Climate psychology and supervision

Climate psychology

Climate psychology indicates a new way of imagining our internal worlds in all our connectedness and interdependence with the vital forces, the animate objects, the creatures with whom we share habitats’. (Hollway, Hoggett, Robertson & Weintrobe, 2022). It is complex reflecting networking and interdependence as the diagram below indicates.

Climate psychology is concerned with understanding the non-rational dimensions of our collective paralysis in the face of a worsening climate crisis. If we humans simply responded to facts and evidence in rational ways then the gravity of our situation would have led to radical action. The psychological work is to engage how the cultural unconscious shapes the way we experience the world.

Learning how to think into the unthought penumbra of human awareness and bear discomfort, invites a different psychology – one that includes a planetary awareness. Climate psychology is not simply a psychology to explain why climate science is not accepted but one which attends to the instability of cultural transition.

Supervision

Supervision can be a lively exchange touching on ecosystemic and cultural ruptures including ecological distress. This style of supervision opens to what emerges through the relationship and how to stay with the troubles the client brings. Important notions include:

• Listening through to the unheard, unseen at the margins

• Digestion – assimilating what was indigestible in the therapeutic relationship

• Giving a place to shadow: both dark and bright sides

• Deconstructing ideas of right/wrong; the normative voice

• Field theory - everything belongs and the work is to understand how it does

• Permission - how to think the unthinkable

Supervision can be of individual and group work. I have been supervising for over 40 years.