A climate of fear: working therapeutically with environmental breakdown
This article first appeared in the May 2024 issue of University & College Counselling published by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/university-and-college-counselling/ ©BACP 2024.
The climate crisis. How do those three words make you feel? Indifferent? Uncomfortable? Anxious? Maybe you’re wondering why a whole column has been dedicated to them, and what on earth they have to do with mental health?
For me, writing those words, knowing that there’s finally space for them here, brings relief. This is quickly followed by a succession of my own anxious questions: how do I begin to talk about this? How do I make sense of it all? How do I tell the truth, yet still bring people along with me? How best do I connect this to the lives of young people, and the strength of emotion they feel about this?
I’ve thought about these questions a lot over the last few years as I’ve read news articles, academic papers and IPCC reports (www.ipcc.ch/reports/ ), all outlining the horrifying reality of environmental breakdown. Like many people who share my terror, I’ve tried to talk about it with colleagues, yet felt alienated and isolated. I’ve noted the deep splitting within the broader professional community, from those who barely register the reality of what is happening, to those who are so deeply immersed in it, they can think of little else.
I’ve been left with a confounding cognitive dissonance, floundering at times between these two poles of radical denial and acceptance, longing to retreat to the former while tempted to join the latter. Finding balance feels like an impossible task, precisely because a ‘balanced’ argument doesn’t exist when it comes to climate change: we’re sliding rapidly towards earth’s tipping points. According to the IPCC, climate tipping points are ‘critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded, can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible.’1 I believe we’re experiencing a mirrored seismic shift psychologically, with more people reaching their emotional tipping points regarding climate breakdown. It’s essential that the therapeutic community finds ways to meet ourselves, our colleagues and our clients at the cusp of these points and find ways to work with these emotions.
In this column over the next year, I’ll be exploring the climate crisis through three common emotional responses to it: fear, rage, and grief. This first piece is going to look at the first emotional tipping point many people encounter regarding climate breakdown: anxiety and fear. You might be familiar with the term ‘eco-anxiety’, first coined by Glenn Albrecht.2 It’s an important concept, which for many has given a name to something that previously felt inarticulable, that which might be understood as a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom’.3
Regardless of the cause, anxiety can be understood as an anticipatory feeling, often a rumination on the unknown and a response to uncertainty. It typically speaks of something to come, a perceived threat within an imagined future, rather than the actual reality of the here and now. In this context, if you feel anxious about climate change right now, this likely means that you’re living in a country, like the UK, largely protected from its devastating impacts. It’s anxiety about the future: what life might look like in twenty years’ time, say, or for real or imagined grandchildren.
For many, however, ‘eco-anxiety’ barely scratches the surface. Those living in nations already impacted by climate change have moved far beyond anxiety: they live with fear. Primal and instinctive, fear activates the nervous system in response to an immediate real or perceived existential threat. In the body, it manifests in a quickened pulse and shortened breath, as we make split second decisions as to whether to fight or flee. It’s the thing felt as you watch your home be consumed in wildfire flames, or see yet another season of your crops fail, meaning the bellies of your children go hungry as you lose your livelihood.
Young people today are in touch with the global reality of not only climate anxiety, but fear too, in new and profound ways. This is first and foremost true for those with international backgrounds, who may themselves be directly impacted. Comparing international student recruitment data with nations most vulnerable to climate change brings a few nations come to the fore: Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Japan, for example.4,5 The reality, however, is that most African, Middle Eastern and South Asian nations are deeply vulnerable to climate change. Experiences of climate trauma within such student populations shouldn’t be underestimated, and neither should the moral injury that might be present in having experienced this reality, while the majority of the world stands by.
For many practitioners, particularly white clinicians from European nations, becoming ‘climate aware’ is a deeply painful process. It necessitates not only an ability to sit with existential anxieties, but as Donna Orange highlights, to confront the history of colonisation, and the direct connections between empire, the exploitation of people and resources, and environmental breakdown.6 It goes hand in hand, to name a few, with exploring themes of racial privilege, refugee issues and experiences of disability. It’s an integrative issue that should be explored as part of broader aspects of the human experience, and requires an ability to lean into any individual fears of complicity within oppressive systems.
Social media also gives rise to complicated experiences of climate-fear. Young people have disembodied access to the reality of their peers in other countries in ways never before seen, exposed to deeply traumatising material regarding climate breakdown, conflict and human suffering. We only need to look to the pro-Palestine protests at university campus’ across the world: though not directly experiencing violence themselves, many student protestors have seen horrifying images and videos of the events, which have fuelled their action and sustained their determination for change.7
This kind of emotional experiencing can be deeply confusing, producing an abstract terror that can be heightened by the lack of something to attribute it to in the immediate environment. This kind of fear is complex: it’s acute, in that young people can see direct footage as events unfold; it’s disembodied, in that their own body may have a fear response as though actually confronted with a disaster, presenting a deeply incongruent experience within their physical surroundings; and it can be heightened, through the capacity to directly communicate online with people who are currently living through a disaster, again blurring experiences of emotional proximity to horror in ways traditional media had previously sanitised. Fear thus becomes an experience of inherent contradiction: it is here/ but not here, it is real/ but not real, it is mine/ but not mine. We might understand this as a ‘fear-fusion’, in which boundaries of the self are distorted in digital spaces, allowing a transience of emotional experience.
The fact is, however, that none of these emotions are new. We’ve all had personal and clinical experiences of anxiety, anger and loss. What’s new is the reason why people are experiencing these emotions, and what they are associated with. For many, it’s a change in awareness of their connection to and reliance on the natural world, akin to a natural disaster occurring within a worldview. An inability to engage with this on a personal level represents a risk within the work, in that thinking about climate breakdown might be disavowed completely. It’s essential, however, that the consulting room itself is an environment in which these feelings can be explored. To deny a client an opportunity to do so may be to deny a fundamental aspect of their identity, such as their national, cultural and spiritual heritage.
As ever, nature offers us the tools we need to survive. Attending to the climate crisis requires a fluid and reciprocal exchange between the internal and external world contexts of both the client and the consulting room. Water comes to mind: what aspects of our practice might need to become more fluid, more open to reflection? What needs to be allowed to move tidally, flowing in and out of previously rigid structures? How might we reach new depths in the work?
Nature also offers us respite beyond the consulting room. When I find myself overwhelmed, I seek the reverie of nature, the otherworld dream-states of being in water or sitting with the drifting shadows of a willow tree. In the same way that an infant’s caregiver contains its distress, it’s nameless dread, as Bion would say, at the idea of losing them, it is always nature itself that contains me when I most fear its destruction.8 We are soothed and given life precisely by the beloved thing we are most fearful to lose.
As a profession, we’re undoubtedly on the last minute when it comes to thinking about and working with climate breakdown. We’re confronted with the full range of human emotional tipping points, because to be human is to be inherently part of nature. We’re required to lean into anxiety and fear, coming face to face with deeply existential questions. Yet as Macagnino rightly identifies, if we cannot connect with our feelings, we cannot connect with our agency to act for change.8
For those living in the UK, we must heed our anxiety as a warning sign and listen to the fear of others. It is the least that older generations can do for young people, who inherit this world from us all.
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Universities UK. International Student Recruitment Data. [Online.] www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/international-student-recruitment-data (accessed 8 July 2024).
Eckstein D, Künzel V, Schaefer L. Global climate risk index 2021. Who suffers most from extreme weather wvents? Weather related loss events in 2019 and 2000-2019. [Online.] www.germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Climate%20Risk%20Index%202021_2.pdf (accessed 8 July 2024).
Orange DM. Climate crisis, psychoanalysis, and radical ethics. London: Routledge; 2017.
Bains D. ‘We’re in it for the long haul’ 4 British students on why they’re joining campus protests across the UK. British Vogue 2024; 4 June. www.vogue.co.uk/article/pro-palestine-student-camps-uk-protests. (accessed 8 July 2024).
Bion WR. A Theory of Thinking. In: Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. London: William Heinemann Medical Books Limited; 1967 (pp110-119).
Macagnino T. Eco-anxiety in the therapy room: affect, defences and implications for practice’. In: Anderson J, Staunton T, O’Gorman J, Hickman C. (eds). Being a therapist in a time of climate breakdown. London: Routledge; 2024, (pp126- 135).
