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.
Emergent Space
"Experience shows that synchronistic connections will emerge between group members and make for a very creative conversation."
What is troubling us and what concerns us deeply often falls outside the purely professional setting. It is not a need for therapy, coaching or supervision. It is often too subtle or difficult to discuss with friends. In fact words seldom seem sufficient to do justice to the complex experience.
What makes Emergent Space different than coaching & supervision?
Emergent Space groups face into the absence of a task and stay with what emerges within the group. Participants learn to use themselves as catalysts of self-organising forces inherent in the group. The catalytic approach to transformation is minimalistic and background. It requires inhibiting imperatives to create change and learning to hold the emergent space without trying to make anything happen.
The place of discomfort in creative inquiry
Negative capability - not another goal to aim at, but a process skill. What is different in us is not itself dark but hidden because it is so close to us.
Sensing the Field sensing us
What emerges through our group interaction is a creative process - the mysterious paradox of shaping while we are being shaped. We feel drawn by something and find ourselves moving in that direction, often even before we consciously understand what is involved. When our hearts are touched, something deep within us responds whether this is through love, creative ventures or a call of the soul.
To join an Emergent Space group contact: chris@culture-crisis.net
Saying what you want from the group and
your availability daytime.