EMDR Therapy Quarterly

In this issue we have presented the findings of our recent survey on the climate crisis, which gives a snapshot of the views and experiences among EMDR therapists on the topic. While not comprehensive, it reveals that many therapists are concerned about climate change, as well as some who deny it is happening. It could be seen as a microcosm of the range of views and feelings out there in the world.

These findings have raised some serious questions and led to challenging discussions within our special interest group (SIG), in particular around our ethical duty and clinical responsibility as mental health professionals in relation to the climate crisis.

• Firstly, is it acceptable for any mental health practitioner today, in light of the established evidence (IPCC, 2022; World Bank, 2022; WHO, 2022; Lawrence et al., 2021), to deny human-induced climate change and its impact on the world at large, on mental health, and on marginalised groups more significantly, including those with mental health difficulties?
• Secondly, what is our duty of care and clinical responsibility? Is it to actively work against our own and others’ denial and disavowal and to steer against collusive silence on this topic?
• Thirdly, how does this translate into how we might create spaces within our therapeutic work with clients for their feelings about the climate crisis to emerge and be named? We ask is it ethical to wait for our clients to name it?

Working with the polycrisis

We are situated in a world of increasing polycrisis (pandemic, wars, cost-of-living crisis, climate and ecological breakdown, etc.), which we can safely say is having an implicit and, for some, explicit impact on our nervous systems and leading to a range of coping responses, including denial and disavowal. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the effects of the polycrisis are not being felt equally by all. Although with time we will all be intensely affected by increasing global inequality, this crisis is having its earliest and most powerful effects on those who have done the least to cause it. (Guivarch et al., 2022; World Bank, 2022).

With growing awareness of unjust systems and contexts of power (e.g., Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the gender debate), the British Psychological Society (BPS) has in recent years recognised the Power Threat Meaning Framework,  (PTMF) (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018), as a valid alternative perspective for understanding psychological distress, in particular as it emphasises not only the ‘what happened to you’ approach (rather than ‘what’s wrong with you’) but also locates power and threat as situated and contextualised.

The PTMF has also been a very helpful tool to understand our response to the climate crisis (Morgan et al., 2022). The climate crisis is one such trauma context that we are all situated within, and there is an argument that this needs to be named with its gathering impact on us all. The breakdown of sustainability is the ultimate pre-traumatic elephant in the room of existential proportions, and whether our clients are specifically bringing it or not, is it not our role to recognise it in some way, and if so, what ethical conflicts does this throw up for us as therapists?

In the recently published “Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown”, Jenny O’Gorman (as cited in Anderson et al.,2014) revisits the ethics of therapeutic practice in relation to the climate crisis and suggests, “We are now in need of a radical ethics in order to give voice to that which has been silenced. It is fitting therefore, in the current context of the climate crisis, to revisit what it means for us to practice ethically, including reflecting on that which has been silenced socio-politically as well as within ourselves.”

Climate silence

Let’s cast our memory back to recent history, when mental health professionals struggled to bring other issues out into the open. Not so long ago, therapists refrained from explicitly naming or asking questions about experiences of child sexual abuse, racism and suicidality.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) was one of the culturally hidden occurrences in society. Among professionals, some therapists believed that it happened, and others believed it was just a product of the client’s imagination, their projection or their fantasy. As a result of these beliefs and the lack of ethical guidance around these topics, great harm was done to many clients who revealed stories of abuse that were not believed. There were also some cases in the past, once the prevalence of CSA was accepted, where presumably well-intentioned therapists led clients into ‘memory recovery’ work, which was also highly questionable and potentially damaging.

In the present day, as we have seen in recent and current election campaigns in the UK, Europe and the US, the impending and already occurring climate crisis also appears to be a cultural and political taboo, presenting another area where we are at risk of collusive silence.

Again, as we discovered in the therapist survey, some colleagues are ready to accept that climate breakdown is happening, while others deny it entirely, suggesting perhaps to their clients that the anxiety they feel is solely related to childhood issues.

As has now been well-documented in “Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown” (Anderson et al.,2014), harm is already being done as clients venture to express their anxiety about the unfolding climate crisis and are not believed. “Some therapists continue to interpret feelings about the external world solely as representations of early relational experiences. Such erasure of a client’s felt experience stands in stark contrast with the ethical principle of non-malevolence…” (O’Gorman, 2024, as cited in Anderson et al.,2014)

But we also know that many therapists report that clients do not talk about the climate crisis, and therefore this topic is not approached, reflecting what we have already learned about other collusive silences around abuse, racism and suicidality, where just because clients are not naming it does not mean it is not happening. We have learned over the years, often painfully, that it is we as therapists who need to tactfully find ways to bring these topics into the open and give clients permission to address difficult topics to help shed light on systemic omissions and injustices.

When the psychosocial context of therapy is not acknowledged within the therapy room, the client may wonder if there can be a space for their feelings around this (the climate crisis). Avoiding engagement with a client’s broader psychosocial context could be interpreted as contravening the ethical tenet that therapists ‘do not harm or collude in the harming of clients.

O’Gorman, 2024, as cited in Anderson et al.,2014

Climate silence is so common that it has become normalised as a way of coping with what is happening to us and to our planet. In ‘Active Hope’ (2012), Joanna Macy and psychologist Chris Johnstone talk about three narratives that we as individuals might move between or remain locked into. ‘Business as usual’ is the dominant, mainstream narrative that suggests humankind can carry on as we are, with high levels of consumption of energy and goods, creating huge amounts of waste, and seeing nature only as a resource to be used for our purposes. When looking at the world from this perspective, periodic disasters due to climate are seen as only temporary interruptions and not to be particularly concerned about. This perhaps explains why it is possible for us to not respond to the evidence and science of the climate crisis as the emergency it is: when we look around, what we see overwhelmingly is people carrying on with business as usual.

Perhaps our collusive silence is so powerful because we are all in it, and if we start to name it, we all wake up to our sense of helplessness, grief and anger. By stepping out of ‘business as usual’, we challenge our very need for and belief in our present safety. The climate crisis calling this into question may feel destabilising to our role as therapists.

However, the end of collusive silence on topics such as childhood sexual abuse has not led to helplessness; on the contrary, it has empowered millions of individuals to reclaim their narratives and begin the healing process. Research shows that open discussions about trauma can significantly improve psychological outcomes, something with which we are all familiar (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). This shift towards openness and validation fosters a sense of community and support, enabling people to transform their experiences into resilience and empowerment rather than remaining trapped in isolation, fear and silence. The same goes for those feeling distressed about climate and ecological breakdown, who often also feel isolated as a result (Broad, 2024). It is therefore not surprising that climate cafés have become successfully established spaces to safely share and explore these difficult feelings and build community and why the Climate Crisis SIG now also offers regular climate cafés to members of the EMDR Association.

Is it not our role as trauma therapists to bring into the light that which is in the shadows, to name appropriately how we are all within the climate crisis, and then to use our skills and resources to build both our own and our clients’ resilience?

EMDR has so much to offer, including the adaptive information processing model (AIP), with its inbuilt capacity to unpick and resolve personal trauma from a wider context. It enables clients to access significantly increased internal resources to handle not just their personal challenges but also the unstable climate of the future that is now unfolding. While it may feel quite challenging to us as trauma therapists, with our focus on maintaining a sense of present safety. O’Gorman (2024, as cited in Anderson et al.,2014) suggests that:

By inviting in the messy and destructive forces at play in ecological destruction, we allow ourselves and our clients to work towards a state of integration, recognising that the dichotomy of a safe therapy room and an unsafe world is a false one. We navigate along a spectrum of safety and unsafety, a constantly changing dynamic with the possibility of creativity, destruction and all that lies between.

Moving forwards

In the first instance, we are pleased that the EMDR Association UK has adopted our proposed position statement on the climate crisis.

What is needed now, as clearly reflected in the survey, is leadership and the initiation of a wider discussion about how to bring the climate crisis into the open, with consideration of training and research needs within our own field of EMDR.

Colleagues reading these lines are very welcome to join our Climate Crisis Special Interest Group, which organises regular meetings and climate cafés to share feelings and experiences and explore the indeed existential challenges we’ve sought to lay out in this article.