Insights from a climate-aware therapist on how to do their work

An interview with Andrew Bryant of Climate & Mind

Andrew Bryant, MSW, MPH is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist in Seattle, and founder of the fabulous website Climate & Mind (which is chock-full of climate psych resources – check it out!) I sat down to ask him about how he approaches supporting clients who are seeking therapy for a wide variety of climate-related dilemmas and fears, and I learned a lot. Hope you enjoy the interview.

How long has climate been a part of your practice?

You know thinking back to 2012, 2013, the topic would come up in the course of general therapy. I remember someone five years ago talking about a conflict with his wife regarding whether or not they should have another child, and the carbon footprint of that child and anxiety about the future. That’s when I started paying attention to this as a kind of mental health issue. And then three years ago I started thinking explicitly about this. I created a website that looks broadly at the themes around eco-anxiety, climate depression, that sort of thing. So that’s where the Climate & Mind website came from. After starting the website, I got people reaching out to me from different parts of the country and the world, saying ‘hey I’m dealing with this, can you recommend a climate therapist in DC or Taiwan?’ Not seeing a lot of places I could send people to, I started paying attention to this on a practical clinical basis.

Can you give me a sense of your clientele and who they tend to be??

I see a lot of people who are in their early 20s and 30s. There are two categories I’ve noticed. There are those who come with climate stuff as their presenting symptom. And then there are people who come because of work stress, or depression, or non-climate related issues and then the topic comes up in the course of therapy. Those are the most common (the latter).??

The people who come to me about climate issues do tend to fall into a white upper-middle-class category. I’ve been thinking about how this can apply to people who have suffered other kinds of injustices, because we know that marginalized populations are the most at risk from climate-related health impacts, and are also least likely to have access to mental health services.?

How do you usually start a session with someone who comes to you with climate distress as a presenting issue??

My goal in the intake is to gather information about what's going on in the person’s life, so I’ll invite them to share their feelings and concerns and grief that they are experiencing about the climate. I also want to know what else is going on in their life. Usually the climate fear or grief intersects with other issues, either professional issues or older family history issues.?

I’ve been looking clinically at the various climate-related stressors, like climate grief, climate anxiety, climate depression and associated anger through the lens of existential fears. That is, fears about the future and our safety and the safety of people or lifeforms we care about, and that triggers certain reactions depending on a person’s anxiety or withdrawal or denial. And then the other big category is grief. With grief, it is not so much the threat and fear that’s being brought up, but sadness about something being lost -- the future that someone had hoped for for themselves, for their kids, for an ecosystem, or a certain kind of stability they thought was going to be there. So I’m looking at themes of fear and loss as they relate to the climate and looking for ways that those experiences have gotten people stuck.?

An example would be someone who back in college was really involved politically or environmentally, and studied some kind of environmental science with the aim of helping the world. But living in Seattle, it is common to find work as a programmer or project developer, and then they lose touch with some of their earlier activism. So they’re watching what’s going on in the world and getting stressed out, and also feeling kind of guilty because they are not as active as they used to be. They feel weak and impotent and like they don’t have anything that they can give. So that’s how this might tie into a person’s career stressors and their sense of capacity to engage in the world and have a meaningful role on the Earth.?

For another person, we might deeply explore their family history of grief, loss, and attachment. What did they come out of their childhood believing? Did they feel they were of value and had a meaningful role to play in the world, or was there a lack of value? Did they feel they had a voice in the family or was it not listened to? General tendencies, like a lack of sense of self worth, will manifest around their engagement with the climate. The most important thing is validating and providing a space for the person to feel comfortable and safe expressing their worries, fears, anxieties – whatever the feelings are – about what is going on.?

What does a course of treatment look like for an eco-distressed person who keeps coming to see you??

I’m figuring it out as I go. There’s not a strong evidence base for climate therapy. But I try to help them express their feelings and be okay with them, as in not beat themselves up about it. There’s a big theme of inner criticism, that people can kind of get at themselves and say ‘oh I shouldn’t be feeling sorry for myself, there are other people who are worse off than me’ or ‘why don’t I just get off my ass and do something?’ That inner judge has a big impact on people’s sense of capacity, so a lot of the time I’m helping them express their feelings and become aware of that environmentalist critic – that judge inside of them that’s telling them that what they’re feeling is not okay. I try to help them get some space away from that negative self talk. So that’s the feeling side.?

The next step I work them through is letting them have space to talk about it inside and outside of the therapy room. There’s a trend of embarrassment or shame or not wanting to freak people out. So people don’t feel comfortable talking openly about their anxieties about the climate. Partly because it is not necessarily mainstream and there are people who won’t understand or have empathy. But a lot of the time it is a self-imposed isolation, and so I encourage people to just talk about how they are feeling in a safe way, in a way they are comfortable with, with their neighbours, colleagues, or friends. This also helps to put it out there in the world as a valid feeling. That is a contribution in itself.?

So FEEL is the first step. TALK is the second one. And then the third step is UNITE, which means finding some group of people that the person can be with who share some of their feelings. That can be an activist group if they have that inclination, but I don’t like to identify what the group should be. For some people that kind of group isn’t the best fit. So it could be an outdoors group, for example, if the person needs to connect with nature and others who care about nature. It could be a trail maintenance crew. It could be a support group. There’s a few climate anxiety and grief support groups popping up. So that’s the idea of finding comfort and support among people who share similar feelings. This helps people feel less isolated and alone.?

The fourth step is ACT. Once a client has gone through the steps of FEEL, TALK, and UNITE, they will be much more prepared to identify a personally appropriate way to engage in the world – what do they have to offer? Starting with action before addressing feelings often leads to burn-out, or we get involved in a project in a manic sort of urgency, or because we think we should.

I have my own ideas about what actions are needed in the world. But that’s me. When I’m with someone in therapy, I try to let them be in control of where the action might manifest, because I don’t know what their capacities are going to be. One person I work with decided to commit to a mediation practice and hold the health of the planet in her heart everyday. That wouldn’t have been on the top of my list, but I actually think, wow, who knows what is going to come out of that act of sitting? Maybe after a year of that meditation, something else will come – the next step. So it is really about supporting people in finding what their particular strengths, needs, and capacities are.?

What tools do we have at our disposal to help us feel most alive if we feel like everything around us is dying??

Connection with other people. Contact. Connection with ourselves in the present moment. Mindfulness is a tool that helps us move forward in the face of everything. Another tool is compassion for oneself and the world and I think of that in terms of the self judgment people have and how that can be disempowering and self defeating. So trying to feel the feelings and not judge them too much, as well as respond to one’s own feelings the way one would respond to a best friend's experiences or a child’s experiences, and maybe come to their defences if they’re being attacked. That’s a huge tool that can lead to forward movement.

Righteous anger is a tool too. Owning that and saying ‘yeah we do have a reason to feel angry.’ One way of looking at anger is as a form of strength that can often either be stifled or crushed. But if I can really own my anger and feel the strength that comes from seeing injustice, I then want to naturally expand out into the world and help make something different happen.?

How do you help someone who feels we are headed for societal collapse or are flirting with the idea that nothing matters anymore??

That’s a delicate place. I’ve found, if people feel that you don’t get it – which might be that society is going to collapse in five years and we are all going to be in a post-apocalyptic scenario – if they feel that you don’t get it and you’re just trying to convince them that it is not that bad, they’ll really either shut down or stop coming. That’s partly why I get people reaching out looking for climate therapists, because they’ve tried to talk to a therapist or a psychiatrist that isn’t climate-aware and their fears get downplayed. But at the same time, I don’t know what is going to happen, so I don’t necessarily feel the same way they do about what is going to happen. I have to walk a careful line around not wanting to endorse the specific outcomes that they are predicting and also not trying to downplay that.?

So what I do is try to validate the feeling that they’re having as real and reasonable given the situation at hand and at the same time try to highlight the fact, which is what I actually believe, that there are a lot of things that we just don’t know about the future. It would be a very narrow and limiting mindset to make a bunch of plans and actions based on a prediction of the future that is very specific. So I highlight not knowing and I highlight the freedom that comes in a certain way with that. There are so many potential outcomes and at the same time as saying ‘yeah I get how scary this is and I’m scared too,’ I also say ‘at the same time I’ve been scared before and things turn out in a way that surprises me.’ The not knowing can open up potentialities, and potential actions.?

Potentialities can be energizing as opposed to the narrowing of the future, which is what anxiety and depression do – you get focused on a thought or feeling and your vision of what can happen gets so narrow that you think you’re stuck there. Not knowing is where mindfulness comes in. When you breathe, take a big breath in, bring awareness into your arms and legs, be present and feel that you actually don’t know, there can be a feeling of excitement about the future that arises. Like, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ There’s more energy, and that can help people find a direction that’s right for them. It’s not going to be the one thing that saves the planet. You have to let that go.?

I’ll give you an example that came up in a session. We were talking about World War II. Now we know that we won the war, but when you’re in it you don’t know that you’re actually going to win. So what attitude, what action would you want to take if you didn’t know if your side was going to win or fail? Where does that lead? With this one client it led to a kind of excitement like ‘oh wow, I’m alive at a time of great importance and so there might be meaning for me in this moment, a role for me in this moment’. Rather than ‘I am helpless and there is nothing I can do.’ It’s more like ‘what would I do if I needed to rise to the occasion and really engage with this huge crisis? How do I want to be? What do I want to do?’ The person I was working with got more energized and I want to say hopeful, and less separate from what was going on around him. More like he is part of this picture.?

How do you help the people who come to you for guidance in resolving their dilemma of whether or not they should have a child, when climate change is making them fearful of doing that??

Yeah that’s a really challenging one, especially when there’s disagreement within a couple. You can’t split the difference and have half a kid, so it feels like a real impasse sometimes. I don’t want to foster an anti-human sentiment. There’s something kind of defeatist about the idea that there is no point in future humans coming into this world even though I think it is a totally valid decision that someone could make. I want them to make it from a position of healthy positivity about the world rather than a defeatist place. So again it is just sort of letting them explore the feelings that they might have.

Usually they have non-climate feelings about parenting coming up too, so I help them work through that and various times it just sorts itself out. Sometimes they end up having a kid, or another kid, and sometimes they don’t. Either way, I think just talking about the feelings helps them feel more at peace with where their family is at. It is hard. A common thing is that therapists feel like we need to solve the problem. So I really try to make sure that I’m not doing that, and am instead supporting them in making their own decision.??

This was all really helpful. Thanks so much Andrew!?

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‘Till next time!

*This article originally appeared at gendread.substack.com sometime between 2020 and the present day, and has been republished on LinkedIn with minor updates.