What is Climate-Aware Therapy?
Climate-aware therapy addresses climate distress. If a therapist is climate-aware it means they are comfortable and versed in discussing emotions related to the climate crisis. This includes feelings such as anxiety, hopelessness, fear, guilt, shame, grief, loss, and helplessness. These feelings can be complicated and confusing as many find there aren’t spaces where they can comfortably discuss or express these feelings.
Climate-aware therapy provides a safe space for these feelings to be voiced and felt. This includes the validation of one’s unique experience in becoming aware of climate and ecological destruction. And the impact of this information on the psyche.
If we break down climate distress, we discover that it stems from a love of the planet. Perhaps love of a tree, plants, an animal, or fellow humans. And when what we love is threatened or destroyed, it brings grief. It can be helpful to work with climate distress through the model of stages of grief.
According to Elisabeth Kubler Ross, the five stages of grief include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages are a part of the framework that determines how we learn to live with the loss of a loved one. This model can be expanded to include the loss of place and nature. And it is possible to see how these stages play out collectively and globally as well. Many are still in denial about the severity of climate change. Others are very angry and take to the streets to protest. It is normal to shift from one stage to another in a non-linear way. Grief is not linear.
And of course, fear is also a natural response to a threatened environment. Our survival fear kicks in. The ability for our planet to provide safe, healthy air, water, and food has been compromised.
In a climate-aware therapy session, the client is given the space to grieve. By creating a safe and welcoming space for climate emotions like grief and climate anxiety, relief can be experienced.
Through being in a climate-aware therapy space, individuals can put words to their feelings. In A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, Sarah Jaquette Ray writes about Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher who gives names to the feelings people have about their environments. “Albrecht found that the English language has few words for environmentally induced distress and illness. He coined the term solastalgia – a combination of the Latin word for comfort (solacium) and the Greek root for pain (-algia)-to capture the existential and psychological feelings people have when their environments undergo profound change or degradation” (Ray p 20-21).
Climate-aware therapy provides a foundation of validation. Experiencing strong emotions related to the state of the Earth, is normal. Climate distress is a healthy response to an unhealthy situation. Feeling upset about climate change is a natural reaction. Our internal system is alerting us to a significant problem and danger.
Feeling climate distress can be a lonely and isolating experience. Many find they don’t have spaces or social groups where they can openly and authentically speak or share concerns. Friends or colleagues may react to their message or distance themselves. Climate-aware therapy can support clients in learning how they want to speak about climate distress and climate change in private or public circles. For example, they may want to see if any of their friends feel the same.
Attending therapy sessions specifically addressing climate distress can relieve a sense of isolation. Knowing that others feel the same and learning about people and organizations involved in transformational action, can bring hope and a sense of community. Our society and media system are set up so that it can be difficult to know about all those creating positive change for a healthier Earth. News media especially focuses on stories that include the problem rather than processes of change. Plugging into this web of like-minded people and activists, can bring inspiration.
Through climate-aware therapy, individuals can express their feelings, grieve, and connect to the wider web of people who feel the same. As James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The effects of facing one’s full climate distress in climate-aware therapy, can ripple out and be supportive to one’s circle of loved ones and community. For some, climate-aware therapy organically leads to aligned actions and a sense of one’s power in a larger movement to tend the Earth.