Therapists’ experience of climate change: A dialectic between personal and professional

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundHumankind is facing extraordinary existential uncertainties. Therapists are mobilised with urgency in response to the emotional and psychological needs of clients at the onset of the COVID‐19 global pandemic. At the same time, individuals and communities have been and are ever‐increasingly impacted by the seemingly inexorable climate and biodiversity crisis, yet the response of the profession is negligible.ObjectiveTo explore therapists’ experiences of climate change, particularly the dialectic between the ‘personal’ and the ‘professional’ and its implications for professional practice.MethodEight therapists participated in semi‐structured, qualitative interviews. Verbatim transcripts and emergent themes were then subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) using a pluralistic theoretical frame including existential, psychoanalytic and psychosocial thinking.ResultsIt was found that therapists’ personal experiences of climate change were complex and profound, as were their clients'. Therapists’ sense of feeling ill‐equipped to support clients in the climate crisis was indicated.ConclusionFindings suggest it is imperative that professional bodies and training institutions provide leadership and guidance to therapists that enables them to support clients, and themselves, facing potentially dire climate crisis realities. The present study points to a need for professional practice and the work with clients ‘in the room’, therapeutically, to incorporate attention to existential concerns and unconscious processes, by necessity underpinned by therapists’ self‐awareness of their own processes existing in parallel with the clients'. This study also strongly indicated the need to conceptualise clients and therapy itself within social, economic, cultural and political contexts.