Mary Dees

Mary Dees is a Certified Transactional Analyst (P) and UKCP reg. psychotherapist.

She specialises in Eco-TA (ecological transactional analysis) and has been working outdoors with clients for over 6 years. Mary is a Masters Degree Environmental Scientist and facilitates organisational training programmes, including Strategic Net Zero Programmes for NHS leaders.

Mary believes grief work is essential for human beings to face the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse and start to awaken to our need for homonomy. Hayley Marshall in her UKATA Conference address in 2021 regarding Eco-TA and homonomy, talks of the importance of interconnectedness and the wider embrace, humans realising (or maybe remembering) that we are part of, and embedded in, the wider web of life.

Grief work is an essential part of this remembering.

Mary’s influencers and teachers are Francis Weller (The Wild Edge of sorrow), Joanna Macy (The Work that Reconnects) Hayley Marshall, William Cornell and Bill Plotkin (Wild Mind).

“Our choice is to be in love or in fear. But to choose to be in love means to have a mountain inside of you, means to have the heart of the world inside you, means you will feel another’s suffering inside your own body and you will weep. You will have no protection from the World’s pain because it will be your own.” China Galland

My Motivation

Like most people in their mid-fifties, I’ve experienced a lot of loss: bereavement of grandparents, father, aunties, friends and colleagues, loss of relationships and friendships, leaving jobs, homes and communities, loss associated with ill health and the grief accompanying trauma.

But the main motivation that led me to my apprenticeship with grief was the climate and biodiversity emergency and my Mum’s Alzheimer's. Some call it anticipatory grief or grief by 1000 cuts; the grief I feel about the climate and biodiversity emergency is very similar to the grief I feel about my Mum’s slow descent into Alzheimer’s.  It’s slow, difficult to grasp, often agonising and seems never-ending.

We carry this type of grief around with us, hardly noticing it, like walking into quicksand it suddenly pulls us down into an existential reality. The house martins that don’t turn up one summer. The day my Mum forgot my name.

In the skin, muscles, nerves and bones the 1000 small cuts, one on top of another, built scar tissue of the grief not yet faced. And I woke up one day and realised my mum was gone and almost everything she had been, in her place an old woman who has no memory, who cannot talk, whose body is clinging on – by one broken fingernail.

I realised that the hypothetical climate change of the 80s is not only happening NOW but at an incredibly fast rate, much faster than predicted. We are seeing parts of the earth burn, flood and die. Many of our kin (human and non-human) are struggling to survive. These things are devastating, heartbreaking, and overwhelmingly sad.

All of this signalled the time for me to face this grief because what is the alternative? Denial, ossification, disconnection, dissociation? I sought out teachers –attending courses run by Francis Weller, reading Joanna Macy and Bill Plonkin (and others) and attending grief rituals run by Sarah and Tony Pletts. And so my apprenticeship with grief started.

I think the greatest act of love we can give to our planet - our kin, the rivers, trees, non humans and our mother earth, is to face the stark realities of the climate and biodiversity emergency and grieve fully and open-heartedly.

Part of that grief is the deep somatic understanding that humans are a humble component of a greater interdependent natural system – Hayley Marshall and Giles Barrow (ECO-TA) call this ecosystemic. This is a counterbalance to the assumptive position of human exceptionalism, which is egosystemic.

In this egosystemic mind frame, death is ignored or denied, grief is pathogised and we forget our humble place within this finite world. If we recognise that we are not separate and accept we are holobionts (biological concept that there are no individual species, just collective ecosystems), then loss and death are essential parts of the creative life cycle.

Grief is an appropriate and fundamental response to life changes. In this, I know and accept that my mother is slowly leaving this World and I allow myself to face that loss and I allow myself to grieve in all its dark and painful ways. And through that, to choose love and gratitude for my human mother and our mother earth. As Francis Weller says 'grief is our response that confirms our intimate bond with all creation."

 

“The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.

All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.

Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.

Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come and is a place of wonder and beauty for our children.”

Chief Seattle in 1854