What to do with Climate Emotions

 Climate Therapy

From The New Yorker

A rather long article, (see link above) but excellent in exploring several points of view from Alaska to the Philippines. I quote below just two paragraphs.

"Leslie Davenport, a licensed therapist in Washington State, is a pioneer in the climate-therapy field. In the nineteen-eighties, she became anxious about what was happening to the planet, and did things to allay that anxiety: she signed petitions, she searched for environmental organizations that she could support. Then it occurred to her that climate change was caused by human behavior, and human behavior was her field of expertise. “So much of what we’re trained in, in the mental-health field, is to break through denial, to work with grief, to motivate life-style changes, to facilitate contentious conversations,” she said, when we spoke on the phone. “We’re trained to do all these things that are needed to equip people to respond to the climate crisis.” Davenport wrote a book, “Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change,” aimed at helping clinicians recognize when patients were struggling with the issue. She has since pushed for climate-related training requirements and created programs for therapists similar to the modules that are mandated on such topics as elder abuse and self-harm.

Climate anxiety differs from many forms of anxiety a person might discuss in therapy—anxiety about crowds, or public speaking, or insufficiently washing one’s hands—because the goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away. “It’s not a keep-calm-and-carry-on approach,” Davenport told me. When it comes to climate change, the brain’s desire to resolve anxiety and distress often leads either to denial or fatalism: some people convince themselves that climate change is not a big deal, or that someone else will take care of it; others conclude that all is lost and there’s nothing to be done. Davenport pushes her clients to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress. We must, she says, become more comfortable in uncertainty, and remain present and active in the midst of fear and grief. Her clients usually struggle with this task in one of two ways, she said: they tend to be activists who can’t acknowledge their feelings or people so aware of their feelings that they fail to act."

Later on the author speaks of herself being urged to use the Serenity Prayer, in determining what you can change, vs. what you cannot change.

Urban poor suffer from climate change in the Philippines. Photo by By SuSanA Secretariat 

Today's quote:

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)