Awakening to Eco-Therapy

As a clinical psychologist and therapist with specialized knowledge in environmental psychology, I’ve been talking about the intersection of climate change and mental health since 2007. Back then, eco-anxiety wasn’t the buzzword it is now. And as recently as a few years ago, many people still dismissed it as a made-up pathology, a political issue with no place in the therapy room, a policy problem for someone else to work out, or the melodramatic overreaction of attention-seeking “tree-huggers.”

But that’s changed. We’re experiencing twin emergencies of a magnitude we’ve never seen before. One is the physical threat to human life caused by uncontrolled climate breakdown: fire, heat, storms, and flooding. The other is the way these threats have been impacting our collective mental health in the form of a growing sense of anxiety, grief, and depression. Anguish over the environment isn’t new, but the stakes feel higher now. In fact, my expertise, once considered niche, is in high demand: by clients, large organizations, and increasing numbers of therapists who, while they may not yet have a box to tick for “climate-related concerns” on their intake form, have noticed these issues permeating their consulting rooms in ways that often feel too scary and amorphous to tackle with traditional clinical tools. No matter what your political leanings or opinions, if you see kids, adolescents, teens, adults, or seniors, you can’t afford to ignore the effect of environmental events on clients’ mental health.

Opening up to the realities of climate change means opening yourself up to feeling threatened, and to knowing things you’d probably rather not know. But while the situation is worse than many people know, it’s also better than they realize. And when you commit to addressing the pain of the climate crisis, you’re welcoming the opportunity to learn new things, grow, and explore what you truly value.

People sometimes ask me how I stay positive as I regularly confront global issues that many find hard to face. I’ve come to understand that creativity flourishes when we face challenges—even those that may seem overwhelming. As a field, we’ve largely moved beyond the illusion that we can separate the work we do in our consulting rooms from the outside world. We know we’re all part of a vast, interconnected network of relationships to myriad species, great and small, as well as to our home places, from neighborhoods to nations to the earth we inhabit. When a client sits sweating through their shirt in our office, or says they’re scared because the high winds in the weather forecast might supercharge a nearby wildfire, we can’t ignore the fact that we’re experiencing the hottest summer on record. Rather than wishing the world were different, or pretending it is, or waiting until things get better, we can have a meaningful impact right now. The world doesn’t have to change for us to support clients in enacting healthy ways of coping with it.

Honoring the Ostrich

Larysa, a 30-year-old project manager on maternity leave from a large tech firm, contacted me for therapy because she felt increasingly anxious about storms and disasters related to the changing climate in the Pacific Northwest, where she lived.

“I’m up all night, nursing the baby while staring at my phone,” she admitted in our first online session, dark shadows under her eyes showing her fatigue. “I just sit there scrolling through disaster stories. When my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said, ‘an emergency generator,’ because I’m so worried about the next winter ice storm that will hit us.”

Larysa’s get-it-done mentality, an asset on her job, led her to approach her climate disaster concerns as problems to be researched and solved. She felt she had to act by keeping up with the news, and that if she dropped her vigilance, it meant she was in denial, or as she put it, “acting like an ostrich with its head in the sand.”

A simple protocol I use in climate therapy—summed up in the catchphrase “validate, elevate, create”—guided me in helping Larysa regain her perspective. When you validate someone with eco-anxiety or climate-related fears, you’re creating a space where their fears are worthy of attention and joining them where they may feel isolated, alone, and judged as overly emotional or alarmist. When you elevate, you’re making a clear statement that, at times, climate or environmental concerns are the most important treatment issue to talk about. When you shift to create, you’re opening a client’s mind to possibilities by activating their creativity and curiosity—a counterintuitive task when our clients’ senses are narrowed because they feel threatened.

Larysa needed validation that her eco-concerns were worthy issues to explore in therapy. I elevated them by showing interest and empathy, letting her know I took her worries seriously. This was important because she’d often felt dismissed by people who said she was “just an anxious new mom.” Part of shifting into the create step involved helping her relax enough to get curious about her own reactions. Why were certain issues affecting her as much as they did? How were these issues related to her “new mom” identity? As I invited her to honor the ostrich, validate, elevate, and create steps were woven through our work.

“Did you know it’s a myth that ostriches hide their heads in the sand at the approach of danger?” I asked. This question was meant to challenge her to reassess her own self-judgement. I then explained that ostriches either run (what do you think those long legs are for?) or camouflage themselves, or strike with a clawed foot that delivers a kick powerful enough to kill a lion. They build nests and lay their eggs in the sand, so an ostrich mother with her head in the sand is likely tending to her young. I gently suggested that Larysa, as a postpartum mom, was behaving like a powerful ostrich in the best possible way: tending to her young and keeping them safe.

Researching disaster scenarios is a kind of tending, but for Larysa, it had become an unhealthy coping mechanism. Her natural obsessiveness, along with her heightened postpartum worries about protecting her child, had led her down a rabbit hole of extreme disaster-preparedness websites. Each doom-scrolling session left her feeling unsafe and helpless. Ironically, her screen habit was making it harder for her to be present for her child. Reframing her image of the ostrich helped her feel validated as a protective mother, entitled to prioritize her environmental concerns alongside her maternal ones, and empowered to get creative as she explored new solutions.

Another critical part of my work with Larysa centered on introducing her to a feelings vocabulary list I’ve been adapting for my practice since my early days training in behavioral medicine. It contains words for feelings, bodily sensations, and associated behaviors that flow from emotional states.

In terms of feelings related to climate and environmental issues, Larysa identified fear, discouragement, paralysis, and loss. Further, she identified the feelings that she wanted to feel: safety, hope, empowerment, and confidence. It’s a leap to go from fear to safety or discouragement to hope, but it’s absolutely possible. The key lies in helping clients find middle-ground states that can function as stepping stones and are within our clients’ grasp. Since we can’t just flip a switch and feel the feeling we want, we need to work with clients to help them get there naturally.

Larysa identified the words for middle-ground emotional states that felt achievable and might gradually transition her toward her goal feelings. These included awareness, nervousness, presence, patience, curiosity, frustration, compassion, and mindfulness. If she couldn’t yet feel safety, perhaps she could feel curious. If she lacked confidence, she could shoot for feeling aware and patient. Hope seemed unattainable, but feeling eager and determined were feeling states within her reach. Even talking about positive feelings energized her and shifted her perspective toward one that was more optimistic. By asking herself which feelings she could inhabit now and which ones she could cultivate, she activated a growth mindset and increased her sense of agency in her emotional life.

Bright Ecology

At 17, Agnes was already a seasoned environmental advocate who participated in climate walks and protests against the expansion of the local freeway. She’d been talking to the media about environmental issues since middle school. At our first session, she was wearing baggy jeans, scuffed Chuck Taylors, and a weathered Bob Dylan T-shirt.

With indignation, she started off by telling me that her last therapist didn’t even know what a Keeling Curve was. Fortunately, I did. (It’s the graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere based on measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory from 1958 on.) With climate-conscious young people like Agnes, knowing the terms they use demonstrates that you can see the world as they see it—which helps build the trust needed to explore personal concerns and vulnerable feelings hidden under a brave façade.

For all her climate-change knowledge and precocious empowerment, though, Agnes was still a teen. Her thinking could be concrete, idealistic, rigid, and judgmental. Before coming to see me, she’d been feeling hopeless and burned out. She was high achieving as well as self-punishing at times. New stories of environmental injustice plunged her into depressed moods. I worked with her to differentiate between the big-issue problems she was addressing, like human rights and sustainability, and her personal challenges, like feeling lonely and depressed. This differentiation helped Agnes recognize how her focus on the bigger problems served a dual function. On the one hand, she felt good about doing important work she believed in, but on the other hand, she used her advocacy work as a shield to avoid facing painful insecurities, fears, and doubts about herself, her friendships, and her future. She noticed that when she chose to neglect her social life in favor of “more important things,” she nevertheless felt hurt and left out by friends enjoying normal teen activities, like watching movies or going bowling.

Tragically, for many young people, a childhood sense of interconnection with nature has morphed into a harsh awareness of threat and the many complex environmental problems that exist—something that author Timothy Morton has termed dark ecology. When young people realize their daily acts are embedded in an unsustainable global system, opportunities for guilt and shame are omnipresent. I explained this to Agnes and wondered what it would’ve felt like for me to confront these kinds of issues when I was her age.

“It’s only natural that you’d feel a mix of surprise, anger, betrayal, responsibility and guilt,” I told her. “But from where I sit, there’s a chance for innovation and hope that didn’t exist when I was a kid in the 1970s.”

The flipside of dark ecology, I explained, is bright ecology, a companion term I’ve coined for the growth opportunities that the environmental challenges of today present. Legions of individuals are making the most of these growth opportunities in their work and lives through invention, government policy, grassroots efforts, and the arts. When a look of skepticism flitted across Agnes’s face, I reassured her that this wasn’t “bright siding,” or superficial positive thinking, or blind faith in progress that hadn’t yet happened. These were hard, positive facts, which she could stand up for, too—also part of bearing witness.

Over time, Agnes and I brought more balance to her life, which included finding small ways to focus more on bright ecology opportunities and realities. During one session, she said, “You know, the bonus of being informed and engaged is that I meet creative, inspiring people. And I’m learning that it’s okay to celebrate small victories with them—not just get depressed because the large ones aren’t happening soon enough.” This shift in her focus added moments of humor, joy, and inspiration to her life, which balanced her fear, anger and guilt. It’s not the solution, but it’s part of the solution.

The Upside-Down Pyramid

I knew Marcus as a city planner and charismatic speaker at urban planning meetings in Portland. He was a vocal advocate for members of his Black community, speaking out against the urban “renewal” that had bulldozed poor neighborhoods for sports arenas and priced people out of their homes in formerly Black main streets. In late 2020, he came to me as a client at the urging of his wife, who wanted him to address his high stress levels and irritable moods. He hadn’t seen a counselor before, but given my presence at city meetings, he agreed to meet with me.

In our first session, we learned that anxiety about the livability of his community in a new era of deadly heat waves, a sense of responsibility for his immediate and extended family, his own health worries, and the tensions he was feeling with his wife and kids were stressing his personal ecosystem beyond a sustainable level. Using an exercise I’d developed when Portlanders were enduring covid restrictions, wildfires, heatwaves, and social unrest, I invited him to draw a triangle that was upside down, with a stick figure directly underneath it labeled “Marcus.” At the wide top of the inverted triangle, I asked him to list his current global-issue and personal-issue anxieties. When he was done with the drawing, he looked at it pensively, then said, “The tip of the pyramid looks like an arrow pointed at my heart.” When I asked what noticing this was like, he said, “I’m seeing the way all these stressors put me at risk for heart disease.”

Next, Marcus drew the pyramid right side up, with the stick figure beside the pyramid. As he completed this drawing, he visibly relaxed and smiled. When I asked him what had elicited this physical softening, he said, “Looking at this one just feels better—like I don’t have to worry about getting crushed under the weight of all my responsibilities.”

At the base of this version, he drew the outlines of bricks to represent the nourishing activities he could do for himself to create a healthy foundation for his responsibilities, like drinking water, eating healthy food, exercising, having fun, enjoying supportive relationships, and fostering his sense of spirituality. In our next session, he shared that he’d identified a couple of new bricks to add: rest and gratitude.

In the spirit of Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry, a movement that encourages Black activists to claim radical rest and self-care amid their cultural struggle, Marcus stopped and rested whenever he could, even if only for a moment. To cultivate more gratitude, he gave thanks regularly to God for his life, his health, and his family. He started his day with nature, not screens, taking a walk around the block in the morning and greeting his neighbors. This helped him feel resourced before exposing himself to a barrage of messages and headlines. To make his transition from work to family more successful, he paused and appreciated his own efforts before entering his house, reimagining his pyramid so that his family was at the top of his priorities.

Taking better care of his foundation helped Marcus create the energy he needed to invest in big-picture issues like climate change, social justice, caring for his family, and serving his community. By thinking of his own self-system as a deserving part of the larger ecosystem, he was able to remain healthy while helping the planet be healthier, too.

In 2007, I was the lone clinical psychologist serving on the newly minted American Psychological Association Task Force on Climate Change. My role was to sort out the mental health impacts of climate change. Research had long shown that anyone in the direct path of climate disasters would experience trauma, and I argued that the impact of vicarious suffering—people reading about environmental crises, worrying about it, anticipating it—could also be severe. Back then, this was discussed in future tense, as speculative. That future has now caught up to us.

Climate therapy isn’t just about coping: I believe we can flourish despite the many challenges we face. Projects like Climate Change and Happiness, the podcast I founded with researcher Panu Pihkala, tap into the positive changes happening all around us in direct response to the climate crisis. There’s a path forward for personal and collective growth that’s a doorway into important questions about meaning, happiness, grief, loss, flourishing, morality, and mortality. Our path offers us opportunities to embrace these things as citizen-therapists of this time.

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