Climate, Psychology and Change
Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety
Psychology in times of ecological collapse.
“This is more than a book. It is a treasure of radical ideas and profound insights. It is a book of wisdom!”
—Satish Kumar
Largely invisible and unnamed collective cultural assumptions act like an adhesive glue, that moulds everything into the same familiar patterns over and over again. Changing our mindset and the way we see things is therefore one of the most powerful leverage points for systems change.
Climate, Psychology, and Change reckons with the ways power, colonialism, capitalism and our innocent seeming familiar perceptions impact our myriad crises - while shaping Western psychology as we know it. Our society’s ‘normal’ is profoundly unwell and our familiar ways of being reflect the same unsustainable systems that erode our ecosystems, accelerate global destruction, and extract our humanity. Moving towards healing means evolving the way we think about who we are.
Editor and climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek co-created an anthology unlike anything you’ve read before: a necessary response, an urgent appeal, and a fearless look forward at how we care for ourselves and others, eyes wide open, with compassion and skill in an uncertain world.
The book releases on June 18, 2024. Available for pre-order now!
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Within Western paradigms, psychotherapy is seen as a way to bring a distressed person back within the realm of the familiar. But our collective “familiar” is fragile, built on dominant norms that accelerate global destruction, extract from our communities, and erode our futures.
We can no longer think of therapeutic practice as bringing clients back to baseline “normal” when our normal is profoundly unwell. Instead, we need to evolve therapy. Climate, Psychology, and Change brings together a diverse group of psychologists and mental health practitioners calling for a sea change.
Editor and climate psychotherapist Steffi Bednarek makes the case for a regenerative disturbance to the commons of our profession—an urgent and insistent call to action that meets the sobering realities of our moment with profound hope for positive change.
Essays explore topics like:
⦿ What decolonizing therapy and re-visioning the field could look like
⦿ Using therapeutic tools to respond to trauma
⦿ What psychologists can offer movements for social change and climate justice
⦿ How to navigate unhelpful responses to climate emergency
⦿ Fostering individual and community resilience
⦿ Nurturing creative solutions to our complex and intersecting crises
Holistic and intersectional, this collection reckons with the ways in which relationships of power, colonialism, and capitalism both reflect and inform the discipline of psychology as we know it. With the inclusion of essays written by clinicians from the Global South, Climate, Psychology, and Change is a collection unlike anything you’ve read before: a necessary response, an urgent appeal, and a fearless look forward at how we care for ourselves and our clients, eyes wide open, with compassion and skill in an uncertain world.
Endorsements
Contributors
About the author, editor and events curator
Steffi Bednarek is a trauma therapist, climate psychologist, writer and events curator at the intersection between climate change, psychology and ecological thinking. She delivers training, education and support to cultivate climate leadership, emotional resilience and collective nervous system regulation.
Steffi prepares leaders, teams and organisations to include the psychological impact of climate change in their approach to change. She has worked with national governments, the corporate sector, global financial institutions, the sustainability sector and large NGOs. Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, the BBC, numerous peer-reviewed academic journals, international publications, books and podcasts.