Frozen in trauma on a warming planet: a relational reckoning with climate distress

Abstract

"As awareness of the destabilising impacts of the climate crisis and its multiple layers of connected injustices increase, individuals struggling with climate distress have begun to arrive at our clinical doorsteps. This article details some of the questions and challenges of climate-informed clinical work, including aspects of what both clinician and client experience emotionally and ways we may turn away from the reality of harms and injustices. Utilising a trauma lens, a detailed case description is presented of a man ‘frozen in trauma’ in response to the climate and environmental crisis. Since clinicians are embedded in the climate emergency along with their clients, the author shares her personal trajectory of climate awareness (Hoggett and Randall, 2018), along with countertransferential responses that occurred in the therapy. The clinical description includes an understanding of the client’s history of a transgenerational trauma that echoed with and amplified his responses to the planetary crisis. Ways of processing and holding the difficult emotions within the clinical work are outlined, along with how the client was usefully able to enlarge his focus to helping others. Recognizing multiple forms of interconnection, including with the more-than-human world, are described as a way to move forward. Keywords climate distress, environmental injustice, trauma, grief, psychoanalysis, transgenerational, interconnection"