Main description:

Global heating, catastrophic climate change and the growing reality of ecosystem damage and accelerated species extinction hang over us all. For the counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, coaches and their supervisors who make up the talking therapy professions, these topics are increasingly coming up in their work. They must deal both with their clients' and communities' emotions and responses - their fear, anger, denial, grief, helplessness and hopelessness - and with their own. The chapters in this thought-provoking, honest, moving and sobering book explore the frameworks, theoretical constructs and ways of working they have devised to hold hope and build agency in the face of all this complexity, uncertainty and injustice. Contributors from a range of cultural backgrounds and professional disciplines discuss our inter-relationships with the natural world, indigenous practices and understandings, acknowledging our betrayal of our children and young people, how to go on practising at the edge of despair, staying well in unwell times, 'rewilding' hope, deep adaptation coaching and much more.

Contents:

Foreword by Sally Weintrobe, Introduction, PART 1 - With the Earth in mind, 1. What your biology teacher didn't teach you: Reclaiming a Western indigenous relationship with nature for a post-mechanistic world - Roger Duncan, 2. What does it mean to be well in unwell times? - Bayo Akomolafe, 3. Towards a sacred framework - Niki Harre, 4. How green is your mind? - Robin Shohet, PART 2 - Hope, what hope? 5. Radical hope: a dimension of the rooted soul - Hetty Einzig, 6. Rewilding hope - Nick Totton, 7. Coming home to a post-human body: finding hopefulness in those who care - Caroline Frizell, 8. Holding hope, letting go - Emma Palmer, PART 3 - From theory to practice, 9. Active hope training - Chris Johnstone, 10. Imaginative engagement with the climate crisis: the role of climate and ecology fiction - Maggie Turp, 11. Breaking silos: sketching an integrative psychotherapy model for working with eco-anxiety - Pedro Oliveira, 12. Deep adaptation coaching in a time of planetary meta-crisis - Matthew Painton, 13. Cultivating kinship through therapy - Yasmin Kapadia, 14. Solution focused practice at the edge of despair - Fred Ehresmann, PART 4 - Holding hope for children and young people, 15. Helping children and young people make meaning from their experience of climate emergency - Caroline Hickman, 16. Changing the world in one generation: raising children to grow resilience amid climate and social collapse - Jo McAndrews, 17. Climate crisis as emotion crisis: Emotion validation coaching for parents of the world - Andy Miller