Climate anxiety is increasingly presenting in the therapy room, sometimes as an explicit concern, and sometimes through experiences of fear, grief, anger, helplessness or loss of direction.As environmental uncertainty intensifies, psychotherapists and counsellors are being invited to engage with forms of distress that are deeply personal, profoundly collective, and rooted in an unfolding global reality.Meaningful Conversations will bring together psychotherapists, counsellors, academics, researchers and reflective practitioners to explore the implications of climate anxiety for contemporary psychotherapy practice.This thought-provoking afternoon event will consider questions including:
- How do we work with climate distress while remaining attentive to each client’s unique way of making sense of it?
- What does it mean to accompany clients in facing profound uncertainty without foreclosing meaning-making or change?
- How do we avoid slipping too quickly into reassurance, avoidance or over-identifying with the client’s experience?
- What assumptions do we bring about hope, agency and change?
- And how do we stay open, curious and grounded when the wider context itself feels unstable?
Taking relational, systemic and pluralistic perspectives, the conversation will explore how climate anxiety challenges more individualised understandings of distress and invites wider reflection on responsibility, ethics, meaning-making and therapeutic practice. This is not about finding the ‘right’ answers. Instead, Meaningful Conversations offers a space to think together about what thoughtful, ethical and responsive psychotherapy might look like in the face of an unfolding environmental crisis.
*Attendance at this event will provide 3 CPD hours.