Full Description
This book introduces readers to the known psychological aspects of climate change as a pressing global concern and explores how they are relevant to current and future clinical practice.
Arguing that it is vital for ecological concerns to enter the therapy room, this book calls for change from regulatory bodies, training institutes and individual practitioners. The book includes original thinking and research by practitioners from a range of perspectives, including psychodynamic, eco-systemic and integrative. It considers how our different modalities and ways of working need to be adapted to be applicable to the ecological crises. It includes Voices from people who are not practitioners about their experience including how they see the role of therapy. Chapters deal with topics from climate science, including the emotional and mental health impacts of climate breakdown, professional ethics and wider systemic understandings of current therapeutic approaches. Also discussed are the practice-based implications of becoming a climate-aware therapist, eco-psychosocial approaches and the inextricable links between the climate crises and racism, colonialism and social injustice.
Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown will enable therapists and mental health professionals across a range of modalities to engage with their own thoughts and feelings about climate breakdown and consider how it both changes and reinforces aspects of their therapeutic work.
Contents
Introduction Voice 1 T-Rex vs. TMX Cartoon Section One: The Trouble We're In Chapter 1 Facing Difficult Climate Truths Voice 2 It's hot as fuck and I need to rest my eyes Chapter 2 The Mental Health and Emotional Impacts of Climate Breakdown: insights from Climate Psychology Voice 3 Climate Change and Thirst Chapter 3 Revisiting Ethics in the Context of Climate Breakdown Voice 4 Timothy Morton - talking about climate agony, trauma, and activism Section Two: Systemic Understandings Chapter 4 How Wide is the Field? Psychotherapy, Capitalism and the more than human world Chapter 5 Climate distress through the lens of the Power Threat Meaning Framework Voice 5 Disability and Climate Anxiety Chapter 6 Deep Democracy: World out there - World in here Chapter 7 Rehearsing Radical Care: Motherhood in a Climate Crisis Voice 6 Becoming an Activist Parent Section Three: Becoming a Climate Aware Therapist Chapter 8 Climate Aware Therapy with Children and Young People to Navigate the Climate and Ecological Crisis Voice 7 Climate Anxiety has taught me this, so far... Chapter 9 Eco-anxiety in the therapy room: Affect, Defences and Implications for Practice Chapter 10 Climate Silence in the Consulting Room: Waiting for Help to Come Voice 8 Activist Journey Chapter 11 'Climate Mania' Chapter 12 Climate Sorrow: Discerning various forms of climate grief and responding to them as a therapist Chapter 13 Coming to our Senses: Turning Towards the Body Voice 9 I want to fly Section Four: The Ecological Self Chapter 14 The Zone of Encounter in Therapy and Why It Matters Now Chapter 15 Rewilding Therapy Voice 10 Saving our children by bringing back beavers Chapter 16 Transforming Our Inner and Outer Landscapes Chapter 17 The Spiral of the Work That Reconnects Voice 11 Wings of Hope Section Five: Community and Social Approaches Chapter 18 Beyond the Ego and Towards Complexity through Social Dreaming Chapter 19 'Ways of being' when facing difficult truths: Exploring the contribution of climate cafés to climate crisis awareness Chapter 20 The 'ticking clock thing': climate trauma in organisations Chapter 21 Turning towards the tears of the world: practices and processes of grief and never-endings Chapter 22 The Psychological Work of Being With the Climate Crisis Voice 12 How does climate breakdown make me feel?
