Healed by nature

Published 5:00 pm Saturday, January 17, 2004

As Susan Scott walked the trails behind South Whidbey High School Wednesday with that day’s walking partner — psychotherapist colleague Doug Carmichael — she explained the glow that illuminates the otherwise dim forest walkway.

“I like to refer to it as emerald candescence,” she said of the light, which seemingly emitted from the shiny leaves.

Scott, 55, grew up in Tucson, Ariz., where her nature-loving parents encouraged her, her brother and sister to explore the desert that surrounded their unfenced property. She learned to look closely and carefully at all of nature whether it was a slow growing saguaro cactus or a fast-moving rattlesnake.

“We honored the unique patterns of growth amidst a diversity of species and learned to appreciate the subtle, sometimes dangerous beauty and intelligence of the natural world,” Scott said.

At the time, she had no idea that those forays into nature would one day be critical to her health and the health of the people she would be paid to help.

Scott is a life-long athlete who has always enjoyed team sports, skiing cross-country and downhill, back packing, practicing yoga and running. Educated at the University of Arizona and International College, Scott traveled to the Northwest in 1982 where she began working with the Jungian Psychotherapist Association in Seattle.

Her life, as she knew it, changed forever April 4, 1991, when Scott was diagnosed with a herniated spinal disc. Her condition, located between her fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae, prevented prolonged sitting without damaging the nerves that controlled the movement of her left leg and foot.

It physically crippled her, causing immense pain if she sat for longer than 15 minutes and eventually nerve damage. It also crippled her career as a writer and as a 20-year psychotherapist veteran.

Told by doctors that prolonged sitting increased pressure on her spine by 150 percent, Scott was forced to look closely at her practice and make some difficult decisions.

So, eschewing her office, her chair and the psychotherapist’s couch, she started taking her patients into the woods.

“I either had to do walking sessions with my patients or take a sabbatical from my work altogether,” she said.

“Healing with Nature,” Scott’s new book, published in October by the New York City-based publisher Helios Press, describes Scott’s journey through 10 years of doctors’ visits, physical therapy and walks through nature that helped heal Scott and her clients.

Nervous at first about approaching her clients with the idea of walking therapy — she always gave a choice of whether to walk or not after she was injured. Many of the clients responded positively to the idea — both verbally and with their body language.

“Patients have been very rigid in the office, but when you get them out walking they open up and are completely different,” she said.

She began with 45-minute walks along park paths, and around the neighborhood that surrounded her Lake Union office.

“It opened a whole new world,” she said. “You see a tree and it changes how you see nature all together, not how it was preconceived.”

In her book she tells of Sara, a patient who was able to relate her feelings of depression to a duck the patient and client witnessed swimming near their walk.

“He has oil on his feathers. He doesn’t know how to get it off,” Sara said. “That’s how my depression feels. No matter what I do, it never comes off.”

One year after her back injury, Scott spent six-weeks at Hedgebrook women’s writing retreat on Whidbey. It was there that her “Healing with Nature” blossomed.

Fellow Whidbey Island Writers’ Association member Susan Zwinger has known Scott since the two writers met just over a decade ago at Hedgebrook women’s retreat. Zwinger, a naturalist since she “picked up her first grasshopper,” has written a number of pieces for nature publications, helps research for the Audobon Society, and has spent years getting the word out about her belief that hiking, backpacking and exploring the woods can be a powerful tool.

“It shifts their attention to self in a transcendental way,” Zwinger said. “The repetition and rhythm of walking in the woods is so powerful.”

A part-time resident for eight years, Susan Scott now spends half of each week writing poetry, fiction and essays from her home in Langley and the other half working with clients in Seattle.

While she does most of her therapy work in Seattle, does a few professional consultations with other psychotherapists on Whidbey Island. She is a member of the Fifth Street Consulting Group in Langley where she continues her walking sessions on Whidbey trails.

“Clients have gotten to see how I’ve healed myself,” she said. “They know I practice what I preach.”