The Practice

Developmental Ecopsychology

There are times in a life when the usual maps stop fitting. You are in the middle of something real and the clinical language names what is wrong but not what is needed. The self-help language offers optimism but not orientation. What you are looking for is someone who can read where you actually are and tell you what the ground you are standing on requires.

Developmental ecopsychology is a nonclinical practice that reads the logic of a human life as it unfolds in relationship with place, season, and the natural world across time. It does not diagnose or treat. It helps you understand where you are in your own development, what conditions you need to move forward, and what the difficulty you are in is actually asking of you.

What this practice is based on

Human development does not stop in childhood or adolescence. It continues across the full span of a life, organized by seasons and cycles rather than a straight line from one stage to the next. Each season has its own character, its own tasks, its own particular difficulty and its own particular gifts.

When the conditions for a season are not adequate, the developmental work of that season does not simply disappear. It waits. It resurfaces later, in new forms, asking again for what it needed. This means that the capacities associated with any developmental period remain available for revisiting across the lifespan. What looks like disorder is often a developmental response to conditions that were never adequate for that person. What looks like being lost is often the beginning of a genuine reorganization.

The natural world is not the backdrop for this development. It is one of its primary conditions. The body organizes itself through relationship with physical place: through the felt senses of gravity and balance and motion, through seasonal rhythm, through the particular quality of attention that natural environments make available. Ecological belonging, the felt sense of being held by what surrounds you, of being a participant in something ongoing, is a developmental substrate. It precedes and makes possible the psychological belonging that follows.

At the center of the practice is a cycle observed across developmental periods and across the writing practice that runs alongside them: recognition, acceptance, understanding, expression. This cycle is not age-dependent and not linear. It deepens with each turn. The work of a consultation or series is to support each movement of that cycle as it is actually occurring, not to accelerate it or substitute for it.

The educational dimension

A significant thread in this practice concerns education: what it makes possible and what it forecloses. Educational environments shape development in ways that are rarely named as developmental. When the conditions of a learning environment do not match what a particular nervous system needs, the result is often labeled as a problem with the child rather than a mismatch between person and environment.

This practice draws on fifteen years of work in educational publishing, deep engagement with curriculum development across content areas, and close observation of what happens when body development supports or inhibits academic capacity. The capacities through which a person comes to know themselves, the world, and their relationship to both include far more than the educational system currently measures. Literacy and mathematical thinking matter, but so do scientific curiosity, aesthetic sensibility, physical intelligence, narrative understanding, creative expression, relational knowing, and the capacity for sustained attention in the natural world. These are not enrichment activities arranged around a real curriculum. They are equally foundational, they develop in relationship with each other, and they share a common substrate in the regulation and executive function that ecological and body-based experience makes possible. The error of standardized education is not only that it fragments these capacities into separate subjects. It is that it has decided in advance which ones count, organizes development around measuring those, and treats the others as optional. What cannot be measured is assumed not to matter. The developmental cost of that assumption falls on every child whose primary capacities lie outside the measured set.

Balance, bilateral coordination, and proprioceptive integration are not peripheral to literacy and numeracy. They are part of the developmental ground on which those capacities organize. Children whose bodies have had sustained experience of rhythmic movement, varied terrain, climbing, and physical challenge consistently show different patterns of academic organization than those whose development has been primarily sedentary and indoor. This is not a marginal observation. It is increasingly supported by research in embodied cognition, sensorimotor development, and executive function, and it is something I observed directly over many years with children in outdoor settings.

The cost of this mismatch accumulates silently. Understanding the developmental and ecological conditions that shape a student's experience, with or alongside any clinical framing, can restore a sense of direction that performance data alone cannot provide.

This dimension of the practice serves parents who are navigating educational decisions for children who thrive in some conditions and disappear in others, families who are home educating and want a developmental orientation that holds both ecological groundedness and academic coherence, and adults who are still carrying the residue of educational environments that could not hold them.

How it works

The practice works through four interlocking elements held across a series of sessions or an extended correspondence.

Daily sensory noticing in a natural area, which can be as immediate as a garden, a nearby path, or the quality of light through a window. The instruction is simple: go, notice what you notice, stay as long as feels right.

A weekly freewrite in conversation with those observations. Not analysis or journaling in the processing sense, but slow noticing in words. The overnight interval between observation and writing is part of the methodology: felt sense organizes itself without being forced into premature meaning.

Carefully chosen readings and recordings that meet the current developmental moment. These are listened to or read in nature when possible, or before sleep, so that the thinking mind receives them at a slower register than ordinary reading allows.

Reflective correspondence that weaves the threads together. Over time, a developmental picture emerges from the material the person themselves has generated: the imagery, the place memories, the threshold moments, the biographical patterns. My role is to read that picture developmentally and return it to the person as orientation rather than interpretation.

The natural world in this practice is not backdrop or metaphor. It is a reflective surface. An encounter with a particular place at a particular moment in a life can make visible something that had been present but unnamed. A garden can be a mirror as well as a person. What the mirror shows does not complete itself in the field. It completes itself in the writing that follows, in the overnight interval when felt sense organizes without being forced, and in the correspondence that reads what has emerged.

Over time the person comes to know not only their developmental picture but their own capacity to read it. That capacity belongs to them and does not require the practitioner to continue.

Sessions are available individually and as an extended series. I also work with parents consulting on educational and developmental questions for their children, and with practitioners in ecopsychology, education, and allied fields who want to deepen their own developmental grounding.

Who this serves

This practice is well suited to adults who feel a strong connection to the natural world and find that time in nature genuinely shifts something in them. People who have been given clinical descriptions of their experience that feel partially true but incomplete. People in genuine life transitions, not crisis in the clinical sense, but the kind of reorganization that feels like dissolution before it reveals itself as something new.

It serves gifted or twice-exceptional adults whose educational arc fractured and who have never had a developmental frame for why certain environments were so costly. Parents navigating educational mismatch with a sensitive or asynchronously developing child. Home educating families who want developmental orientation alongside academic planning. Adults composing a life across multiple roles and seasons who need someone who can read the arc.

When the practice involves children, the parent or educator is the practitioner. Part of what this work offers to parents is the capacity to hold and share their child's developmental story in ways that allow the child to begin to know themselves. Agency forms through being accompanied in that discovery, not through being assessed. A child who receives reflections of their own capacity observed in real conditions, rather than measurements against predetermined standards, develops the ability to read their own developmental picture. That capacity, once formed, belongs to them.

This is not a substitute for clinical care, psychiatric support, or medical treatment. If you are managing an acute mental health condition, those forms of support come first. This practice works alongside them, or after stabilization, as a way of building the developmental and ecological ground that supports lasting direction rather than management.

If you are reading this and recognizing something, that recognition is worth following. You do not need to know exactly what you are looking for to reach out. A single conversation can change how you read your own situation. That is where this work begins.

For conversations, speaking inquiries, and professional correspondence: email me.