Holding the Hope - Reviving Psychological & Spiritual Agency in the Face of Climate Change
Edited by Linda Aspey, Catherine Jackson and Diane Parker, Published by PCCS Books, 2023
Catastrophic climate change and the growing reality of the destruction of Earth’s ecosystem and species extinction hang over us all. These topics are increasingly coming up in the work of all talking therapy professionals – counsellors, psychotherapists, coaches and psychologists. They must be able to hold their clients’ and communities’ emotions and responses – fear, anger, denial, grief, helplessness and hopelessness – and manage their own.
The chapters in this thought-provoking, honest, moving and sobering book explore the frameworks, theoretical constructs and ways of working talking therapists have devised to hold hope and build agency in the face of this immensity of complexity, uncertainty and injustice. Contributors from a range of cultural backgrounds and professional disciplines discuss our inter-relationships with the natural world, indigenous practices and understandings, how to face the reality with our children and young people, how to go on practising at the edge of despair, and much more.
“Politics has been seen as something done to us, but many of the authors in this book stress that health and healing can come from getting together with others to make politics what you do.
Hope flowers in an act of guerrilla gardening, in the supporting of a vulnerable community member. It is not wishful thinking but mindful acting.”
Contents:
Foreword by Sally Weintrobe
Introduction by Catherine Jackson, Linda Aspey and Diane Parker
PART ONE – WE ARE ALL NATURE
1. What your biology teacher didn’t teach you: Reclaiming a Western indigenous relationship with nature for a post-mechanistic world – Roger Duncan
2. What does it mean to be well in unwell times? – Bayo Akomolafe
3. Towards a sacred framework – Niki Harré
4. How green is your mind? – Robin Shohet
PART TWO – HOPE, WHAT HOPE?
5. Radical hope: A dimension of the rooted soul – Hetty Einzig
6. Rewilding hope – Nick Totton
7. Coming home to a post-human body: Finding hopefulness in those who care – Caroline Frizell
8. Holding hope, letting go – Emma Palmer
PART THREE – FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
9. Building change-making capacity: Active Hope Training – Chris Johnstone
10. Imaginative engagement with the climate crisis: The role of climate and ecology fiction – Maggie Turp
11. Breaking the silence: An integrative psychotherapy model for working with eco-anxiety – Pedro Oliveira
12. Deep adaptation coaching in a time of planetary meta-crisis – Matthew Painton
13. Cultivating kinship through therapy – Yasmin Kapadia
14. Solution-focused practice at the edge of despair: Nursing a planet in hospice – Fred Ehresmann
PART FOUR – HOLDING HOPE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE
15. Feeling okay with not feeling okay: Helping children and young people make meaning from their experience of climate emergency – Caroline Hickman
16. Changing the world in one generation: Raising children to grow resilience amid climate and social collapse – Jo McAndrews
17. Climate crisis as emotion crisis: Emotion validation coaching for parents of the world – Andy Miller
“Climate change is a crisis confronting us all, clients and therapists alike. This innovative and important collection of chapters can help us meet this challenge with hope and with a sense of possibility for overcoming inactivity, resignation and despair.
An essential read for therapists who want to face the reality of our world in crisis with their eyes open.”
Image courtesy of PCCS Books and Onlinevents who managed our book launch conference in March 2024