Eco anxiety and grief in psychotherapy with Caroline Hickman
About this workshop
This workshop is part of WPF Therapy’s 2020-2021 CPD programme themed around ‘The World We Live In.’
We are seeing increased psychological distress such as eco-anxiety, depression, and grief as we become more aware of environmental problems. How do we work with this in the consulting room?
During this workshop, we will explore these emergent problems in our psychotherapy practice. We will look at this both theoretically and practically through a climate crisis lens, and develop practical ideas of how to work imaginably with these concerns through art and stories.
Children and young people are increasingly anxious about the state of the world we are living in, they need help to navigate this, and their parents need support in knowing how to parent their children through these changing and difficult times. We will also explore how these crises are having an increased impact on couples and families and how to navigate this in practice as well as how to support people engaged in direct work or campaigning in these fields such as climate activists, conservationists and climate scientists.
We will also make space to examine the connection between climate or eco-anxiety and the distress caused by the COVID virus. This is increasingly important and we will explore the interrelationship between these and examine how to address both in psychotherapy practice.
Workshop aims
By the end of the workshop you can expect:
- to have learned about how the climate and biodiversity crisis leads to feelings of eco-anxiety and increasingly affecting children and young people’s mental health, couples, families and environmental activists
- to have examined the climate and biodiversity crisis in relation to defences and also psychological frameworks of trauma, resilience, hope and hopelessness, anxiety, depression and grief
- to have a greater personal understanding of how the climate and biodiversity crisis is impacting on ourselves as psychotherapists
Workshop leader
Caroline Hickman is an integrative psychosynthesis psychotherapist trained at Re-vision. She studied archetypal and cultural psychology with Thiasos for three years. She teaches at the University of Bath and has been on the Climate Psychology Alliance Executive since 2018 leading on therapeutic outreach, media liaison and developing a series of podcasts on Climate Psychology, Eco-Anxiety and Biodiversity loss - ‘Climate Crisis Conversations - Catastrophe or Transformation’.
She is currently researching and writing about children and young people’s feelings including eco-anxiety about the climate and biodiversity crisis using a psychosocial free association methodology to uncover and explore different stories, narratives and images around our defences against the 'difficult truth' of the climate and biodiversity crisis, and hidden and ‘less conscious’ feelings about climate anxiety. She has been working with different youth climate activist groups globally and is passionate about getting ‘under the surface’ metaphorically and literally. Her psychotherapy dissertation explored grief and depression and our relationship with the sea and saltwater, both real and imaginal.
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