When Anxiety Makes Sense: Working with Climate Distress in Clinical Practice

Climate change, ecological loss, political instability, war, displacement, racial injustice, and other overlapping crises are increasingly entering the therapy room—sometimes directly, and sometimes as a quiet background weight. Clients may present with panic, despair, grief, numbness, avoidance, urgency, burnout, or a sense that they are “supposed” to talk about something more personal. Clinicians may be navigating these same realities themselves.

This workshop introduces climate distress and eco-grief as understandable responses to real and ongoing threats, rather than as irrational anxiety or individual pathology. Participants will consider how large-scale systemic stressors affect mental health, how the climate crisis intersects with inequity and oppression, and how therapists can make room for what is being said—and not being said—in clinical work.

The program will offer practical ways to help clients stay present with climate-related distress without becoming overwhelmed or paralyzed. Drawing from climate psychology, somatic and mindfulness-based approaches, grief models, and values-based action, participants will explore how to validate distress, support nervous system regulation, invite embodied processing, and help clients move toward grounded, sustainable, and even joy-connected action.