Working With Clients Experiencing Climate Distress

Impacts correlated with climate change are increasing, a trend expected to continue as wildfires, rising sea levels, and extreme weather affect the lives of millions. Regardless of whether such events occur locally, concerned individuals often feel a growing sense of dread associated with the climate and immense fear about a foreshortened future.

Increasingly, psychotherapists and counselors see clients experiencing climate distress in the form of hopelessness and anxiety about environmental degradation, stress from confrontations with climate-skeptical family members and friends, and direct trauma and grief from living through a severe weather event.

In this video, APA author of All the Feelings Under the Sun Leslie Davenport and clinical psychologist Wendy Greenspun discuss working with such clients and Dr. Greenspun demonstrates her climate-aware approach in a teletherapy session. Throughout, the guest experts talk about how to help clients manage their climate distress while also discovering ways to contribute to building a more just, healthy, and safer world.

To address the growing mental health impacts of the climate emergency, climate psychology requires a basic understanding of the scientific consensus on the unfolding climate and ecological crisis, as well as the embedded interplay between psychological and sociocultural factors. Clinical skills include a capacity to adapt current clinical approaches to meet the array of emergent symptoms and responses. These may include cognitive interventions, emotional processing, meaning or existential-based explorations, grief work, trauma treatment, ecopsychology and connecting to nature, group support, and individual and collective advocacy work.

The main therapeutic principles of climate aware therapy include:

• The psychological impacts of climate distress cannot be separated from social justice issues that bring into view broken system legacies including racism and other forms of social, cultural, and economic inequities that amplify painful eco-emotional conditions.
• The range of feelings triggered by the climate crisis, including anxiety, grief, shame, ambivalence, and rage, are held as normal responses to difficult truths, and should therefore be validated and processed rather than pathologized. These emotional responses are recognized as being filtered through the lenses of personal, familial, and sociocultural history.
• Encouraging ways to join with others and to engage in activism and solutions, in tandem with other sources for building emotional resiliency, are part of the complex array of therapeutic means for working with climate distress.
• Strengthening connections to a sense of place, other species, and the natural world, with a global sustainability ethic, often enhances the depth of the work.

Wendy Greenspun, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She serves on the board of directors of the Climate Psychology Alliance—North America and has been a consultant at the Climate School of Columbia University. She is faculty at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, at the Adelphi University Postgraduate Program in Marriage and Couples Therapy, and the William Alanson White Couple Therapy Training and Education Program.

She has presented papers and workshops nationally and internationally on climate psychology and provides workshops and courses for mental health professionals on ways to work with climate distress and grief. She also provides workshops on building emotional resilience for climate activists and university students and has run group forums (climate cafes) for processing climate distress.

She is in private practice and specializes in couples therapy and in climate-aware therapy in New York City.

Leslie Davenport, MA, MS, LMFT, is an international climate psychology educator and consultant, integrating social science insights into relevant resources for organizations often exploring the intersectionality of climate, economics, education, policy, and social justice. She helped shape the document "Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance."

She is the author of four books, including Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change, a manual for the mental health field, and All the Feelings Under the Sun, written for youth, published by the American Psychological Association's children's book division, Magination Press.

Leslie is an advisor to the nonprofits the Post-Carbon Institute, Climate Mental Health Network, Integrative Healers Action Network, One Resilient Earth, and co-lead of the Climate Psychology Certification at the California Institute of Integral Studies and on faculty with their School of Professional Psychology and Health.

For more information, go to her websiteopens in new window.

Baudon, P., Jachens, L. A. (2021). Scoping review of interventions for the treatment of eco-anxiety. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18, 9636. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18189636

Davenport, L. (2001). All the feelings under the sun: How to deal with climate change. Magination Press.

Davenport, L. (2017). Emotional resiliency in the era of climate change: A clinician's guide. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Pihkala,P. (2022, January). Toward a taxonomy of climate emotions. Frontiers in Climate, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2021.738154

Woodbury, Z. (2019). Climate trauma: Toward a new taxonomy of trauma. Ecopsychology, 11(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2018.0021

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APA Books

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