Climate, Psychology, and Change

**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, Haweatea 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. Adopting a holistic and intersectional lens, the essays here address the historical relationships between psychology as a discipline and underlying structures (such as colonialism and capitalism) driving many of our current global crises. Conversations between Indigenous healers and Western psychotherapists reflect on what a decolonization of the field might look like, and how psychologists might reframe and re-vision its essential frameworks and tools. Other chapters dig into what psychologists have to offer the struggle for social and climate justice, such as using therapeutic tools for responding to trauma; identifying patterns in unhelpful responses to climate emergency (denial; numbness; despair); and fostering the resilience in individuals and communities that is necessary to be able to work toward creative solutions to the complex and intersecting crises we face today.