The realities of climate change, from extreme weather events to environmental degradation, can profoundly affect individuals' emotional well-being and contribute to feelings of eco-anxiety or climate anxiety, eco-grief, and despair.  Ecological emotions like eco-anxiety, are not something to get rid of, but something to transform into something meaningful.

 

Climate-Aware Therapy is not a specific psychotherapeutic technique, but a clinical orientation that integrates awareness of the climate crisis into the understanding of psychological distress. It recognizes that emotions such as eco-anxiety, ecological grief, fear, anger, and helplessness are often understandable human responses to environmental change and its consequences, rather than signs of mental illness. This approach acknowledges the climate crisis as one of the many contexts that can shape psychological well-being, without reducing every personal difficulty to climate change.

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Grounded in a systemic and ecopsychological perspective, Climate-Aware Therapy understands mental health as emerging from the interaction of individual, relational, social, cultural, and ecological factors. Within therapy, this means exploring how the climate crisis may affect a person's sense of identity, safety, meaning, hope, and ability to imagine the future. The therapeutic goal is to provide a space where these experiences can be understood and integrated, fostering resilience, adaptive coping, and a sense of agency, so that individuals can respond in ways that are aligned with their values rather than becoming overwhelmed or immobilized by distress.

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This approach can support both people experiencing anticipatory climate distress and those who have been directly affected by climate-related disasters or environmental injustice. It also encourages therapists to reflect on their own emotional responses to the climate crisis and on how these may influence the therapeutic relationship, promoting a reflective, ethically grounded, and contextually informed clinical practice.

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As both a psychotherapist and researcher deeply concerned about the ecological and climate crisis, I view climate emotions as precious signals and messengers of our sense of care for others and the world, that nonetheless can become in some cases debilitating and needing of understanding and extra support to get "unstuck". Feeling and holding space for our grief, learning to manage our anxiety, creating connections and community, and reaching for resiliently cautious hope and meaningful action, are my go-tos.