From WXXI news, I'm Jasmine Singer, and this is Environmental Connections.

Today's environmental connection began around 9 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, when my phone lit up with a text from an old friend.

She just put her young daughter to bed, but she couldn't shake the conversation that they had had just moments earlier.

Her daughter had come home from school very distraught.

Not about playground drama or homework pressures, but about climate change.

She learned about it in science class, and the images of wildfires and storms and melting glaciers kept her awake.

My neighbor's message captured a mix of anxiety and helplessness.

How could she reassure her daughter?

She asked me when she herself shared similar fears for herself, and even more so for her daughter.

This moment of vulnerability is becoming familiar for more and more families and teachers and caregivers.

So many of us climate anxiety.

So the emotional response to climate change and the uncertainty it brings.

It's something that a lot of us are grappling with privately.

Unsure how to express our fears, let alone address them.

In recent months, we've seen a notable increase in public conversations about climate anxiety, a direct response to increasingly visible climate impacts.

But even as we begin naming our fears openly, so many people still struggle privately to cope with these overwhelming or maybe confusing feelings of eco anxiety and grief and uncertainty.

How do we process?

How do we process these difficult emotions individually and collectively?

What tools can help us find resilience when facing such an immense and complex crisis?

Today, we're joined by climate inclusive psychologist Emma Nelson, who helps individual and communities navigate the emotional toll of climate disruption.

Together, we're going to chat about and explore the climate crisis and how it's reshaping our mental health.

We'll discuss practical strategies for coping with climate related distress, and we'll reflect on why having open and honest conversations about these emotions can lead us to resilience, collective action, maybe even hope.

Emma, welcome back to Environmental Connections.

Thanks so much for having me, Jasmine.

I am so grateful for you.

I, I interviewed you a few months ago, and I just felt like I could have sat there for five hours.

I mean, you're talking about something that everyone I know is feeling, but not everyone I know knows how to explain what they're feeling.

So you're really normalizing something that I think is very profound at this moment in time.

So I want to start with the foundation when we talk about climate anxiety.

What exactly does that look like in practice?

Like how do people experience it for sure.

So the first thing I would do actually is brought in this term anxiety.

I now use the term climate distress.

Although the word anxiety is really culturally important for us right now, we like using it to describe a whole host of feelings, but we certainly don't only feel anxiety about the climate crisis, we feel grief, we feel terror.

We feel rage sometimes and often.

Really, we feel an emptiness or a numbness, a kind of mixture of worried avoidance and denial.

And none of those experiences are right or wrong or normal or abnormal.

So when I use the term distress, part of the purpose there is to include all of us and all the parts of us that are also having multiple experiences and different ones in this time.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I appreciate the pivot to distress, and it's interesting to me to hear that you would put all of those, like, grief and all of those feelings under that umbrella.

Anxiety, I guess, is just one way people are feeling about this moment in time.

Exactly.

And it's a way that we really like describing how we feel.

But it can be a little limiting if it's our only word to describe what is actually a very complex and changing array of emotions about the being alive in this time.

Yeah, I don't want to get too derailed here so soon, but I think anxiety is an interesting way of talking about things because to me, in my body, it feels physical and it feels very similar to excitement.

And so I think like, you know, my cords over there, up in my brain somewhere, hopefully are misfiring sometimes.

And whenever I sort of feel that palpitation, I just that anxiety.

And so I wonder if that's partly why myself and others I know refer to what they feel about the climate as just anxiety.

But there is a profound sadness too.

Yes.

Yeah.

Thank you for bringing grief in so early on.

I mean, even to go back to the way that you opened the show at the very poignant story about your friend texting her daughter.

I feel in myself and I swim in this material, right?

I'm talking about it all the time.

So I have some resilience, or you would think that I do.

But you share that story, and I just feel my stomach drop out from under me like there's no floor and I'm about to fall into something that is scary and unknown, and I don't know what to do or how to be with it.

To me, the word anxiety fits for that, and the word grief takes me deeper still.

This is not the way I expected to parent my child, and not the way I expected to have to know how to show up for kids in general.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

I remember being the age that my friend's child is now, and I remember learning about dinosaurs in school, and that was what I was afraid of, you know, like dinosaurs.

And now it's just like this big, real thing where, you know, as a kid growing up in the 80s, it was quicksand or like, you know, all of these kind of random things that you would see and in these, in these movies.

But now it's not the movies, it's the news.

It's every time you turn on the radio, it's every time you turn on the TV, it's all around us.

And I know that you've noted that there has been a noticeable rise in overwhelm and as you mentioned, numbing as reactions to climate issues.

Absolutely.

Can you explain a little bit more about why that's happening and what exactly those reactions look like?

Yeah, the first thing I would say about numbing is that numbing is an emotion like any other feeling.

It's not like our baseline state.

Numbing is actually an active process.

You can kind of liken it to putting something in the freezer right?

If I put something in the freezer, I have to pay the electricity bill.

There's some energy going into that to keep it frozen.

So then we get to your question why might we be having to put so much in the freezer right now if we stay with our metaphor, right.

Maybe we have a lot of food, we don't know how to cook, or we don't have a recipe, or we're just not sure how to digest it, how to eat it and pass it through.

And so we have to put it somewhere.

And so our nervous systems are smart.

They will numb us out when they need us.

And we certainly didn't evolve to collectively metabolize this kind of horror that we're we're really in contact with some of us more than others on an increasingly frequent basis.

Yeah, I don't even have a very big freezer at home.

So I like the stuff would just rot on the counter.

Honestly, that's such a good way of putting it.

And I think it's a defense mechanism to for a lot of people, the numbness.

Because if you're feeling numb about something as big as climate change or as, you know, relatively small, and I'm using air quotes here as the latest wildfire, that might not feel connected to the bigger climate change in the moment that you're looking at it in the headline, numbness can feel like the easiest way forward.

Because if you don't have that, then what do you have?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I see a lot of people who have shame about numbing out as though they should always be feeling what we're in contact with.

And I really increasingly have a lot of respect for numbing.

If you, You said it so.

Well, Jasmine, the food will rot on your counter and it smells bad, right?

Like it's going to get flies.

And so there's an intelligence to what our bodies are trying to help us do.

If it's our only strategy, then yeah, we have a really big freezer bill.

And that can start to really detract from maybe other things we want to be spending our energy on.

Yeah.

And I definitely want to start to, you know, unpack like how we can deal with these emotions or confront them or address that.

I'm not going to say fix them because I know that that is a go to for me personally, like, let's fix it.

And I know that you've you've mentioned before, including to me, when I've interviewed you in the past, that fixing isn't always the right way forward.

But let me put a pin in that for just a moment, because one thing I appreciate about you and you're already doing it is the importance of naming these feelings, like naming collective feelings about the climate crisis.

So what's in a name?

What power does naming our emotions hold in terms of mental health and resilience?

Yeah, there's an old psychotherapy, a dodge, name it to tame it that the first thing that we do as we're learning emotion regulation is learn to put words on some of our feelings.

And with climate distress, I think it's increasingly important because some of these experiences that we're having, don't have old names, like the experience of being sad or being happy, right.

Everybody knows what that means.

But there are some new words like solace, star, which is this sense of loss of place when a place you love has been changed for the worst and Taupo aversion is related, maybe you don't want to go there.

You're kind of averse to this place that has been degraded in some way, but there's something that happens in my body just to know there's a word for that.

Yeah, something about a very normalizing.

Can you say those words again just for our listeners?

Yeah, those are solace.

Star-Ledger and Taupo aversion.

Wow.

That's fascinating.

If you're just tuning in, this is environmental connections.

I'm Jasmine Singer, and today I'm speaking with climate inclusive psychologist Emma Nelson about mental health and climate change.

Climate inclusive psychologists tell me about the choice to name name it that because I haven't heard that before.

Yeah.

This is actually a name that a colleague from the Climate Psychology Alliance, I work extensively with that organization uses in her practice down in Australia.

For the most part, we actually use climate aware therapy, but I've chosen climate inclusive because sometimes I see people who wonder, well, what?

I only have to talk about climate change in therapy, where I do work with you, and that's certainly not the case.

What I'm trying to do is create a therapeutic environment where we recognize together that the climate crisis is the context in which all of our maturation and struggles, individuals, is occurring now.

So it's inclusive of climate change rather than leaving it as the elephant in the room, or even worse, outside the door entirely.

Is it inclusive of climate change, or is climate change, to stress the foundation for it?

Like if if someone's coming into you because they, they have marital issues going on, is it possible that their fear of climate is partly at the core of that or insert the blank, how do I parent when I feel so, you know, incapable of it today?

Maybe the root of that is, is climate distress.

Can you just, tell me your thoughts about that a little bit?

Because to me, it feels like it's the root jasmine.

That is a fantastic question.

So I'm just going to reiterate it for for you and for the listeners.

So you're asking how much of what we experience as our individual stuff is actually a response to this collective unraveling, this collective predicament?

Am I hearing.

Yes, that's exactly it.

Yeah, it's a great question.

The answer is, to me, both simple and complex.

So the simple part is that our individual stuff so like what's happened to me in my life, what happened in my family, what happened to my parents, what's happened in my culture?

All of that is always and already interacting with our climate and ecological reality.

They're in conversation with each other.

They're tangled up together.

The complex part is that that tangle might help me in my life.

It might actually help me engage in actions that are really meaningful to me.

Give me some direction, or help me feel some, grief about my family, right?

If I get in touch with my climate grief, maybe it opens up grief in other parts of my life.

It's healthy.

So there's that piece.

But the tangle can also make it really challenging for me to be in the world in a way that makes me proud.

So really, what I'm working with when I work with clients is asking, how is the interaction between this collective stuff, our feelings, our collective responses to the climate crisis, interacting with our personal stuff in a helpful or unhelpful ways?

So when you talk about tangling things up, the first thing I think about is quite tangible, which is like a bunch of necklace chains being tangled up.

Taking those apart is my least favorite activity.

I give it to my wife to do it.

She doesn't particularly like it either, but she married me and she therefore knows that untangling these necklace chains is part of her job, however.

So at the end of untangling those chains, you've got some.

Presumably you've got usable necklace chains that you could put your gem on.

If you untangle what's going on with the distress in your own life as it relates to climate anxiety or climate change, I should say in from where I sit, it seems like there is no beautiful chain.

At the end of it.

There's there's climate change in and of itself is a tangled mess that cannot be untangled.

So I don't I don't want to get too lost in my strange metaphor here.

What I'm asking is, is do we need, like radical acceptance first of of this, this catastrophe, you know, and I clearly my own fears are spilling out here, but this catastrophe we seem to be living in that is not, you know, turn around a mole.

We have to sort of accept that in order to deal with the distress or.

No.

Yeah.

I'm going to ground this in, a wonderful phrase from another climate psychologist, Steffi Bednarik, is her name.

She's out in the UK.

I'll say her phrase in a moment.

Just to reiterate what you're asking, there's this question that comes up.

If I were to really untangle what I'm feeling about our collective moment and how my own stuff is playing into that, I would kind of be left with this reality that is deeply scary and unstable.

So, am I still hearing you, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So Steffi has this wonderful phrase that it's actually guided my career.

In part, she says, what does it mean to live?

Well when the familiar is dying?

Say it again.

What does it mean to live well when the familiar is dying?

And so that question, if you're listening to this right now, you might notice how it lands with you.

Like, how does it feel in your body to actually ask that?

What would it mean to live a meaningful, good life, a joyful life, even if you are born into a time when the familiar is dying?

Yeah, I mean, this is it.

Hearing those words is a gut punch.

Because if you're, you know, if you're going into therapy for marital counseling, for example, it is very possible that both partners would do the necessary work on themselves in order to come back together in a healthy way.

But in in terms of the climate crisis there there is no compromise they can make because it's just it's just happening.

Yeah.

I mean, I can lighten it up a little bit for us here too, because there there is a funny side of it that people often come to therapy because of our culture expecting to be fixed so that we might return to being productive cogs in the market economy that has created the same mess that is causing us distress.

And of course, I have to tell people at some point in our work together that that's probably not going to happen with me.

Like, we're probably not going to get to a place where folks are like, well, thanks a lot.

I'm I'll go back to work now, that's funny.

Like, I've got 45 minutes.

Doctor, please.

I need to get rid of this, this childhood trauma, if you can get on that.

Yeah, but now you've said, and correct me if I'm wrong, that eco and eco distress isn't something to eliminate.

It can even be healthy.

So am I right there?

I'd love to know why you would frame it that way.

Yes, you're right and wrong because this field is like the the paragon of paradoxes.

So, you're right in that the climate crisis is a mental health crisis.

Eco anxiety is a problem.

This is an increasing and very real experience of psychological suffering for which our mental health system is woefully underprepared.

So when I say this, you might think of things like climate trauma following exposure to an extreme weather event, like if I lose my house in flooding and I develop PTSD, that's real, right?

That's a deleterious mental health impact of the climate crisis.

Or even if I have an anxiety disorder and my anxiety gets worse when it's smoky outside because I worry for my children and for myself.

Right.

That's a very real mental health impact of the climate crisis.

Of course we want to fix that.

Of course we want to alleviate that suffering.

So that's true.

That's one side of it.

Okay.

If I give the other side.

Yeah.

Please do.

And the other side of that is that we are having inherently healthy responses to a system in crisis.

Climate distress is not a disorder.

Climate distress is not a disorder.

I always say that choice whenever I say it, because our nervous systems need to hear it, that there's actually something right with you.

If you're listening and you're feeling like, oh, she's talking about me.

Well, good.

Right?

You're awake, or part of you is awake and you're having an adaptive response to living in a time, perhaps when the familiar is dying.

Right?

And so that feels like something.

And that is a doorway into action, or can be a doorway in to transformation.

We don't want to fix that.

We don't want to shut it down.

We want to resource it so that it might do its work on us, so that we can meet this moment with our full selves.

So there's a real both.

And here this is a mental health crisis, and it's also really not well.

But how do you counsel your patients when they are either convincing themselves that perhaps they're being overly sensitive or alarmist, or maybe the people in their life are feeling that way about them?

From your professional perspective, how do you respond to that kind of skepticism?

Yeah, it's tricky because our culture is changing quickly and we have all these like fragmented subcultures.

So you never know when you meet someone how climate is, is or isn't discussed in their family and how their concern about it is being received in their family.

Am I hearing what you are absolutely asking about?

So I think it becomes a pretty nuanced conversation about what's functional.

What part of myself can I actually bring to my family or to my colleagues, or to my partner, that the relational system that I'm in is able to tolerate?

And it might be that some social circles that we're in aren't able to receive that yet.

There's grief there, right?

There's some sadness that we're all at different stages of working with us.

There's so much to say on this.

So I would just want to pause there and see if that lands, and then we can say a little more about it.

It lends it it reminds me very much of, you know, a young Jasmine 20 some years ago, going vegan, you know, living in New York City.

I've been vegan for more than 20 years at this point.

I was in my 20s at the time, and just feeling like I was constantly going up the down staircase, right?

Because we live in a meat eating society, and it was on every literally every street corner with the hot dog stands and this and that.

And I had was having this giant shift.

And yet all around me, it was being drummed in that like it wasn't me.

That was the quote unquote normal one.

And so it's I'm not bringing that up to dissect that particular situation, but it's very much reminding me of, you know, the folks I know who are very concerned about the climate and are alarmed by other people around them who aren't acting like it's an emergency.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm glad you said I'm not here to dissect that moment, because I was about to ask question about that moment.

We'll talk later.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can talk later.

But yeah.

So what can we say on this?

You're speaking to an experience many of us have of this kind of, like, confused outrage.

Why am I seeing something that actually feels so healthy and reality based and important?

And maybe I'm changing my life around it, and then I, like, go buy milk at the store and, like, I'm just making small talk.

And there's a sense of unreality to this.

Am I still.

Yeah.

Hearing this.

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So that, I mean, even as we just let that in the into the room with us, it's worth saying that that is not just you.

Right?

If you're listening to it and you're like, oh, I feel that too.

This is a collective experience.

And sometimes I've started to talk about what it might mean to live in a time between worlds where we have one world in a system that's falling apart or falling away or undercutting itself, and one foot in a world that really hasn't been born yet, and that we can barely even talk about.

And so those of us born in a time are having to do this strange dance of almost like code switching back and forth.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's a little destabilizing.

Yeah.

So what do we do with that?

I mean, I think that is a great way of putting it.

You know, it reminds me a little bit of, like, when the internet came out, I when, when I was a young adult, and suddenly I was living in this, this world where we had we had to go to the gas station to get a map.

And then there was this, this thing where you could, like, get directions on your computer by typing in the address.

And it felt like a bit of straddling two different worlds.

Now, that was kind of a fun precipice to be at.

This isn't so much.

So how do we navigate that duality?

Can I turn it back, to you here and maybe you might say a little bit about how you've navigated that in your own life, even with the veganism piece, like.

Yeah, yeah, with the, just kind of straddling two very young people did it.

Some people don't.

How do I live?

Well, in that I mean, over time, I've had to just choose what hell I want to die on, you know, I've had to accept that, like, most of the time, I'm going to just, like, let things go because I know myself very well.

So I know my truth and I know what what matters to me, and also recognize that everyone's on their own journey and they they are privy to different perspectives as well, that I'm not privy to.

But the core element, the anchor for me is having community around me of people who really deeply understand it and deeply understand me.

So that's how I deal with it.

So three things there.

If I'm hearing you right and then I'm going to tell a story, courage, compassion and finding your own people.

Yeah.

I love that way of putting it.

Yeah.

Do you want the story?

I do, of course I want the story.

You're reminding me.

Every last bit about community reminds me of being on retreat.

Many years ago.

I was in my early 20s, probably.

And I'm sitting at this retreat with this teacher, and we're doing all this introspection and, work on ourselves.

And one of the women there, we're doing a question period.

She puts her hand up and she says, you know, I feel like I'm really understanding more about who I am and what I might be here to do.

I've feel better, but I don't know how to talk about this with people in my life, and I'm losing them, and I I'm sad about that, or I'm anxious about it and I'm listening to this woman being like, she's not compassionate enough.

She he's going to tell her right now that she just needs to understand them where they are at.

And, you know, he looked at her and he said, sometimes it's important to have spiritual friends.

Oh, and it was very validating for me because I, I think at that stage in my own development, I was bending myself into a pretzel to try to allow space for others to meet me where I was.

And so depending on where we're starting out, right, this is how the entire psychic, our stuff in the collective stuff are talking to each other, right?

I needed to back off a little bit and allow it to be okay to have a community that gets me.

So if you're listening to this and this is where you are feeling a little isolated, maybe it's important to allow yourself to have that community.

That said, if you're so focused in in that insular community that you can't talk to anyone outside of it, maybe it's the reverse.

Maybe it's the compassion piece from what you're saying.

The courage I think goes, anyway, yeah, I appreciate that.

I, I'm wondering if we could really lay it out simply here because I think we're talking.

I feel like we're talking a lot about the problem of, of, you know, climate change and, and how people are sort of being gaslit or gaslighting themselves, maybe, if that's possible.

I don't know, regarding, you know, dismissing the reality of what's going on.

And, and I feel like we're talking a lot about how we can normalize and validate our feelings and recognize that this is a new world that we're living in.

And we, you know, it is normal.

It is perfectly healthy to be feeling this distress and the importance of community.

But what I'm curious about is how we cope with it.

Yeah.

And I'm not I'm not sure if I'm missing this or if we just haven't really talked about it yet.

And I'm trying really hard to not say fix it because I know it can't, you know, you can't, and I can't, I wish I, I really wish I could, but.

So how how do we go about our day?

I mean, for my friend who texted me the other day for people who are listening to this, who just feel that gut punch, that despair, whether it's about politics or, you know, how politics are, you know, intersecting right now with the climate catastrophe.

What what do we do with these giant big feelings?

I mean, saying we we feel that like, to me is a little like, you know, week T I just am wondering what happens next.

There's such a longing here.

Yeah.

What on earth do I do with the magnitude of these feelings.

This is another paradox.

So I have some tangible stuff that I'd like to talk about.

So do that in a moment.

And at the same time there is such an urgency that we're feeling with good reason to know how to grow up in this time and how to be okay.

If we rush our way through it, we will skip what we're really feeling.

So there's a there's a risk that we bypass because we want to do climate distress.

Right.

And we want the feeling to go away.

But the feeling is quite wise and it needs our attention and respect.

So there's a both and here.

So that's my that's my preface.

My answer is that I'm with you okay.

And then the tangible event for those of you are like jumping at the bit like what do I do.

So there's a model I really like that you can Google called the process model of ecological anxiety and eco grief.

It's by a clinical psychologist and climate researcher Paolo Piccola, out of, Europe.

And he talks about balancing these three facets of coping.

So his idea is you have an ecological awakening.

At some level.

You wake up to the severity of our predicament here and you feel really bad.

What do you do after that?

He calls the stage that comes after that coping and changing.

And the three pieces that he balances are emotional engagement, action and distancing, emotional engagement, action and distancing.

The amount of each of these that you need to do is kind of dependent on what you do naturally.

If you're an activist who only does action and you feel anxiety, or you feel depressed about the climate crisis, you're probably going to need to rebalance in the direction of grief work and taking some breaks.

If you're someone who's only taking breaks and who's scrolling like just doom scrolling media all the time, you need to get active or you need to feel what's underneath all the doom scrolling.

Probably both.

It's really the flexible movement between those three and balancing them that, in his research, seems to help people adjust to living in this time in a way that they have some more, more of a sense that they're showing up in the world in a way that's meaningful.

That's great.

I love that.

I want to talk a little bit more about the tangible, but we do need to take a really quick, break right now.

But before we do I do want to invite our listeners and our viewers on YouTube to join the discussion here.

I'm chatting with Emma Nelson, who is a climate inclusive psychologist, and we're talking about, climate distress and how we're managing our mental health in these difficult moments.

So please join the conversation.

Let us know how you're feeling about the climate crisis.

How is this showing up in your day to day life?

If you have any specific questions, bring those to Emma as well.

You can call us at (844) 295-8255, or you can call us if you're local at (585) 263-9994.

You can comment on YouTube if you're watching us on YouTube right now.

And thank you and welcome to those who are.

We're going to take a really quick break.

We'll be right back.

I'm Jasmine Singer.

Coming up in our second hour of Environmental Connections how artists are responding to the climate crisis from movement to memory to mural, we explore how creative work can awaken awareness, fuel hope, and maybe help communities imagine a better future.

That's all coming up on the second hour of environmental Connections.

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If you're just tuning in, I'm Jasmine Singer and you're listening to Environmental Connections here on WXXI news.

I want to say I'm really enjoying my conversation with you, Emma.

I'm talking to Emma Nelson, who's a climate inclusive psychologist.

I don't know if enjoying is the right word, but there is something deeply grounding about discussing climate distress and mental health because it is a very, very real thing.

You know, I have a teenage niece and I sometimes look at her and I think, my goodness, like, this is her reality.

Like I adapted to this.

I mean, of course it was going on when I was born, but it's just gotten 5 billion times worse.

That's the official, amount.

And I just, I, I'm, I'm very concerned for the up and coming, generation.

So can you just tell me if this is something you hear in your office when people are coming to you about climate distress, perhaps concern about their children, their children's futures, or, you know, or themselves, like, I'm also concerned for me, I'm not like a totally selfless individual full of me, but I I'm I'm baffled.

I'm flabbergasted when I think about young people.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's a concern that I hear.

And it's another concern that fits the fox.

That's an appropriate response to what our young people are facing, and maybe even a doorway into figuring out how to show up for them.

So, I mean, what comes up for me when you say this is there was a recent study last year, a huge study, 10,000 young people across ten countries ages 16 to 25.

So these are young people, Gen Z, 85% of them are at least moderately worried about climate change, 59% extremely worried, very sad.

Me yeah.

So if you are a young person or you have young people in their in your life, it's a pretty solid guess that they're feeling this to a certain extent.

Some other numbers from the study are 56% of these young people believe humanity is doomed.

What?

Yeah.

What a feeling to be living with.

So it really begs the question for us as caregivers and parents and and humans, right, who care for other people in our community?

How do we help them hold that?

How do we help them hold that.

Yeah.

Yeah that's a good follow up question.

So one thing that came up when you were just starting after the break and you said like I'm kind of surprised when I'm actually like a little bit enjoying having this vision.

It made me think of this kind of group that I, run sometimes called a climate cafe, which is an hour and a half long listening circle on climate emotions.

So we don't talk about what we're doing, what action is happening, what's coming down the pipeline with news.

We just talk about how we're feeling.

We like use some nature objects to help us associate and gets a little deeper.

But this funny thing happens.

You know, someone names some really scary stuff, like halfway in, like, someone's like, I'm really hopeless, or someone is really deep in grief, or someone is super angry and we're all a little scared.

We're like, oh, are we really going to talk about this?

And then we do and we're okay.

And then at the tail end there's this bubbly feeling.

And I was so curious about that bubbly ness.

And the more I do this work in groups, the more I notice, oh, we can't carry it on our own, can we?

But there is a capacity that we might remember together.

I don't get that bubbly feeling when I do my climate emotional work solo, but I do when a group holds it with me.

And so for young people, I wonder if one of the things we might remember as a community is how to hold things collectively and include our young people in that, so that at least they're not alone with it.

I think that's, it has to happen.

I mean, it has to be core to that generation, especially as they come up.

I want to switch gears briefly before we get to some of our callers here and add a little bit of context that we haven't added yet.

I noticed that you frequently mention, and this is something that's deeply important to me, too.

The intersection of climate anxiety with broader social justice issues like patriarchy and white supremacy, culture and collective trauma.

I know this is a giant question for me to ask you to briefly answer, but can you connect the dots for us a little bit there?

Absolutely.

So, I mean, the brief answer would probably be to introduce this term poly crisis or meta crisis, which is the idea that the crises that we're living through are actually one large crisis formed of many intersecting systems that have kept us separate from each other in the world.

So when we're talking about collective trauma, what we're really saying is the pain of what we've done to the earth and each other because we forgot who we were, the pain of what we've done to the earth and each other because we forgot who we were.

So from that base standpoint, you can track yourselves out to white supremacy and to patriarchy and to ecocide and our climate and ecological crisis.

So I find when I'm trying to link those, it helps to go back in time a little bit and ask ourselves, well, how did we get here?

What are the many things that we're carrying together and how have they reinforced each other, talked to each other over time?

In healing from one, you have to touch the others.

I never see a climate client who I don't talk with about whiteness or about patriarchy.

It's always in the room.

I spent this morning, just by complete coincidence, editing, a paper about Petro masculinity, which is a term coined by political scientist Kara Daggett.

And it basically examines the intersection of masculinity and fossil fuels and power dynamics.

And, it suggests that fossil fuels, like the fossil fuel industry as a whole, not only provides energy, but also fuels certain ideas about masculinity, which is often linked to dominance and control.

And I think that's actually a great introduction to our next caller.

Samantha, thanks for being patient.

Welcome to Environmental Connections.

What is your question or your experience that you'd like to share with Emma today?

Well, I mean, I guess you're sort of addressing it right now.

What I, what I was hearing in all of this, I was feeling like, oh, like, okay, it's a bunch of white people getting together and saying, for me, I'm so stressed out because of the condition of the climate.

And let's really examine this.

And I'm like, well, who's, you know, who's taking care of the indigenous people who are having to abandon their homes because the water levels are too high.

And, I mean, and for hundreds of years, Native Americans have been, you know, their culture has been ruined and there's no justice for them.

So, I mean, I just I kind of have a really hard time with all of this, you know, introspection or and probably not using the right words.

But you know what I mean by that.

So that's what I'm feeling right now.

And I, I'm, I'm terribly angry about the situation, of course, of the, of the planet and my meager efforts at recycling.

Just like it's just ridiculous.

It's like there's nothing we can do.

I feel like until our governments really make it mandatory to do all the things we need to do, and of course, our current government is never going to do that and is making it worse.

And worse daily.

Well, first of all, know, Samantha, thank you so much for calling.

I just want to I just want to say that I think you're speaking for a lot of people right now.

And, Emma, do you want to do you want to chat with Samantha about this very big topic?

Yeah.

I mean, as Samantha, you're bringing up something that actually comes up a lot in these conversations that sometimes phrase, as is climate distress, a privileged white person's problem.

And the answer to that is actually more multifaceted than I think we often give ourselves credit for in, climate, like when it's talked about in the media.

So there are some ways that this conversation, the one that we're having right now, privileges the people with the resources and the time and space and the lineage, the ancestry to have it.

So who gets to feel pain on behalf of the world?

Probably people who aren't worrying about what they're going to eat, people who aren't about to lose their homes.

People who aren't coping with decades of racial trauma.

So that's true, right?

That's a piece of this.

The vast majority of the people who come to me for climate distress work are white people of privilege.

There's another side to this that's also important climate distress.

The research tells us, is actually more of an impact on marginalized communities, vastly more than it is for communities of privilege.

And of course, that's because of climate justice issues, right?

Because this is a crisis that is and will impact those who are most marginalized more severely.

And first.

So it's wonderful, Samantha, to bring this piece in, because it raises the question of who gets to work through these emotions and for whom, for what.

So this question often comes up with my clients because there's an assumption in psychotherapy that you work through it for you, that you work through your feelings so that you might be happier.

But this approach to psychotherapy really flips that on its head.

You work through it so that you might know what is yours to do here, and that's going to force you to look outside of yourself, to look at colonization, to look at what's happening in your community and what's happened in your lineage.

So, Yeah, there's lots to say here, but, Samantha, I want to give you a chance if you want to come back on and say how that lands with you and anything that it sparks in your experience to.

Yeah, I, I, I agree with that to a certain extent.

But in my personal experience, I don't see a lot of people in my community making drastic changes in order to impact the lives of the people who are suffering the most because of this, like those marginalized people you were just mentioning.

And, you know, there are a lot of people yelling and screaming about it.

But when it comes to brass tacks, when it comes to like, how do I really want to change my life, myself included?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I'm a saint or something, and I'm bicycling everywhere to work.

I'm not.

But, I, you know, I, I it's a it's a terrible reconciliation to know that every single day you're breathing on the planet and you're contributing to the problem.

There's there's other people who are who are suffering even more greatly than you.

And you're and you're just a small, tiny, you know, insignificant bug that has no impact.

That's how I feel.

It's pretty desperate I understand that.

But you know, somehow I manage to get through the day.

Well lucky for you you're on a show that where you can bring the feeling of desperate and some despair.

I think that comes up here.

Yeah, yeah.

Samantha, thank you so much.

I really appreciate you.

You know, it's not easy to share that kind of feeling.

And I'm.

I'm sitting here nodding, and I just have this feeling that a lot of our listeners are, too.

So I really appreciate you calling in.

And Carol, we've got Carol from Livonia.

Thank you for being patient.

Carol, welcome to Environmental Connections.

What did you want to chat about today?

Hi.

Thanks.

Well, Samantha, really, hit the nail on the head with the feelings that she's expressing.

Desperate and despair.

I, I've been, very active for a long time with climate change.

Like, back in the 70s.

I remember the VW rabbit and the AMC pacer.

Right.

And those were such cool cars.

And I thought, yes, finally we're going to start having smaller cars using less lethal and gas.

And then all of a sudden I kept seeing bigger vehicles and SUV starting to ride.

And I was like, what's going on?

And for years I wanted to have a home off the grid.

When we finally did, almost all that this past, few years, not completely off the grid, because I realized that to contribute back to the grid was just as important, sustainability wise, as to have it all to yourself.

So I really worked hard to study and learn how to be self-reliant.

So that gives me some comfort on the not being so desperate part.

But at the same time, politically, just protesting is not enough to me.

It's great to have numbers and to show others that they're not the only ones feeling that.

But there are people that came to me when I finally pushed have Something in Livonia, a real protest, and they happened twice.

Oh, I'm so glad you did this.

I, you know, here's my name and number.

I want to keep informed.

And so I'm trying to build on that desire.

And I think it's very similar, climate distress that people are feeling as much as myself.

And my thought was going to, the businesses, business owners in town because, we are in the Finger Lakes and we tend to have more of a touristy kind of, economic situation that's getting better and better and more year round businesses are making it.

So I think we can those two together and having conversations or just meeting people where they're at and having some ground rules of what is fair and what is not fair to, share and discuss, to just start talking together again.

And I'm wondering what you think of that idea and if it's feasible, the, and bit of what you said.

Carol.

Right.

Yeah.

It's this longing to just start talking again.

Am I hearing that bit.

Right.

Yes.

Yeah.

For the folks we all have very extreme.

I don't say oh that's the fear.

We tend to have extreme positions on climate change based on what we've been told and what we're willing to buy into and the sources of our news.

And that's where I think we're missing the boat, is that it affects everything.

It affects the way men and women are not talking to each other.

Why some women just want to date women and why some men just want to date men.

And I think there's a greater issue there because we're just not talking anymore.

That yes, it happened in Venus versus Mars books, you know.

Yeah.

I'll stop you there, Carol.

I because I do have some thoughts on this.

I think you're speaking to a very painful fragmentation, a particularly in our American culture right now.

We miss each other.

Sometimes when I run a group, this comes up.

I miss my neighbors.

I miss being able to speak with each other and to know that we share some commonality.

So some, like baseline.

And so this comes up in our climate conversations too.

And I find if I'm going to answer this question as short as quickly as I can, naming that with another person is really powerful.

I miss the time when we were able to speak to each other, and we understood.

It's a ballsy thing to do.

Wow.

Yeah, right.

That's so true.

And I also want to echo two things.

First of all, that this could be a topic for connections just by itself.

And secondly, I also just want to thank you, Carol, for calling in and sharing that.

And I apologize that we have to cut you short here because it is a very complex and fascinating topic.

I was just talking to someone yesterday about this, actually, about how, she grew up in the 50s and 60s in the suburbs and said everyone was always outside.

You always knew your neighbors and I can totally relate to what Carol is saying here.

Gary from Bloomfield.

We don't have too much time left, but I'm so glad that you called Gary, welcome to environmental Connections.

What did you want to chat about?

Well, thank you very much.

I always wind up getting at the last minute.

Oh, no.

And but, there's a couple, a couple of issues.

One is the importance of, you when you.

When I was talking earlier, she said the importance of, owning your, yourself and being able to talk about, especially in family counseling.

I've, I've been a psychologist for a number of years, and I don't specialize in, in climate, but I do a lot of anxiety and depression and those kinds of things.

I also do forest, counseling, but, but, the the story I wanted to share, and one is, one is it's how important it is to in this.

Let me, let me back up a second in this, in this environment where people are afraid to talk about what's really bothering them.

And I do think that sometimes things like, you know, political things or, environmental things, they're shut down so much that that causes problems in the families because it's not just the environmental issues, it's it's the idea of not being able to talk with each other.

Yeah.

Share a quick story that that is what they put me on for.

You have to.

Yeah.

You'll have to make it real quick the next time we're going to get you on first, Gary, I promise.

Yes.

Anyway, you know, when one of the, one of the things you mentioned that, the, the after everything else which is concluded speaking, but, after everything else, you still wind up with the environ mental problems.

Well, I'm going to share a quick story.

When I was a younger man and my son was in high school, they had a discussion about at that time, it was, nuclear proliferation and Central America war and the Cold War and stuff like this.

And the teacher told me that they were having this discussion, and all the students were very anxious about being blown up, you know, and not being able and, you know, finished their lives.

And my son, teacher told me that my son perked up and said, it's not going to happen.

I know it's not going to happen.

And and the teacher said, well, how do you know that?

He says, because my dad is out there every day working to stop this nuclear proliferation.

And, and this stuff.

And it was just amazing.

The teacher was just flabbergasted on the whole, so, so, you know, the whole class kind of kind of changed their tune.

But the point is, yeah, about about 15 more seconds, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Go ahead.

Letting people know that you're active and getting active helps your children feel more comfortable.

That's that's a very profound way for us to start to wrap up.

Do you want to respond real quick to Gary?

I, I can respond very quickly.

That's correct.

I know that story.

Well, the more active you are, the more contained your children will feel and their feelings show up for this moment.

And, and they will see you.

And you do in our last minute.

I'd love for you to share with our listeners one key insight or practice that you wish more people really understood about managing climate related anxiety or grief or distress.

Oh, thank you for this.

Yeah.

It's tricky because I notice in myself all of the kind of psychotherapeutic coping tools which are really helpful with this.

But underneath them all is that we have forgotten that we're actually embedded in the world.

So remembering that that's really where affective coping in this moment begins.

And that is also something that totally goes with what all of our callers said today.

So I, I, I feel that sense of bubbly ness that you were referring to earlier.

Emma.

Emma Nelson is a climate inclusive psychologist working at the intersection of climate change and mental health, which is such an important topic.

Emma.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you so much for being here with us today and engaging in this dialog.

We so appreciate you.

Thanks for having me, and we'll talk to you next time.

I'm Jasmine Singer.

Thanks for making today's environmental connections.

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