This book introduces readers to the known psychological aspects of climate change as a pressing global concern and explores how it is relevant to current and future clinical practice.
This book introduces readers to the known psychological aspects of climate change as a pressing global concern and explores how it is relevant to current and future clinical practice.
Arguing that it is vital for ecological concerns to enter the therapy room, this book calls for change from regulatory bodies, training institutes, and individual practitioners. The book includes original thinking and research by practitioners from a range of perspectives, including psychodynamic, eco-systemic and integrative. It considers how our different modalities and ways of working need to be adapted to be applicable to the ecological crises. Chapters deal with topics from climate science, including the emotional and mental health impacts of climate breakdown, professional ethics, and wider systemic understandings of current therapeutic approaches. Also discussed are the practice-based implications of becoming a climate-aware therapist, eco-psychosocial approaches, and the inextricable links between the climate crises and racism, colonialism, and social injustice. Throughout the book voices of non-practitioners are featured sharing their experience of the climate crisis and how they see the role of therapy in it.
Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown will enable therapists and mental health professionals across a range of modalities to engage with their own thoughts and feelings about climate breakdown and consider how it both changes and reinforces aspects of their therapeutic work.
Introduction Voice 1 T-Rex vs. TMX Cartoon Section One: The Trouble
Were In
Chapter 1 Facing Difficult Climate Truths Voice 2 Its hot as fuck
and I need to rest my eyes
Chapter 2 The Mental Health and Emotional Impacts
of Climate Breakdown: insights from Climate Psychology Voice 3 Climate Change
and Thirst
Chapter 3 Revisiting Ethics in the Context of Climate Breakdown
Voice 4 Timothy Morton talking about climate agony, trauma, and activism
Section Two: Systemic Understandings
Chapter 4 How Wide is the Field?
Psychotherapy, Capitalism and the more than human world
Chapter 5 Climate
distress through the lens of the Power Threat Meaning Framework Voice 5
Disability and Climate Anxiety
Chapter 6 Deep Democracy: World out there
World in here
Chapter 7 Rehearsing Radical Care: Motherhood in a Climate
Crisis Voice 6 Becoming an Activist Parent Section Three: Becoming a Climate
Aware Therapist
Chapter 8 Climate Aware Therapy with Children and Young
People to Navigate the Climate and Ecological Crisis Voice 7 Climate Anxiety
has taught me this, so far
Chapter 9 Eco-anxiety in the therapy room:
Affect, Defences and Implications for Practice
Chapter 10 Climate Silence in
the Consulting Room: Waiting for Help to Come Voice 8 Activist Journey
Chapter 11 Climate Mania
Chapter 12 Climate Sorrow: Discerning various
forms of climate grief and responding to them as a therapist
Chapter 13
Coming to our Senses: Turning Towards the Body Voice 9 I want to fly Section
Four: The Ecological Self
Chapter 14 The Zone of Encounter in Therapy and Why
It Matters Now
Chapter 15 Rewilding Therapy Voice 10 Saving our children by
bringing back beavers
Chapter 16 Transforming Our Inner and Outer Landscapes
Chapter 17 The Spiral of the Work That Reconnects Voice 11 Wings of Hope
Section Five: Community and Social Approaches
Chapter 18 Beyond the Ego and
Towards Complexity through Social Dreaming
Chapter 19 Ways of being when
facing difficult truths: Exploring the contribution of climate cafés to
climate crisis awareness
Chapter 20 The ticking clock thing: climate trauma
in organisations
Chapter 21 Turning towards the tears of the world: practices
and processes of grief and never-endings
Chapter 22 The Psychological Work of
Being With the Climate Crisis Voice 12 How does climate breakdown make me
feel?
Judith Anderson is a Jungian psychotherapist and psychiatrist.
Tree Staunton is a UKCP Honorary Fellow and a Registered Body Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Trainer.
Jenny OGorman is a queer, disabled Psychodynamic Counsellor, writer and activist.
Caroline Hickman is a psychotherapist in clinical practice and lecturer at the University of Bath.
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