Climate Crisis Conversations

Talking climate change in the therapy room

Tree Staunton, Clinical Director of BCPC talks with Caroline Hickman about our current climate and biodiversity crisis, and the important role that psychotherapists may have in facing these difficult truths, and supporting a self -reflective dialogue about our relationship to the world around us as well as our responsibility for it.

 

Asking many questions and not necessarily providing all the answers, they discuss many issues and dilemmas for practice especially how we can nourish a level of deep listening and engagement which may lead to empowerment and appropriate action.

 

Did we Care When Birds and Animals Died during the Sixth Extinction?

In this podcast Sally Weintrobe, psychoanalyst and editor of Engaging with Climate Change, is in conversation with Caroline Hickman about the natural relationship which children have with animals. They feel close to them and fascinated by them. Sally sees our prevailing culture of un-care as working to break links between humans and animals and to invite us to treat animals (and the animal we are) as “distanced others”. How are we facing the Sixth Mass Extinction? Can children help adults repair their inner representations of the natural world and our place in it? The danger is animals will die in their millions without being sufficiently loved to be mourned and fought for. Children are as Vaclav Havel put it “pre-political”, meaning not yet so influenced by culture. The pre-political is, however, deeply political. 

From Anxiety to Agency: stepping up, rather than shutting down, in the face of the climate change crisis

Clover Hogan is a 20-year-old climate activist, researcher on eco-anxiety, and the founder of Force of Nature. 

 In this Podcast, Clover Hogan talks with Caroline Hickman about how depth psychology transformed her approach to her activism, the role of holding despair and optimism in the same breath, and her path to igniting agency in a diversity of audiences - from Wall Street bankers, to 11-year-old students in the classroom.