Interview: Social worker Melissa Grisi on cultivating a relationship with nature
To celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month, we spoke with high desert therapist Melissa Grisi. A licensed social worker for twenty years, Melissa integrates a range of psychotherapeutic methods into practice, including connecting with nature. Melissa talked about the importance of getting outdoors and cultivating a relationship with nature for one’s mental health.
By Ella Richie DeMaria, MDLT Social Media and Outreach Coordinator
MDLT: It seems like there’s a lot more discussion about mental wellness these days. How do you feel about that?
MG: It’s a dream. I’ve been doing this for twenty years — in March I celebrated twenty years in social work — and I’m still standing. The conversations are so different now. Talking about mental health, normalizing therapy, being aware of systems — it has shifted so much in twenty years.
MDLT: How would you describe your personal connection to nature?
MG: It’s always been there, on a personal level. Obviously, I’m a big believer in psychotherapy, but I also think there’s so many other ways to support our mental health, and one of those ways is being in nature. A lot of that I came to in my own personal experience, and it’s a huge reason why I was drawn to this place. I felt so connected and held by nature here. Just being able to sort of have access to this open space and be in connection with nature, and what it does for my overall system. Back east, we lived by this running path, and I always tell my partner that if we didn’t have that path, I would have never lasted fifteen years in a city. That was my lifeline, a beautiful running path surrounded by trees.
My own relationship with nature has helped me move through my own emotions, particularly grief. A therapist can only take you where they’ve been able to go themselves and use what we’ve found has worked for us. Moving through my own grief in nature, I’ve found, wow, this is really effective.
MDLT: Can you describe the emerging field of ecotherapy?
MG: There’s this field called ecotherapy, it’s relatively new, but it’s old knowledge. It’s been there for quite some time. In therapy we have a way of taking from Indigenous practices. But it’s the felt experience: when we spend time in nature, we feel better. When I ask patients to think of a calm, peaceful place, nine times out of ten, it’s a special place in nature they have. It’s wired within us, this connection to nature, but we’re so disconnected. That connection is a give and take; it supports not only me but supports the Earth. It supports a connection between two living beings: the Earth and the person; and the animals around you, your pets. Moving in nature can be just as effective as anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medications.
MDLT: Yes, although I would add they are very different. Nature is everything, and being in nature is all-encompassing, it’s a lifestyle; medications are prescriptive and target specific parts of the brain or nervous system.
MG: Yes. I’m a believer that everybody’s path is different; what we need and what supports us looks different throughout our lifetime. What worked in my 20s is different than my 40s, and what worked in my early 40s is different than what worked in my later 40s, for example. That unique relationship that everyone has in nature, it’s different for each of us. It’s like cultivating our relationship with ourselves, and then we are able to show up in our relationships for others and in the world around us. It’s this whole picture, like you said. It’s all-encompassing.
MDLT: How do you integrate it in your practice?
MG: As an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapist, a part of the therapy process we do what’s called preparation and stabilization. We’re taking these experiences that overwhelmed our system and, using bilateral stimulation — it could be tapping, it could be pulsers — to desensitize the memory and help our body metabolize it so that the memory no longer carries the same intensity. It’s been processed. I started having people go out into nature to do this. If they have access to it, folks can go out into desert and do bilateral stimulation. We notice what we see, and can touch and hear, and bilateral stimulation gets the right and left brain to strengthen the experience.
MDLT: The desert has a healing effect on a lot of people.
MG: You ask people why they moved here, they say, ‘I moved to the desert because I felt good being here. I felt my nervous system calm down,’ or, ‘I’d never seen the stars this bright, I never had access to this sort of expansiveness, and it felt so good in my body.’
MDLT: Can you speak a little more on the importance of simple activities like going on a walk? People sometimes roll their eyes when I recommend going on a walk…
MG: I’m so glad you asked that. It comes up in my practice all the time. They look at me and say, ‘Is this really what I’m paying for?’ But sleep, movement, eating foods that are nourishing — these are so important. We’ll start with: what does your sleep look like? Patients come in with really big symptoms happening, and we got to start with sleep. Are you going outside, do you have a house plant? How much are you getting off your phone? The phone is so activating for our nervous system. It’s such an effective way to disassociate. Nature is in total opposition to that.
It’s an invitation, maybe it’s not a walk; maybe it’s a rock. Just go sit on a rock. One ecotherapy assignment is to find a plant, a rock, something in nature in your view, and cultivate a relationship with it, spending time with it every day. Checking in on this tree, this rock. Again, I know it sounds simplistic, but it’s everything — it’s life — it’s where we came out of, it’s where we’ll go back into. That’s a whole other conversation, how disconnected we are. Sleep, nourishing foods, getting outside. It doesn’t have to be perfect. We can be so all or nothing, but it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be an hour a day; between sessions I’ll go outside, look around, see my cacti, then go back to my next session. It breaks it up. These little practices I call sacred pauses. Just take a pause.
There are so many splinters from the pandemic and surrounding loss lodged within us. Even being able to name that, and no one’s talking about it.
When I acknowledge climate change in the therapy space, the relief I see… people thank me, they say, thank you for naming it and acknowledging it. Gaslighting as a term has been so overused, but there is this collective gaslighting around climate change. If you didn’t specialize in grieving before the pandemic, you are experiencing it now. There would be some grief from the collective down into the individual from the last three years, and talking very specifically about the last three years, from George Floyd to the wildfires in 2020… We’re not acknowledging what’s happening with the planet, people know intuitively that something is wrong, but the collective is not speaking to it. There are pockets, but mainstream leadership is not taking action. They are not acknowledging this… When these things are not acknowledged or validated, it is an existential crisis.
It feeds into shame and defectiveness, that there’s something wrong with me — that nobody else seems to be upset, nobody else is having a hard time. The numbers around anxiety are exploding. And when no one’s talking about that, you think, ‘What’s wrong with me that I’m having a hard time getting up and going to work?’ That negative belief that ‘I can’t handle it.’ When we acknowledge and validate these secrets we’re holding onto in life, they dissolve when in connection with someone else. Someone else says, ‘Oh my god, I feel that way, too.”
What we experience here — I’m not an expert, but we are the forefront of climate change. We are seeing it in real time, and we need to prepare for how our mental health is going to be affected by climate change. Since 2020, since the fires, people come in in the summers and they’re really depressed, and they think there’s something wrong with them. I say, no, this is it, the summers, the heat… As things get more intense, we’ll see more of that, for sure.
Overcoming barriers to nature
By Ella Richie DeMaria