Climate, Psychology, and Change : Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety

With so many immediate and intensifying crises unfolding around us, how can therapists adapt to promote healing and growth?

“As these intriguing essays make clear, some of the finest minds in the world are thinking through the problems and arriving at powerful answers."
—Bill McKibben, author, environmentalist, educator, activist, and founder of Third Act

With essays from Francis Weller, Bayo Akomolafe, Hāweatea Holly Bryson, and more

Western psychotherapy views our practice as a way to bring clients back to baseline “normal.” But our society’s “normal” is profoundly unwell: our ways of being reflect the same unsustainable systems that erode our ecosystems, accelerate global destruction, and ultimately extract our humanity. Moving toward healing and purpose in uncertain times means evolving the way we do therapy and the way we think about mental health.

Editor and climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek invites us to co-create a field that navigates unknown futures with skill and grace—one that helps clients build resilience and holds space for the uncertainties unfolding before us. She and 32 contributors explore ideas like:

• Decolonizing therapy
• Using therapeutic tools to respond to trauma
• What psychologists can offer movements for social change and climate justice
• Helping clients recognize and move past unhelpful responses to climate emergency
• Nurturing creativity in the face of crisis

Holistic and intersectional, this collection reckons with the ways power, colonialism, and capitalism impact our myriad crises—while shaping Western psychology as we know it.

With essays by clinicians from both the Global South and Global North, Climate, Psychology, and Change is an anthology unlike anything you’ve read before: a necessary response, an urgent appeal, and a fearless look forward at how we care for our clients, eyes wide open, with compassion and skill in an uncertain world.

Steffi Bednarek is a gestalt psychotherapist, trauma therapist, and climate psychologist. Her work explores the interface between climate change and mental health. With twenty-five years of experience in depth psychology, complexity thinking, climate psychology, and grief tending, Bednarek has worked for national governments and global institutions to prepare leaders and organizations for the psychological dimension of climate change in decision-making processes. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, BBC, David Milliband's "Reasons to be cheerful" podcast and numerous international publications. She is the co-founder of "Explorations into Climate Psychology" journal and an associate member of the American Psychological Association's climate change group.