May 024 CPA-NA Newsletter
May 2024 Newsletter
Dear Climate-Aware Colleagues
Join us on our collective journey as we explore what it means to practice psychotherapy in a climate changed world, and how we can best use our professional wisdom to help create a just, sustainable, and resilient culture.
Letter from Co-President
Dear membership,
Today is Earth Day, and I'm thinking about its extraordinary origins in the civil rights movement and the environmental movement of the1970s. I imagine the courage, conviction, tenacity, and sense of solidarity that enabled people to keep stepping forward despite the odds and in the face of setbacks, summoning what Joanna Macy characterizes as “active hope.”
The long view of hindsight is always 20/20. But looking forward to the uncertain and precarious future, our vision gets murky; present-tense emotions and contradictions overwhelm. The concatenation of recent news—about waves of campus protests related to Gaza, union victories in the south, Trump's trial and projected election odds—makes for feeling overwhelmed and hopeless.
Yet, at our best, we are an organization of members who understand such feelings. We know how to face difficult truths and harness the will to collaborate. We are an organization arising out of and uniquely suited to this time even when our work is difficult.
Looking backwards, feeling the present moment, and projecting into the future, I am thrilled that members Rebekah Hart and Amy Lister will host a two-part training based Joanna Macy's work, The Work That Reconnects, that could not be more timely or relevant, as it is rooted in ecology, seeks to reclaim grounding, and elicit active hope. Also, members Maria Vamvalis and Jeremy Lehrer will host a members-only space to connect about Gaza and Israel. These rising tensions loom as harbingers of a world becoming more unstable and polarized. The Executive Committee sees our mission as that of practicing and supporting each other in holding multiple truths, staying with and connecting through difficult feelings, and remaining in conversation. Indeed, we aim to provide for ourselves what we hope to then offer others. Now and into the future.
CPA-NA Co-President, Rebecca Weston, JD and LCSW
Linking Conversations
In this bi-monthly series, we talk together about what’s happening in the world–-such as extreme weather, political moments, and cultural flashpoints—and about linking thought and action, being and doing, the internal and external worlds.
The conversations are founded on the idea that to build an empathic and justice- oriented response to the climate crisis, we need to support and honor those parts of being human that “link” - to our own inner lives, to the subjective experiences of others, to the collective lived experience of our communities, and to the environment in which we live and upon which we depend. In a culture that persistently attacks and disavows these links, we aim to recognize and support them.
Free. $5 suggested donation. Please register in advance and arrive promptly.
Linking conversations: DAYTIME
Wednesday, May 1, 12 NOON-1PM (ET)/9-10AM (ET)
Linking conversations: EVENING
East Coast: Wednesday, June 5, 7:30-8:30 (ET). Topic: TBA.
West Coast: Wednesday, June 5, 7:30-8:30 (PT) Topic: TBA.
SUGGESTED TOPIC FOR APRIL/MAY:
How are the political energies surrounding the US elections impacting you? Surely, this year will heighten the divisive discourse on many issues that underlie and are related to the condition of the environment/climate. If only we could just stand up for human and ecological rights for their own sake, without the need to be political or divisive! How are you feeling emotionally and physically in the run up to this November? Would you appreciate a safe space to discuss, experience, share and feel around this?
Climate Cafés
Climate Café Facilitator Support Group
This support meeting is for those who have already been trained in climate café facilitation by CPA or CPA-NA at one of our training workshops, or who have been trained in a similar climate emotion group model. Like the non-directive, reflective model of climate cafés, this structured consultation approach allows members to bring challenges and listening support to each other around holding, or anticipating holding, climate cafés and similar emotion-support groups. Meets the 2nd Monday each month. Free.
Facilitators: Wendy Greenspun PhD, Janet A. Castellini, LCSW, LCADC, Elizabeth Allured, Psy.D
How to Facilitate and Host a Climate Café: An Online Experiential Training.
For those interested in learning to become a Climate Café Facilitator, this workshop includes learning the principles and practicalities of this reflective group process for sharing climate emotions. In addition to discussing the practical aspects of organizing and facilitating, the training includes an experiential “taster” climate café and a toolkit of practical resources.
Fee: $35 for CPA-NA members, $40 for non-members. A very limited number of hardship/lower rate tickets are available; more info.
Saturday, May 18, 11:30AM-1:45PM (ET)
Facilitators: Wendy Greenspun, PhD, Liliane Mavridara MA, DipACLM, Dipl. ABT (NCCAOM)
Saturday, July 20, 11:30AM-1:45PM (ET)
Facilitators: Elizabeth Allured, PsyD and Jennifer Fendya, PhD
Launching Your Climate Café: New Facilitator Conversations
If you've completed the CPA-NA Climate Café Facilitator Training, and have questions or concerns about launching your own Climate Café, please join us for this special support training. In the training you'll have an opportunity to participate in another abbreviated café with explicitly transparent facilitation modeling, followed by time for conversation with attention to your practical questions including using the resources on the group facilitators’ Hub, finding a co-facilitator, where to host your cafe, and more. $10. No-one turned away from participating for lack of funds. Reach out to Audrey Martin to request assistance.
Saturday, June 1, 1:00-2:00 PM (ET)
Facilitators: Sadie Forsythe, LICSW, and Audrey Martin, MFT
_________________________________________
What is a climate café?
It’s…
An informal, open, respectful, confidential space to safely share emotional responses and reactions related to the climate and environmental emergency (i.e. a “container”).
A space for exploration of thoughts, feelings and experiences rather than what we are DOING about the climate crisis.
A quiet, reflective experience—a haven from usual busyness and activity.
Not designed to lead participants to any conclusion or toward action (actions can be discussed, but reflection is paramount).
Online Workshop:
The Work that Reconnects for Clinicians
Tools for Tending to Ourselves and our Clients in Turbulent Times
A workshop for psychotherapists
In two parts: Friday, May 3 and Friday, May 10
3:00-5:30PM (ET)
As climate aware therapists, what tools can we use for working with climate distress and hopelessness in the therapy room? And how do we simultaneously work with our own climate emotions as human beings equally impacted by the unfolding polycrisis? The Work that Reconnects is a pioneering set of practices that normalize climate distress as a healthy response to a planet in danger, and nourish collective resilience for the long haul. Based on the work of Joanna Macy, the Work that Reconnects offers an innovative framework that can both serve as a guidepost to us as clinicians, and an experiential methodology to work with climate and social justice related distress directly.
Presenters: Rebekah Hart, MA, MSc, MFT and Amy Lister, RP(Q), DTATI, PCC, OCT
This workshop for psychotherapists is sponsored by the Clinical Support Committee of CPA-NA. Fee: $80-$100. Limited discounted tickets are available. Please contact Rebekah Hart for details.
More info on the workshop.
Register here.
Mental Health for Environmental Journalists -
Workshop hosted by
The Uproot Project & Climate Psychology Alliance
Wednesday, May 15
5:00-6:30 PM (ET)
This workshop starts with a presentation from Yessenia Funes (environmental and climate justice journalist and co-facilitator of the CARES Media Initiative with Rebecca Weston) and CPA-NA co-President Rebecca Weston, JD and LCSW, followed by breakout sessions where active participation is expected. Please note that registration is capped at 25 participants, to enable meaningful discussions during this workshop.
Space is limited. Please do not register for this workshop if you are not able to attend the entire 90 min session.
Register here.
Learn more about The Uproot Project and CPA-NA’s CARES Media Initiative.
Exiled Capacities:
Sitting with the Differences that Divide (Gaza & Israel)
Wednesday, May 29
7:00-8:30 PM (ET)
During this online gathering sponsored by the Social Justice Committee, CPA-NA members Maria Vamvalis and Jeremy Lehrer will host a members-only circle to hold space for feelings arising about Gaza and Israel. Rising tensions related to Gaza are painful in their own right and they are also harbingers of what is to come in our unstable world—a world in which relationality is increasingly threatened—particularly in the context of climate change and its related politics of reaction.
Jeremy Lehrer, a writer and member of the CPA-NA's Social Justice Committee, is currently pursuing a Master's degree in social work at Columbia University.
Maria Vamvalis (PhD Candidate) is a consultant, educator, facilitator and researcher. Her doctoral research focuses on how to educate for climate justice in ways that nurture collective well-being.
Tickets: $35. For discounted admission, contact Rebecca Weston.
Register here.
Committee Updates
CARES Media Initiative: Our media project is really making progress. We’ve created the first draft of our climate journalist survey and received extremely helpful and positive feedback from our partnering climate media organizations (Covering Climate Now, Solutions Journalism Network, the Uproot Project and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma) and hope to have it finalized by the end of May. From there, we will focus on a distribution plan. In addition, in collaboration with the Uproot Project, we are co-hosting a workshop, Mental Health for Environmental Journalists, scheduled for May.
Climate and Psyche Writers Committee: We have openings in our supportive Climate and Psyche Writer’s Group for members who are developing psychodynamic climate-related/intersectional articles for psychological and psychoanalytic journals, blogs, and books. We use a collaborative structure responsive to the needs of participating members (prompts, sharing pages, giving feedback and resources, discussion and support, accountability and goal-setting, as appropriate). Meeting online on Sunday mornings noon (ET)/9AM (PT) for one hour, approximately every other week. Please contact Penelope Starr Karlin for more information, and tell us a bit about you.
Clinical Support Committee: There are still some spaces left in our clinical workshop The Work that Reconnects for Clinicians: Tools for Tending to Ourselves and our Clients in Turbulent Times presented by Rebekah Hart and Amy Lister. Click here for more information and registration. Stay tuned for further clinical support offerings. Our planning committee welcomes your interest and ideas. Please contact Wendy Greenspun.
NEW! Community Mental Health Committee: This committee will be exploring ways to offer our climate mental health skills beyond the individual therapy room, including public health and community resilience models and other emergent practices to promote and facilitate healthy community, both as a means for coping with disaster and climate distress, and as a strategy for strengthening climate actions. Our next meeting will be on May 1 at 3PM (ET). Please contact Jenni Silverstein for more information.
Education and Training/Professional Development Committee: At our April meeting we welcomed several new members, and discussed Chelsea Rissner’s upcoming presentation to social workers-in-training on climate change. We also discussed specifics of how to give realistic information in presentations that does not leave attendees feeling hopeless. Several very experienced presenters in the group shared their accumulated wisdom on this and other topics with us all. Please contact us if you’d like help in working on a presentation: Elizabeth Allured, PsyD, Committee Chair.
Educator and School Counselor Committee: The Educator and School Counselor Committee is thrilled to announce that The Educator's Guide to Climate Emotions is available for download on the CPA-NA website. The guide is the result of over a year's worth of work by the committee in consultation with youth climate leaders, researchers, mental health and education professionals. It aims to provide a variety of approaches for working with climate emotions in educational settings. To learn more about our committee and what we do and/or to join us, contact Carolyn McGrath.
Expressive Arts Committee: During the April meeting, the EXA committee focused on the creation of a collective Eco Poem, with a focus on a vision for the future. Guided by Mor Keshet, the group heard several poems by Philip Larkin, bell hooks, and Nora Bateson and then processed the felt impact of each poem. Members then each wrote their own poem about a vision for the future which Mor then compiled into this offering for the CPA-NA community:
If you are a Creative Arts Therapist or interested in how the Expressive Arts intersect in climate psychology and wish to explore these themes creatively, please join us in future meetings. The EXA committee meets the second Friday of every month at 1:15PM (ET). You may reach out to Mor Keshet for additional information.
Film Series Committee: The CPA-NA Film Series Committee is delighted to announce Shift Happens, Broadening Awareness of Relationality: A Conversation with Nora Bateson and Steffi Bednarek. Thought leaders and authors Nora Bateson and Steffi Bednarek riff around what is shaping their understanding of and our response to what it means to be psychotherapists and human beings in this time of collapse, transformation, and evolutionary shift. Online, Friday, June 28, NOON (ET) / 11AM (CT) / 9AM (PT), 6PM (CEST).
Participants are encouraged to pre-screen the award-winning documentary Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson, directed by Nora Bateson. The film showcases the important contributions that Gregory Bateson made to psychology, cybernetics, and anthropology through his seminal work in the development of systems theory.
CPA-NA is honored to host the North American launch of Steffi Bednarek’s Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety, (Penguin Random House, 2024) Steffi’s book is an anthology of contemporary psychologists and mental health workers offering guidance and inquiry for the field of psychotherapy through the uncharted waters of global transformation and collapse. Publication date: June 18
Hub Committee: The Hub Committee is working on the initiative to offer climate cafés to the public from within CPA-NA. This involves thinking about training, mentoring, supporting newer facilitators, as well as bringing experienced training facilitators into the project. As part of this, Sadie Forsythe and Audrey Martin offered the second New Facilitator Conversations meeting on April 6 and will offer it again on June 1. In addition, committee members are addressing the complexity of compensation for facilitators and trainers with considerations of equity, engagement with the Budget Committee, and research on honorarium policies in other activist spaces.
If you’re interested in being part of the team to offer climate cafés to the public from within CPA-NA, please contact Sadie Forsythe. If you haven’t yet participated in the Climate Cafe Facilitator Training, take the first step to join the team.
Social Justice Committee: We are thrilled to share with you the initiatives taking shape within the Social Justice Committee. Committed to fostering dialogue, inclusivity, and innovative practices, our committee is dedicated to addressing social justice issues within the CPA-NA community and beyond.
Our first project is “Exiled Capacities: Sitting with the Differences that Divide,” an online gathering on Wednesday, May 29, 7-8PM (ET)/ 4-5PM (PT). CPA-NA members Maria Vamvalis and Jeremy Lehrer will host a members-only circle to hold space for feelings arising about Gaza and Israel, creating a safe space for members to engage in constructive dialogue on the complex and sensitive topic of Gaza and Israel. Through open discussion, we aim to provide a platform for members to share their feelings and perspectives, in order to foster understanding and empathy.
In our second project, we are continuing development on workshops that explore alternative models of clinical work. These workshops will incorporate diverse approaches such as liberation psychology, community-oriented mental health, positive psychology, and radical eco-psychology. By embracing innovative and comprehensive practices, we strive to enrich the field of psychology and better serve our communities.
We invite you to join us every other Monday at noon (PT) in our mission to promote social justice within the CPA-NA community and beyond. Whether you're passionate about dialogue facilitation, workshop development, or advocacy, there's a place for you in our committee. For more info, contact Emily Hart Roth.
Youth Committee: The Youth Committee is working on developing a CEU workshop for clinicians interested in learning more about how to support children of all ages with climate emotions. If you feel passionate about meeting the needs of young people and their caregivers in these times, please reach out to Jenni Silverstein. The committee meets monthly and we are open to new members.
Regional Coordinators Corner
A Regional Coordinator is a member of the CPA-NA that acts as the organization's point of contact for a particular region. RCs may work with environmental justice, professional mental health, or climate psychology-related organizations in their region that collaborates with the CPA-NA by pointing it in the right direction, establishing contacts, and planning next steps. RCs also serve as a point of contact for CPA-NA members themselves by recruiting and holding meetings for members in their areas. RCs provide support for their regional members by keeping local members informed of events, meetings, advocacy efforts, self- & other-supportive services, and assisting regional members in coordinating events and initiatives to facilitate member engagement. Currently, there are 16 RCs spanning across 15 states in the U.S.A. and two in Ontario, Canada.
Natalie Thomas, RC in Ontario, Canada, writes about her work:
“I work as a professor and therapist in Ontario, Canada with a small private practice in Guelph. I hold monthly climate cafes online and have started running community-based events and workshops on climate emotions and mental health. I also work closely with Cordelia Huxtable as my fellow RC in Ontario, and we are working towards increasing the connection between other CPA members across Canada and supporting those who have expressed interest in becoming RCs in other provinces.
In addition to this work, I’ve been writing and presenting my thoughts and experiences on using IFS for climate distress. A short article was published by Parts & Self on this, including the benefits of climate cafés. A recording of a presentation that I gave to the Canadian Ecopsychology Network on the same topic can be found here.”
Out and About
Jodie Skillicorn, our "Out and About" news collator, would like to hear from members who have have been quoted in the media or have authored research articles/books. We want to keep our membership up to date on these important activities! Please send updates to Jodie directly.
Elizabeth Bechard and Jenni Silverstein were briefly interviewed on NPR’s Anti-Dread Climate Podcast about how to talk to kids about scary climate news.
Cordelia Huxtable talks about trying to convert her parents on sustainable practices (e.g. lawn maintenance) in an article, “You’re Worried About Climate Change. Your Parents Are Not,” published in Chatelaine.
Noa Heiman’s article, “Climate change in and out of the therapy room,” was published in Nature Climate Change. She addresses the growing need for therapists to learn how to support clients with climate stress by learning to validate and tolerate difficult emotions, connect with resources for support, community, and action, and the necessity of building and sustaining active hope.
On April 20, the San Francisco Chronicle published Ariella Cook-Shonkoff’s editorial, “Earth Day should be a federal holiday. Here’s why.”
CPA-NA members contributed to the anthology edited by Steffi Bednarek, Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety, in which a diverse group of psychologists and mental health practitioners call for a sea change in the commons of the therapeutic profession and for action that meets the sobering realities of our moment. Publication date: June 18.
Educator's Guide to Climate Emotions
While young people may not always talk about these experiences in school or act outwardly distressed, their feelings about climate change are still making their way into the classroom. What can educators do to help young people navigate these difficult emotions?
The Educator's Guide to Climate Emotions, written by a team of teachers, researchers, and mental health clinicians, in consultation with youth climate leaders and climate psychology professionals, offers a variety of approaches for working with climate emotions in educational settings.
Audio Recording and Podcast
“How Did We Get Here, and Where to Now?”
A Conversation with Bill McKibben and Sally Weintrobe
CPA-NA hosted a conversation between American environmentalist Bill McKibben and British psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe
about her book, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare.
Click here to listen.
In the CPA-NA podcast, Affecting Climate Change, host Karyne Messina, PhD, collaborates with the New Books Network to review non-fiction and fiction books that align with the CPA-NA mission.
New episode:
Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future by Charlie Hertzog Young (Footnote Press, 2023).
In her book, Charlie Hertzog Young explores how climate chaos and the failure of those in power to tackle it are causing an inevitable mental health crisis across the globe. The relationship between the climate and our emotional well-being goes far deeper than eco-anxiety. It goes to the roots of our civilization—its principles, its practices, and its false solutions.