Climate Crisis SIG
The SIG started meeting in January 2023, and we have regular online meetings as well as holding climate cafes through the year. Our meetings and committee work focuses broadly on these areas:
- Using our collective power: connecting with our own Association and EMDR Associations more widely, as well as other professional bodies and groups within the UK to coordinate messaging around the climate emergency as a mental health and social injustice emergency. Learn and share from what other organisations are doing, identify any parallels which can feed into the EMDR Association’s role and response to the climate emergency, developing position statements or policies and relevant training. Support and feed into the Association’s increasing move towards sustainability. We have recently drafted a climate crisis position statement which has been approved by the Association and will soon be shared. We have also joined with Climate Minds Coalition alongside other professional bodies with view to developing and sharing resources.
- Increasing our awareness and resilience: Looking at how we as therapists can prepare ourselves for increases in eco-distress (our own and our clients’) by doing our own emotional processing in order to become a safe container for our clients too, increasing our own knowledge base, increasing our trauma-informed awareness of the psychology of the climate crisis. Establishing ways to look after ourselves in this unfolding crisis, and considering together what our professional duty of care is and how this might translate into how we name climate change in the room with clients. In our first year we have held meetings with some discussions on this topic, and started running climate cafes for therapists.
- Working with clients: Sharing experiences of working with eco-distress and climate change related themes within an EMDR and trauma informed model. Considering what aspects of EMDR will be particularly important and how they might be adapted; how to disentangle personal trauma from the contextual unfolding climate / biodiversity-loss / social inequalities related trauma. What aspects of EMDR are most relevant to working with eco-distress. With these topics in mind we also conducted a therapist survey about the climate crisis with 234 EMDR therapists taking part. We aim to write this up shortly and hope that it will inform further discussions on working with clients.
If you are interested in any of the above areas, please come join our mailing list where you will receive regular updates. You can join our regular online group meetings or sign up to an online climate café. Contact mleevenpsychologist@gmail.com
Why climate cafes? Climate cafes are online gatherings facilitated by two participants, who hold a safe listening and sharing space where we can use our stabilisation skills to ‘feel the feelings’ and connect with what comes up for us when thinking about the climate crisis. By sharing in a café, we become more able to remain grounded feeling our own feelings, hopefully enabling us to recognise and sit with our clients’ eco distress when it emerges. While many therapists may feel this issue is not emerging in their therapy rooms, it is sure to be on the increase before too long. The cafes are a place where we can build our own resilience.
Chair: Martina Leeven – mleevenpsychologists@gmail.com