What Is Stopping Us?

One can ask what it is that is stopping us from living in peace, in
solidarity and in balance with nature.  Is it really so, that people don't
care about the situation on earth, haven't they understood how bad it is? 
What is it that makes some people not care.

Everything depends on our ability to feel empathy, our ability to understand
how other living beings can feel.

The empathic ability begins early in life - much earlier than we think.

What children do is a reflection of what they have experienced. That is, what
we do to our children they will do to others. 

We humans also very early have an ability that protects us from too much
anguish, stress and feelings of guilt. When the anguish or stress gets too
big to handle the psychological defences are activated. 

What good is it to feel empathy with a person if one feels unable to do
something about it. What good is it then to try to live in peace, in
solidarity and in balance with nature if one thinks it doesn't help anyway?

After stressing information we hear daily, the level of anguish rises and the
psychological defences are activated. We are in a state of alarm. In the end
we stop listening and won't take in any frightening information at all.  For
example: Repression - I don't want to see things like that! Reaction
formation - There are too many people on earth anyhow. Rationalising - It's
natures' way to select.

We become passive. To break this state of mind we need to talk to each other,
start a dialogue about how we feel, to hear that other persons also become
worried, to feel one is not alone, that is to feel interconnectedness, to
realise that one is a part of a bigger consensus. Then we are able to open up
our defences and little by little we can receive more facts. Out of this
comes a power to do something, a recharging that still is sensitive for
disturbances, one needs to understand what abilities, what resources one has,
one's place, one's meaning. Then one is ready for acting.

To become active we need practical advice and suggestions on concrete
measures both for our own acting and for all actions - something that is
clear and gives direct results and in time even indirect results.

Briefly: Our empathy is blocked by self-defence. Empathy also is the rescue -
by showing empathy with people that are in a state of alarm, by starting a
dialogue with them, accepting their feelings of worry and stress, by giving
them a feeling of interconnectedness we can guide them to recharging and have
them joining us in acting, that is the concrete work for a more peaceful
world, with more solidarity between people and a more ecologically  balanced
way of life.
Anita Kullander
Psychologists Against Nuclear Arms, for Peace and Ecological Balance.
from the Pegasus conference, nonviolent.action