Individual Therapy for Climate Anxiety

Climate Anxiety

We live in a time when the unfolding climate and extinction crises are forcing a wholesale rethinking of our place as humans in the natural world, in a process that will affect each and every one of us whether we are engaging consciously with it or not. Indeed, a recent American Psychological Association poll found that close to 2/3 of Americans are anxious about planetary climate change. And these anxieties ripple out into many corners of individual, family, and social life. Should you have kids in the face of these changes? Does the work you do feel like you’re helping address this fundamental issue? How do you relate to people around you who seem unaffected by it? And what can you, as one individual, do to help address this global catastrophe?

It’s natural to want to just disconnect from everything that is happening, and this is a useful strategy some of the time. But when over-used it tends to leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and the world around us. Some part of us knows that we’re ignoring something important, and wants us to turn and face what’s happening directly. But doing this brings us face-to-face with the very emotions we have been trying to avoid by looking away. This dilemma is a recipe for anxiety. Fortunately, there are ways to learn to tolerate these feelings, move through them, and come out the other side more settled.

What I Offer

I work with people struggling with these questions in both individual and group settings. Together we work to deepen your ability first to feel all of the feelings and then to find the best way forward given your unique temperament, situation, and skills. This moment presents a unique emotional challenge - how can you acknowledge the immensity of what we are facing and still find the courage and clarity needed to keep doing the next right thing? What does it look like to let go of naiveté about the situation but still hold on to what the Buddhist ecologist and activist Joanna Macy called Active Hope?

I’m not here to sugarcoat this situation - it is dire, and likely to get more so. But it’s also not true that everything is lost, or that there’s nothing to be done, or that what you do doesn’t matter. If you’re feeling these things, then come talk to me and let’s figure out how to help you get back to a feeling of engagement in your life and the world, even in this turbulent time.

My Qualifications

The connection to the so-called natural world has always been an extremely important one to me. It’s so important, in fact, that I wrote my PhD dissertation on how we humans relate to the world (natural or human-built) around us and the way those relations shape our psychology, and I give regular talks on these topics. I have also spent years in activist circles and gone through my own stages of burnout, recovery, and reengagement. I know these waters, and I love working with people who want to use this crisis as an opportunity to reorient their lives in meaningful ways.