Within Western paradigms, psychotherapy is seen as a way to bring a distressed person back within the realm of the familiar. But our collective “familiar” is fragile, built on dominant norms that accelerate global destruction, extract from our communities, and erode our futures.

We can no longer think of therapeutic practice as bringing clients back to baseline “normal” when our normal is profoundly unwell. Instead, we need to evolve therapy. Climate, Psychology, and Change brings together a diverse group of psychologists and mental health practitioners calling for a sea change.

Editor and climate psychotherapist Steffi Bednarek makes the case for a regenerative disturbance to the commons of our profession—an urgent and insistent call to action that meets the sobering realities of our moment with profound hope for positive change.

Essays explore topics like:

⦿ What decolonizing therapy and re-visioning the field could look like

⦿ Using therapeutic tools to respond to trauma

⦿ What psychologists can offer movements for social change and climate justice

⦿ How to navigate unhelpful responses to climate emergency

⦿ Fostering individual and community resilience

⦿ Nurturing creative solutions to our complex and intersecting crises

Holistic and intersectional, this collection reckons with the ways in which relationships of power, colonialism, and capitalism both reflect and inform the discipline of psychology as we know it. With the inclusion of essays written by clinicians from the Global South, Climate, Psychology, and Change is a collection unlike anything you’ve read before: a necessary response, an urgent appeal, and a fearless look forward at how we care for ourselves and our clients, eyes wide open, with compassion and skill in an uncertain world.