Climate psychology, a burgeoning field born from the intersection of human psychology and our changing environment, has seen recent growth driven by heightened climate awareness and a need to understand the psychological barriers hindering action. Eva Jahn, a seasoned trauma psychotherapist, joined this field after witnessing emotional voids in climate activism and the resonance between Earth’s violence and violence against marginalized bodies. Co-founding initiatives like the Climate Emotional Resilience Institute, she supports clients navigating climate distress, as well as the public through trainings and forums, empowering individuals and communities.

In a dialogue with Bioneers President Teo Grossman, Eva delves into the psychological complexities individuals face amidst climate crises. She addresses the parental challenge of balancing climate awareness and hopeful action for children. Her vision sees climate psychology fostering shifts in consciousness, resilience, and collective action toward a more harmonious relationship with our planet.

Eva Jahn will host a panel about climate anxiety and response at Bioneers 2024, a session presented in partnership with the Climate Psychology Certificate Program at CIIS.

Teo Grossman: Climate psychology is a fairly nascent field, emerging as a part of the profession alongside our increasing intellectual awareness and physical experience of a changing climate. Would you be able to give a little more background on the emergence of this field of study and treatment? 

Eva Jahn: Yes, of course. I would say that the field may have had its origin with psychoanalyst Harold Searles, who wrote in 1960 about the significant role of the “non-human environment,” as he called it, in the psychological life of humans and the implications of their disconnection with nature. He also introduced the psychoanalytic idea that some may ignore environmental degradation to keep their own idealized childhood intact and that others with less ideal childhoods may have less investment in preserving that early fantasy or believing that they can disconnect from the more-than-human world. As much as some analytically trained psychotherapists may take that idea into account in their current work with climate distress, the field really aims not to pathologize any of the feelings that arise. I mean, how can we pathologize a normal, healthy response to an actual threat? Shouldn’t we be expected to grieve, to experience fear, to be angry when part of the world that we love is dying?

Ecopsychology is another influence that started the dialogue between Psychology and Ecology around the early 1990’s with Theodore Roszak’s book The Voice Of The Earth and comes from the premise that each one of us comes from the Earth and is part of the Earth. But of course, none of these are original thoughts as Indigenous peoples have embodied and lived from and in that place of connection with the more-than-human world throughout time. 

But climate psychology as a field really emerged only recently with the growing acceptance of climate change and an interest in studying psychological processes that may interfere with people taking action. Many analytically-minded people, such as Donna Orange, Elizabeth Allured, and Sally Weintrobe, are leading the way and helping us understand the dynamics around dissociation, narcissism, denial, and how our resistance towards knowing plays a big role in it. How is it that we can see and care about what is happening in this world as well as not see and not care at the same time?

Climate Psychology is now considered more as an umbrella discipline including a range of many subfields such as disaster work, social justice, clinical work that includes group and individual treatment, peer support, clinical research, acute disaster and frontline responses, supporting the climate movement and really anyone on the frontline through emotional resilience trainings, writing curriculum to support schools and universities, and so on. We have climate psychologists who are working with national and local governments and NGOs as well as the United Nations and corporations in addition to the clinical work with individuals or small groups. 

TG: How did you come to this work? 

EJ: As a psychotherapist specializing in trauma, I have worked in the field of gender-based violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence, for a long time. As faculty for the International Center for Mental Health & Human Rights, I was co-facilitating trauma and resiliency groups for communities on the frontline of war. My partner works in climate activism, and we have spent much time in that world together. I have witnessed many friends needing to take a step back from climate work because of burnout. I think a combination of watching the lack of emotional support in the movement, my own complex feelings towards this crisis, and the direct correlation between enacted violence on female bodies and the earth really sparked a passion to intentionally bring this work more into my practice as well as wider spaces.  

As my psychotherapy clients began increasingly talking about climate anxiety, existential dread, and a fear of bringing children into this world or feeling alone in their experience with climate distress, my colleague Elizabeth Driscoll from the International Center and I started to offer online climate emotional resilience groups and trainings to support the navigation of all these complex feelings of climate distress and create community support. I became an active member of our mother ship, as I like to call it, the Climate Psychology Alliance, and received a climate psychology certificate from CIIS. I then later co-founded CERI, the Climate Emotional Resilience Institute, to meet the growing requests for training, workshops, and talks around the intersection of mental health and climate change and to create a small collaborative community of professionals to support activists, medical providers, educators, researchers, public servants and others confronting climate change in their work and beyond with emotional resilience so they can continue to go out and do the work. 

TG: I understand you’ve worked with a wide range of individuals and even institutions and organizations, from scientists to government agencies to front-line activists. Can you share the range of concerns folks have and the approach that climate psychology brings to these situations?

EJ: I think one way to answer this question is to bring in Finnish climate psychologist Panu Pihkala’s work talking about the psychological awakening process to crisis. As we are moving from unknowing to semi-consciousness to awakening to shock, humans, whose brains are not very well set up to deal with uncertainty in the first place, may experience complex feelings and try to cope with those feelings, including trying to make them go away again. So one way to cope might be jumping into action – full speed. We may grieve and retreat from the world for a while. We may get angry, fearful, and rageful. Experience existential dread or disenfranchised grief. Feel guilt or shame. We may want to distance ourselves from the knowing, even fall back into the comfort of denial for a while to avoid that new created consciousness. 

Panu says that distancing ourselves from the climate crisis is actually a crucial part of coexisting with it. Not dissociation, which is a mostly unconscious coping strategy where the individual is not in control. Distancing is a choice that you can make at times to create space for yourself. Susi Moser calls it “functional denial”  – those necessary breaks from grieving, from action. To take a breath. To allow yourself to retreat. To not absorb every climate change news article that comes your way, but to recharge. We are in this for the long haul, so we need to make this work sustainable. 

One thing that I see over and over, especially with the climate activists and scientists I work with, is burnout. Slowing down and taking a moment for oneself to rest and recover feels almost impossible when we breathe in the urgency of this crisis all the time. Climate psychologist Caroline Hickman introduced the terms internal and external activism. Too much external activism creates burnout, and too much internal activism may lead you to retreat from the important work in the world. So we need to find a balance between the two. We need to titrate. To be able to move back and forth between taking in difficult information and suffering and calming ourselves. And the way we do that is we listen. We lean in and pay attention to our nervous system: It will tell you when something starts to be too much. Deciding between the need to continue or the need to retreat is often tricky, as both are needed.

TG: You and I are both parents of small children. One of the challenges I face, both as a professional engaged in climate-related work and as a person living on the planet at this moment in time, is how to support my children to be informed without becoming overwhelmed and despondent. I know one of the leaders in this field, Leslie Davenport (who will also be joining us at Bioneers this year), has written an entire book on this subject. I realize this is an enormous question, and it’s different family by family and child by child, but I’m interested in the parental struggle to balance information and hope, criticism and action. 

EJ: That’s a great question and such a personal one too. And yes, Leslie can speak to it in so much more detail. I think with any parenting approach, we start with ourselves first. Asking: ‘How do I, as a parent, feel when I read disturbing news about the extinction of animals? Do I allow my grief to arise, or do I try to push it down? Does it make me anxious to even think about approaching this topic with my child? What other barriers do I identify within myself that may prevent me from talking to my child about the crisis?’ Maybe if I let myself get close to imagining my children’s pain, it’s almost too unbearable to tolerate. I may worry that I could exacerbate my child’s feelings if I bring it up.  

The truth is that we protect our children by talking to them about the scary stuff and making an effort to hear them out and understand it from their perspective. Daniel Siegel, who has written many books on parenting, says that acknowledging and naming our feelings helps us make them less scary. We name them to tame them. But as parents, we have to be ready to receive our child’s feelings with a regulated nervous system. When both sides are dysregulated, it’s very hard to find connections, and it may send the message to your child that this can’t be talked about. 

Once you have a regulated connection with each other, you can introduce climate change through children’s books and leave plenty of space for questions. You can ask them if they have heard about it before. Dreamt about it. Maybe in their school. You can share that it sometimes feels scary to you too. And then you can look at ways together on how to take better care of the Earth. You can choose a particular issue together that you both feel passionate about. 

Depending on your child’s age, you can study it together, read books, and then make space for feelings to arise and listen actively and openly when your child approaches you with concerns. And then link an action to that issue. I personally have taken my child to many demonstrations and rallies, and we create protest art for it. Or you could create little pamphlets and help your child to talk to your neighbors about it. The list is endless. Just follow your child’s interests. One thing I want to say about hope, which in itself can be its own question, is that the type of hope we are looking to pass on to our children and need for ourselves is not what Lauren Berlant may call cruel optimism. The one that lets us off the hook by luring us into a false sense of comfort that everything will turn out ok in the end. Instead we are looking for a hope that is grounded and engaged. Where we are not convinced the future is going to be great at all, but we are still going to apply ourselves toward the best outcome we can get. It’s engaging because we are writing ourselves and our children into the story as an active participant. 

TG: What are you excited by as this field continues to grow? What brings you hope?

EJ: Joanna Macy talks about the three dimensions necessary to create the change we need. 

1. Holding Actions 

2. Structural Change 

3. Shift in Consciousness

As it stands right now, I believe that the field of climate psychology can and should show up in all of these dimensions, but especially to provide a necessary foundation for that third dimension. To stand in collaborative communion next to all the other traditions and values, new and ancient, that have been shared over so many generations: in songs, and prayers, and demonstrator’s signs and banners. In the climate emotional resilience groups and workshops I run, I have witnessed so much beauty, compassion, and connection when people come together and share and allow themselves to be vulnerable. People feel less alone in their fight against climate change as it can feel a lonely road for many at times. 

Lin Yutang says: “Hope is like a road in the country, there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.” I think that gives me hope. Movements give me hope. My family gives me hope. My engaged community. Witnessing the resilience of our Earth gives me hope. Seeing people excited, engaged, creative, and passionate about climate change gives me hope. Hope, as so many of these complex feelings such as fear, compassion, outrage can all be a means to an end. They all motivate and can move us towards imagining and creating the future we want to see. Joanna Macy talks about the Great Turning. The story of the emergence of new and creative human responses that are going to enable a transition to a life-sustaining society where we join together to act for the sake of life on earth. And even though I go through phases of despair and anger at outrageous human behavior and may lose faith at times in our capacity to create change on a global level, this story provides a refuge for me. And then I choose to turn towards seeing beauty again, as we all are surrounded by it all the time. And that is the backpocket radical hope I try to stay in relationship with.