of directions there. I mean the pyramid at the top is pointed. The upside down pyramid is infinite. It just extends, widens, and there's no end to it. But the pyramid that's on its basis actually has a point. And then we can start thinking about what are your priorities? And what, you know? And so it's just a metaphor, and I find it helps the ground people.
Pihkala: Yeah, I really like that one. And it's got many good dimensions, like the metaphor of bricks also, and resources and that type of thing. And it also reminds me of a young person I met at this old farm at the School of Self- Sufficiency, who talked about how earlier on he very often had this feeling of the pyramid. He didn't use that word, but anyway, resting on his head and shoulders and feeling very inadequate. And now during what they do there, he's often physically tired. But because he can physically touch things and do things in an embodied, holistic way, that helps him to feel adequate and feel enough. So that sort of dynamic I know is possible also in urban settings, when you do something with your hands and body. So I think that's also an important resource, which can help with grounding and getting [the] feeling that you've done something.
But it also takes much psychological work, I think. And then old theologian, philosopher, psychologist, Paul Tillich, has been important for me in that regard. This 1950s classic The Courage to Be, which has these two dimensions in it. Courage to be oneself, an individual. And courage to be part of collectives. But also then the more spiritual idea of accepting that you are accepted. I think that also from a secular point of view, that points to something very important. That it's not enough when you hear that, you know, everything, everybody's accepted, but you sort of have to be able to perform it yourself with the support of others. So that's the second level of accepting that you are accepted. That you're okay. But how does that resonate with you, Thomas?
Doherty: It resonates. You know, I think this idea of doing concrete action, like you were describing that person that was doing the living skills. There is something, you know, comforting about doing something that's concrete or with our hands. Doing some sort of project. Whether it be knitting or cooking or painting or woodworking or repairing our home or building something or doing some sort of skill. You know, music or, you know, some sort of handiwork. You know, like blacksmithing, or something like that.
There is obviously, you know, the sense of a flow state in terms of psychology. You know, we have a concrete cause and effect. And, you know, we can get into a flow with these kinds of things. And so I think it is a takeaway for all of us to add some concrete things to our very abstract worlds. If we're only ever dealing with abstract policy and sort of distant things, we don't get that pay off. And, I know for me when I'm working with people — that's concrete. Doing this podcast is also concrete. So I feel like, in the moment, I'm doing something. And, you know, the therapy training groups that I'm doing now, it's [a] 10-week group, you know, with mental health people. You know, that's very rewarding, because we're doing something very concrete and helping these counselors, you know, therapists learn about their own environmental identity and talk about their feelings in the way that we are doing [with this podcast].
And so when I'm working with people, it brings out the best in me, typically. My creativity and, you know, my not necessarily being upbeat, sometimes I work on really dark, dark topics. But even then I'm, you know, creating spaces, we've talked about holding space for others. And that holding space is a very, very concrete thing as well. So I think, yeah, I think one of the antidotes to inadequacy outside of just rest is doing some concrete things that we can sort of measure and feel.
Pihkala: Hmm. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. That's very important, I think. And it's sometimes also tricky, because if one recognizes that one's got a lot of privilege, as we Finns tend to have, then there's also the dimension of, you know, wanting and feeling like one also has to use that privilege to help the global dimension. Both the more-than-human world and then the suffering people around the globe. So that sometimes makes the questions of and feelings of inadequacy even worse.
Just today from social media, I read from a very experienced Finnish climate reporter who was saying that she's been totally fatigued now for one and a half years. And one of the reasons has been this privilege issue of, you know, feeling the need to do so much, that's causing it. But I was very glad that she shared about it all openly, because of course, that's something related to other areas of work life, in contemporary societies, also. Structural demands can be so high. And when you combine that with ecological awareness, it can be quite heavy indeed.
Doherty: Yeah, indeed. So naming this impulse to duty that we have. You know, we have a duty. We have, in psychology terms, a “social norm.” You know, an expectation that we should be doing something based on our knowledge and our ability to take action. You know, privilege is a kind of a touchy word. But in the sense that, you know, some people, it's not like people, you know, chose their privilege. Some people are, they're in a place where they discover that they are privileged. But what that means is that you have resources and you have abilities. You have either the ability to act or resources or choice. And that leads you to a sense of obligation, you know. A sense of duty. And so, you know, that's where the action is there. And the privilege is kind of self-loathing, some of that is it gets into self loathing. That's an action as well. So I can do self loathing as an action just to cope. But it's not a good coping skill. It's really about how do I channel some of the resources that I have in a good direction.
And again, the psychology 101 stuff, I mean, it's either egocentric values like my own personal protection and my family, or altruistic values, or biocentric values, you know, for the Earth. Earth values. And so we're going to have duties in all those directions. I have duties in those directions. Panu you do as well. We need to rest so we have the energy to get in the game and work on things like that. So yeah, we've got a few more minutes left here. Can you revisit the Finnish words that you described at the outset so we can get that more clear in people's minds?
Pihkala: Yeah. And that's been two. Of course there's Marraskuu. You know November as the death of the summer months. Then this riittämättömyyden tunne. Feeling of not being and doing enough. Feeling inadequate is the most accurate respondent meaning that I've found but it's not exactly the same either. And then there's the sort of the counter force of strength of acceptance. I've liked the stuff related to so-called “radical acceptance” that mindfulness writer Tara Brach has been putting forward, for example. Perhaps because I see so much of this riittämättömyyden tunne / inadequacy feelings among the people I meet in the environmental sectors.
Doherty: Yes. “Riittamatomuden tunne”.
Pihkala: Very nice. Thomas. You're learning your Finnish!
Doherty: Yes, yes. Yes, I'll have to get on my Duolingo for Finnish here. But yes, acceptance, radical acceptance, you know. Yes, I would, I will point out that a lot of people choke on acceptance. You know, they don't want to accept certain things. They seem to be “unacceptable.” But, you know, you could also think of it as just being open. Being open to a thing. I am open that it exists. I don't need to, you know, with some people semantically acceptance means some sort of condoning or some sort of, you know, giving permission and so. But being open, and I think that's still, in keeping with Tara Brach's idea of radical acceptance is living and being open that this thing exists. And it's with me. And it's next to me. And I'm involved with it. And I'm open to it. So, you know, from a therapeutic standpoint, just feeling open to a thing and having this little bit of a distance from it, but being present with it and open with it is also enough. You know, we typically have enough energy to do that. Like, we can be enough to be open to something. I don't have to come down on one side or the other about my feelings about it, per se. But the feeling of openness, presence, awareness.
So there's a sustainability there. The sustainability of being open as well. Sometimes I can get to a place where that's not fatiguing and I'm just open. But that's the work as well. Well, as we go, this is another one of these feeling words to add to our vocabulary list. This feeling of not being enough or not having done enough. And I want people to be, you know, listeners to be thinking about their own feelings. And talking about them with others. And finding some safe places to think about and express these things. And we're going to keep doing that work ourselves.
Pihkala: Exactly. And also remembering the sort of counter emotion of riittämättömyyden tunne, which is then you know, feeling enough. And, you know, that doesn't mean completely full or perfect, but it's just, you know, enough. And that's after the end of the day, I think that's something that we very much need. So taking a look back at the day and you know, that's that's what it is. And from many points of view, you just have to sort of look for the new morning and also remember to feel enough.
Doherty: Yeah. Riittämättömyyden tunne. Feeling enough. You know, what I say in my practice is, you know, just imagine what you would tell [your] best friend in the same situation. So when we can't pull that out for ourselves. Typically, we would be able to do it for a friend. We'd be able to let a friend know that they are enough. And if that friend had this exact same day as us, then we can transfer that energy back toward ourselves. So what would you tell a best friend in the same situation? That's a good mental hack. That's good almost all the time. So what would you tell your family or friends? Are they being enough? Are they doing enough? Some of you might feel like some people aren't and that's another conversation. But for the people that genuinely are, we need to be able to let them know. Alright, Panu well, I think you're doing enough. And -
Pihkala: Likewise.
Doherty: You're welcome! Have a good evening over there and get some rest. And I look forward to chatting again soon. And listeners take care of yourselves.
