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The Doomsday Clock Is Ticking

I am starting to have panic attacks, sometimes involving whales

Christyl Rivers, Phd.
2 min readJan 19, 2022

Very Unpopular Strong Opinions Blog by Christyl Rivers

Photo by Lynn

It’s kinda bad when a psychotherapist/ecopsychologist — who knows what the body and stress hormones are up to — begins to freak out.

When fiction assaults reality

Yesterday, I wrote about how to separate toxic positivity, or fake optimism, from reality.

I used the metaphor of unicorns as toxic positivity, and rainbows as something real. However, facing truth is not for the faint of heart, and often, each of us feels faint of heart because truth can just be that much heavier and more smashy than the heartbeat that day.

This morning during my ritual perusal of the Guardian and New York Times, I read that the Doomsday clock is mere seconds to midnight.

It’s Putin invading Ukraine again, threatening alliances and global nuke dusting. It’s also the threat of losing democracy in places where votes and elections are hanging on ragged threads. It’s the pandemic. It’s climate crisis. It’s extinction events. It’s polarization.

It’s everything, frankly.

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Christyl Rivers, Phd.
Christyl Rivers, Phd.

Written by Christyl Rivers, Phd.

Ecopsychologist, Writer, Farmer, Defender of reality, and Cat Castle Custodian.

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