The OG climate-aware therapist on what to do with your big climate emotions
Climate change is entering therapy rooms, and mental health practitioners are increasingly called upon to to address climate distress in their clients. What’s happening to the earth is affecting our psyches, as well it should. But what if the existing models of therapy aren’t up to the task of addressing climate anxiety? How can therapy’s tools of inner resilience, uncertainty tolerance, nervous system regulation, and healing trauma to solve a problem so large and systemic as climate change?
In this conversation, the OG climate-aware therapist Leslie Davenport makes the case that therapy has to get out of the therapy room and get political, and that the only way to harness the big emotions of climate distress is to nurture our nervous systems so we stop shutting down and burning out, and cultivate the resilience to do something about it all, with others.
Shownotes
- Leslie Davenport’s website and books
- Mental Health and Our Changing Climate report (2017 and 2021 update)
- California Institute for Integral Studies Climate Psychology Certificate program
- The Window of Tolerance explained on Psychology Today
- The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators, in which Leslie has a great essay
- Clayton Page Aldern, author of The Weight of Nature, on Climate Magic
- Polyvagal theory and “co-regulation” information
- An essay about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing on the English language’s inability to capture the human relationship to nature, “The Grammar of Animacy”
- Climate Emotions Wheel and other resources on the Climate Mental Health Network
- Kids receive often less than 2 hours of climate education per year, citation here
- 4 out of 5 parents want climate education, article here
- Climate Psychology Alliance’s Climate-Aware Therapy Directory
- Tara Brach’s RAIN practice
- “Ask a Climate Therapist” resource on Grist.org
Transcript:
DAVENPORT: I now define emotional resiliency for these times as cultivating the ability to remain grounded, empathetic, clear minded, open hearted in the face of increasing distress.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and fellow climate despairing human. Today, my esteemed guest is clinical psychologist and climate emotions guru Leslie Davenport. Leslie combines psychology with expertise from a wide variety of other disciplines to advance creative solutions for climate change that all start with hearts and minds.
DAVENPORT: You can get into this sort of battle in the moment of feeling moved, feeling distressed, feeling inspired, feeling horrified. And it's not even that it necessarily bumps back and forth. It's all one big, distressing, confusing experience.
RAY: I first came across her work when I was trying to retool my teaching as a professor to figure out more about my students' psychological, inside lives and needs. Leslie's book, Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change, was the only thing I could find on the topic of psychology and climate change. And I applied it to what I was doing in my classroom as best as I could.
Ever since I found this book, I've been in touch with her, collaborating with her, and feel so enriched by her teachings and also her unwavering dedication to leveraging her field of psychology in support of the planet. Her book is chock full of exercises that apply insights of psychology to transform feelings about climate change into actions that both preserve your own energy and also help you plug your own climate magic into the world.
Leslie's been a licensed marriage and family therapist in practice for 30 years, and is a founding member of the Institute for Health and Healing, one of the nation's first and largest hospital based integrative medicine programs. Her 25 years of medical experience developing and empowering a collaborative approach to resolving crises has informed her community oriented climate psychology model.
She was also involved in the first ever major publication, drawing attention to the mental health aspects of climate change, a publication organized by the American Psychological Association, Eco America, and Climate for health. This was called “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate Impacts, Implications and Guidance,” and was published in 2017. She has extensive teaching experience at universities including Mills College and the University of San Francisco, among others. And she is the program and faculty lead of the nation's first certificate training in climate psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Are you ready to hear more from the OG climate aware therapist Leslie Davenport? Let's dive in. So welcome to the show, Leslie.
DAVENPORT: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad for this chance to talk. I mean, we've known each other a while, but we often don't get the time to just sit down and chat.
RAY: So that honestly, is my secret mission here. This is why I'm doing this. I'm like, okay, what can I do to just talk with my people about these things? I'm so loving it.
So I have so many questions for you. As I mentioned in the intro, your book kind of came to me in a real moment of questioning and curiosity about this field. So maybe you can help our audience figure out why you were this beacon, why this book was a beacon for me. How did you become one of the earliest champions of advocating for climate awareness in therapy?
DAVENPORT: Yes. Thank you for that question. I could have a very long answer. I'll try and shorten it.
RAY: So I was just like my whole story, my whole life story here. Yeah. It all adds up. Yes.
DAVENPORT: It's hard for me to put an exact time frame on this, but more than 15 years ago, I had my own climate awakening moment. And what I mean by that is I've just always had an interest in the environment. I would always be reading studies, documentaries just for my own interest in education.
And one day, and it wasn't a particular film or article, it was just this sense that everything I was learning and reading coalesced into, “You've got to be kidding me” kind of moment. Just the reality, the intensity, the wow. What I understood then that we’re really facing just landed. It kind of went from information to this, like, visceral knowing.
And I made a decision right then at the time, I was working in health psychology. I was working in a hospital, and I said, okay, I want to pivot everything I can to address this. I don't see anything more important for me to do. But you're right, there wasn't really much out there. I don't even know if eco anxiety was named very much at that time. And so I did what a lot of people do. And I still do, you know, sign petitions and join my local clean air initiative and all those things. But I'm like, well, where can I get the most traction? And I thought about my work and I'm like, okay, so what am I trained in? I'm trained in helping people break through denial, processing deep and complex emotions and grief, supporting lifestyle changes, facilitating conversations that could be contentious, but perhaps that can be more productive. And then I'm like, I think.
HOST: Just plug it in. I think it's a good skill set. Yeah.
DAVENPORT: And so I originally wrote that book to say, you know, my mental health colleagues, anyone in that type of field, you know, we've got work to do and to kind of help others connect the dots the way I personally connected the dots. And so I just tried to articulate as clearly as I could how I understood the application of all of this and not that I think that this is, you know, the silver bullet. I don't think there is one, but how vital it is to be able to talk about our nervous system, our thoughts, their feelings, how tied they are to what's happening around us and have that be part of the conversation, whatever the interdisciplinary model may be, that this was a missing piece. So that's how that came about.
RAY: Yeah. How did you see that climate change was showing up actually in your therapy rooms and in your counseling? Or was it more of your own personal awakening at that time?
DAVENPORT: It was more of my own personal awakening. But what I did do right early on is change my intake form that new clients fill out that set, you know, takes their history. But I added, and “when you hear about what's happening in the world, including climate change, how does that affect you?”
RAY: Oh, wow. What happened when you added that? What do you notice?
DAVENPORT: It was really interesting. It was kind of all over the map. Some people were like, why are you asking this? Others were like, oh, you know, this keeps me up at night. I'd never thought about talking about it here. It's not why I reached out to you. Others were. You know, I try not to think about it, but it really validated how integral it is.
You know, one of our roles in the therapeutic world is to help people identify stressors, even if they're coming in for work issues or relationship or whatever it may be, or what else is influencing how you're feeling and you know how you're functioning in your life, because they're not always and all acknowledged at first. And so even if this at the time is more of a backdrop issue, it's weighing in because we know that there's a collective impact, even if it's not always on the forefront of people's minds.
RAY: Would you say that's changed over the last ten years or so? Would you say that question on the intake form is starting to get a different kind of answer? Yeah. What do you notice?
DAVENPORT: Definitely. And also more people coming in specifically wanting to address this, feeling overwhelmed, feeling powerless, feeling angry, whatever it may be, that's the most predominant or what can I do? You know, how to work through, kind of an action plan that feels personal and relevant to them? Yeah. So it's much more understood as to why the question would be there. And that's also moved for many people from the back burner to the front burner.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. Why do you think that is?
DAVENPORT: Oh well, the rising impacts that we're seeing and experiencing, whether we're being touched directly or know of, of others who are learning about it, you know, that's one of the fundamental understandings, is that what we think, feel, experience is not separate from what's happening around us, which is why if we see a beautiful sunset, we might feel calmer or kind of an odd move toward, or if we have smoky skies or feel at risk or have losses that we're incredibly distressed. That's how we're wired, that's how we're programmed as humans. And so as impacts rise, emotional distress is going to rise in tandem. There's just no separation.
RAY: Yeah. I'm curious. I really do want to focus in a little bit on the clinical space and what's happening in the therapy world before I pan out to some of your other work. But I have experiences of students telling me that they've brought up their climate emotions in therapy and have been told by their therapist, I'm sure you've heard this story– not to think so much, or to not pay so much attention to the news or the various forms of dismissal. I was listening to a podcast yesterday where someone said that the first time they brought it up, somebody said something like, why don't we just leave you out in the desert so that you can return to the earth.
Which is sort of a beautiful, but also I think it was intended very hostilely. Yes. Like. Oh, yes, I'll go do that. Thank you. That sounds perfect. The perfect solution. Great.
And I also have noticed increased suicidal ideation and all kinds of mental health consequences in my own students, which is, of course, why I turn to your book. So I'm sort of curious what you think the role of the clinical setting the therapist is in helping people deal with climate change.
DAVENPORT: You know, it just breaks my heart whenever I hear a story like that. And there are so many and part of the issue and I, I'm confident this will change is, at this point in time, no level of mental health licensure from counselors, marriage and family therapists, clinical social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists. No one is required to do any training on working with climate trigger distress, which is why, they sadly sometimes do more damage than they are helpful. So I think it's an absolutely crucial role and I have some very strong beliefs about it's got to move outside of the one on one therapeutic setting. You know, there's plenty of people in the community who don't have access or an inclination to seek out individual therapy, and the needs are growing, and there's many ways to approach it and be beneficial. And some of that lies outside, outside of, licensed clinicians. But we can also help with training or be a bridge or be another resource. So I sort of feel like I can't speak fast enough.
RAY: and, and, and...
DAVENPORT: Yeah, all these thoughts related to it because there's plenty in our field from the research in the years of practice and the theories that are very applicable. But it has to start from that place, that in that story you just told, we need to start with validating that people are upset, why they're upset. It's natural. It's normal.
What I was saying earlier about it's inseparable from our environment. And then from there we can talk about what are some tools for self-regulation paired with what are some ways to get involved, in some form of activism, whether that's conventional or something creative or more personal. But as far as I'm concerned that those things go hand in hand.
I sort of compare it to, you know, if someone stepped on a nail or a piece of glass and they need pain management. What a foolhardy approach it would be to only like, do meditation so that you feel better. But the glass is still in your foot.
RAY: Yeah, yeah.
DAVENPORT: You know, there has to be that. Let's address the realities of why these feelings are arising and work with tools that will be helpful.
RAY: Yeah. And that's for sort of people who may be already not be very involved. And I'm sure you also work with people who are very involved. And on the other end of the spectrum, you're dealing with burnout and…
DAVENPORT: Yeah, yeah.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. But you're seeing a lot of that in burnout in the climate and environmental spaces and really any kind of, you know, healing social spaces where people are trying to be of service in the world. That seems to be a place where burnout is. I'm seeing in lots of areas that are not just environmentally related.
DAVENPORT: Yes, very much so. And in organizations, nonprofits, there's often not staff support built in, you know, that type of thing. But you're right. You know, that is why they're hand in hand – the activism and the self-regulation resiliency practices. Because for people who just want to somehow feel better and sleep at night but not be part of the issue, we've got only half the picture. And for those who are out there on the frontlines in one way or another, but aren't doing self-care, that's only half the picture. And they each come with their own set of problems.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. My next question is sort of related to this sort of glass on the foot metaphor you just used, and I'm sort of curious to push you a little bit further to unpack that tension.
You're already talking about it very beautifully, but one of the criticisms I hear often of turning towards inner work and thinking about resiliency, much less therapy as a space for climate, you know, adaptation or, or action is that the work itself is too individualized or it is adapting people to a malfunctioning system thereby, sort of, you know, diminishing their anger about or diminishing their capacity to fix it and pull the proverbial glass out of the foot. You know, what is you know, what is the relation? What's your comment about that?
I mean, if there's a tension between these things and then on the other hand, also, do you have clients sometimes, or do you hear this in conversation in all the different places that you work that, some clients or some subjects or some, you know, whatever you want to call them are resentful of being pushed into doing action and think that what they're seeking in therapy is not to be sort of politicized in that way.
DAVENPORT: Oh, boy. Okay.
RAY: I'm asking for both sides of that. Not political enough for too political, right?
DAVENPORT: Yes. This question feels like it just really goes to the heart of so much so if I provide some thoughts and I'm not getting to the whole picture, just bring me back.
RAY: It's a big one. It's a big it's like it's the one that takes up the most place in my notes.
DAVENPORT: Well, I think I want to start with how I've been redefining what resiliency means. Emotional resiliency. So the more traditional definition is the ability to bounce back from a distressing event situation, experience and get back to your life. So whatever that may be, a loss, a health issue, losing a job that, getting married or getting divorced. They both stir up things. Traumatic change. Right. But the reason that's not applicable when it comes to how much our world is changing is that there's no going back to, you know, there's no solid ground. And whatever may have been working before or we were oriented toward is quickly growing irrelevant or shifting in some way in a requires a much more dynamic approach, because we spoke earlier of the escalating climate impacts, it also requires us to cultivate the ability to be with more distress. So I now define emotional resiliency for these times as cultivating the ability to remain grounded, empathetic, clear minded, open hearted in the face of increasing distress.
RAY: I really love what you're saying there about not going back as a new definition of resilience.
DAVENPORT: Yeah. And this ability to have kind of an agility, a flexibility to change course because while there are very reliable predictions related to the trajectory coming out of climate science, it's still packed with a lot of unknowns, timing, unforeseen things that can move in numerous directions.
And so how to again, remain agile, as we're involved in all of that. So it's not that we want to just aim for feeling calm all the time. We want to have our full range of emotions. You know, we're angry because injustices are happening or boundaries are being crossed. It's how we're built as humans. And yet, if we are so angry and don't know kind of how to use that productively, it erodes our own energy. We may not be making the most effective choices related to change that we're fighting for. So, I'm wondering if it makes sense to talk a little bit about what's called the Window of Tolerance.
RAY: Oh beautiful. Please. I love it. So, yes.
DAVENPORT: So I wish I could draw it because it's often depicted as two parallel lines, kind of like railroad tracks that are horizontal. And these tracks expand and contract. So there's a wider space and a more narrow space. And the idea is that most of the time in our lives, we're operating in that middle space between the two lines, there might be stressors, responsibilities, a busy schedule, a lot to do. But we're managing. We're somehow getting it done. Our feelings are could be big, but we're still functioning or somehow getting by.
If something happens that's either so big, like a climate direct impact or there's just so much going on that our plate feels too full and we move either above the line or below the line. There's something that happens to our brain and nervous system. If it moves above the line, it's usually characterized as lashing out, being really hyper reactive outbursts. Aggression could move toward violence if it if it's below the line, it's more of a checking out and numbing out could go toward substance abuse, depression. And when I spoke before about resilience as growing our capacity, another way of thinking about it is stretching our window of tolerance, stretching our zone of resilience, because there is going to be more that we need to face in our daily lives and on a larger scale. So, when it comes to I'm trying to tie all the things we've talked about together when there's a lot of threads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When it comes to, resiliency practices and, you know, where and when and why would we want to, sort of calm down or practice self-care? It's so that we can be more effective in our lives and in our climate action, because if we're in a reactive state or we're in a checked out state, we can't do it. Yeah, yeah. We can't do it.
RAY: Yeah. And one of the things you've helped me understand, with your article that you wrote for the book I co-edited, the Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators is how to notice trauma trigger in my own students. So that has been a really helpful thing that when I'm seeing students act in ways that I have been taught, are forms of, I guess defiance or rudeness are in fact, oftentimes I think to myself now, oh, compassion– they’re having some dysregulation going on.
And that is that trauma informed pedagogy is a really important part of climate education. This is a whole other rabbit hole we could go down, but I really appreciate that. The visual of the Window of Tolerance as a way to help us also have compassion for other people when they're in a reactive place or numbing out place.
And I've also seen another depiction of the window of tolerance where when we're in the window of tolerance, we also have the capacity to think about longer time frames, whereas when we're out of the window of tolerance and we're triggered, our time frame is red in the immediate, what's right in front of us and in order to act, the very next step we would take to be in alignment with whatever our values are, our longer term hopes for the world, we really need to be able to see that longer picture, like, okay, I will I will do something difficult now because it is going to be part of this longer, this bigger picture of the collective good or whatever it is. And I have appreciated the, kind of temporal frame of the window of time as to have you seen something like that, or do you, do you know any more about that than I do?
DAVENPORT: Well, I'm really glad you added that. I'm not sure what I could add to that in terms of research or anything else, but it's absolutely true. And to just, underscore that, you know, there's a literal change in our brain, you know, that parts of our brain shut down, their parts light up when we're activated. When we're outside a window of tolerance. So I think, again, I think it's helpful to think of it in kind of common everyday examples, like if you're in a really heated argument with someone, you sometimes can't hear the other person or you're not even sure what you're saying anymore, and that …
RAY: That has definitely happened to me. Yes.
DAVENPORT: That idea of a like take a cooling down period and let's come back again is about moving into the window of tolerance, where, as you're saying, that ability to think about things in a more reasoned way, to use what's sometimes called our more of our executive function, of our brain to think about things in a different timeline, to put them in perspective, are not accessible when we're triggered.
RAY: And what you're talking about, the way you define resiliency a moment ago really is reliant on this model. The idea here is that these uncertainties and traumas and big events are going to only increasingly be happening to us. And not only do we need that emotional resiliency muscle kind of built so that we can handle those things when they come, but also because we part of one of the things that often happens when we're triggered is that we, isolate or do more violent things to each other and the work we're going to need to do to change politics, to change culture, to change society is going to really require us being able to be connected. Yeah.
And I'm thinking of Clayton Page Aldern's new book, The Weight of Nature, where he writes something like, it's not just that a warmer world would, hurt us. It would make us hurt each other more. And I just think that insight about how the warming climate, what is doing to our nervous systems, is this vicious cycle of making us unable to do the collective work we need to do to fix the problem. Yeah, unless we interrupt this cycle in some way. And that's what you're offering. Yeah.
DAVENPORT: It's so beautiful. And it makes me think of co-regulation that comes out of polyvagal theory.
RAY: Tell us more about that. I love co- regulation. Always makes me think of you know snuggling my kids or something.
DAVENPORT: That is an example. So it's really good news. And it also helps bridge the question you posed earlier about individual versus community.
RAY: Yes.
DAVENPORT: And the basic idea is that our, the state of our nervous system, our state of being, our emotions are contagious. So and it's done in a way, the contagion happens in an often an unconscious way. So what I mean by that is let's say you're with a group of friends, someone walks into the room that you know, but they haven't set down yet, and you can tell that they're agitated about something. You don't know what's going on. But immediately there's often a ripple that just travels throughout the group.
That's an example of the ways that we're connected. And the opposite is true. If we invest time in growing our window of tolerance, know how to be grounded, know how to self-regulate. That ripples to our community and the people we are connected with.
RAY: So that's so important. Yeah.
DAVENPORT: So in that regard, self-care becomes community care and the community affects us as well in these ways. It's just another example of, we're used to chopping things up. Thinking in very separatist, siloed ways is it this or is it that. And this is another place where it's like, well, it's both. And here's kind of how it works. And this is what it looks like.
RAY: Your comment there I love that you're describing this social contagion thing. I had a quote from your book. You quote the Vietnamese peace activist and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Yeah, he wrote, “there is suffering, fear and anger inside of us. And when we take care of it, we are taking care of the world”.
DAVENPORT: Yeah I forgot I put that in. Oh yeah. That really speaks to it.
RAY: It really captures it. Yeah.
DAVENPORT: And what I love is that so there's this Buddhist monk who says that. There's neuroscience that says that. Right? There's our personal lives that provide examples. We can go, oh, yeah, I recognize that. And it's lovely just to have it sort of light up on these different fronts.
RAY: Yeah, I love it too.
Okay. So I'm going to ask you a little bit of a different line now. I appreciate everything you've said there about the window of tolerance and social contagion. I really haven't talked about that yet. So I'm really happy to have an expert weigh in on those things and explain that better than I can.
I would love you to get a little bit granular for us. I love the work in your book. And also, I know you do this work in other spaces. The nuances of different types of emotions, the climate, emotions we are thinking about, the work of someone like Glenn Albrecht and his work, trying to come up with his argument that we need to have the language to talk about the emotions that capture what's happening between the more than human world and humans.
And you too sort of take up that mantle in your book. You parse out emotions like climate anxiety, solastalgia, eco grief, moral injury, climate justice, vicarious trauma. There's so many more. His whole book is full of these. You even distinguish between habituation and adaptation. I'm sort of curious. You don't have to define all these terms for us, but I would be interested in just your general shtick on why we need such granularity of emotional vocabulary around climate change.
DAVENPORT: Language is so tricky because you, as you said, it's important. It helps us recognize and identify states of being and experiences. Create a bit of a map. But any time we name something, it also has edges, right? It has boundaries. And in that sense it's limiting. So for example, eco anxiety as a term is probably the most widely used in media, in conversation. And it's great in that it raises awareness, it gets to be part of a public conversation. And to tie everything we're talking about of an internal experience with what's happening in the world.
What's not great about it is, when people experience some version of, well, I don't think I have eco anxiety and somehow throw out all the other feelings that are being triggered for them personally related to the changes in the world, which might look like grief. It might look like rage, it might look like confusion, it might go into moral injury, which is sort of like, I can't believe everything I saw was true about whatever my the government or trusted institutions, whatever it might be, is completely disillusioned. And I'm groundless. Now, all of that needs to have room. And I do appreciate people who are putting names to these different experiences. And we I feel like we need to keep making room for more.
RAY: Yeah, yeah.
DAVENPORT: Like I'll tell you, I don't know what the term for this is, but it's an example of things that I don't think we've quite experienced before as collectively. So most of us feel moved by a beautiful sunrise or sunset, you know, it's colorful. There's something about it that just speaks to us. But if the sky at sunset is particularly brilliant and colorful because there's particulates in the air from a forest fire, from pollution, it tends to amplify colors. And if you know that you can get into this sort of battle in the moment of feeling moved, feeling distressed, feeling inspired, feeling horrified, and it's not even that it necessarily bumps back and forth. It's all one big distressing, confusing experience. And there's so many things like that. Another one might be, a friend or family member gives you a lovely birthday gift, but it's plastic and it's wrapped in all this paper and it's got all of these… Things that go against what feel important to you and your values.
And yet you love and care about this person and you're in suddenly another one of those kinds of moments. And there's so many of them and, collectively, those can be really eroding, you know, to move through life with so much dissonance. And how do I navigate this? And do I take the time to have a conversation with this family member or friend about the gift? Or what do I do about the sense? And I'm just going to stay in the house now, you know? Or was it, how do we deal with all this?
It's so pervasive. And, again, for examples like that, I said dissonance, but there's probably going to be more and more words and phrases that emerge. So I just try and make a lot of room for, tell me in your own words and in your own way, what your experience, your feelings, your thoughts, your emotions, everything.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. And what is. And you said the value of having them. I love that you're, you're even nuanced in your approach to all these nuanced words.
But what is your, you know, what's the defense of them? What Glenn Albrecht, and what is the point of even having vocabulary? I know the reason I ask is because there are two things I'm thinking, one is just the sheer relief that I hear from people about having validation. That is, yes, a shared emotion that this is not just them and that I hear all the time. I think that's one of the big incentives for me to even create this show was to say hello out there. You're not alone.
DAVENPORT: Yes.
RAY: Lots of people are talking and thinking about this and have really good advice and, and understanding is so, so to help for healing. But secondly, I think that there is also the, the acknowledgment that in the English language, which is my primary language, there has been a real erasure of the human connection to the more than human world and to try to create vocabulary that other languages may have much better, to acknowledge our interdependence with nature is a real you know, I think there's of some value to that. But I hear your point about not labeling so that people don't get stuck. And then the problem with labeling, of course, is the fact that it cuts a lot of other things out and gets binary thinking into play and all that.
DAVENPORT: Yeah, yeah, no, I do agree with you. And that is the flip side. I'll mention with the Climate Emotions wheel in particular, created by the Climate Mental Health Network. And just say if you haven't been to their website that they have this translated into something like 20 languages now, including any emoji version. All fantastic, all downloadable and a little, you know, guide of how to work with it.
But I will often start out. In fact, I have this plan for a conference I'm going to be at in a couple of weeks of just having people look at the wheel. And there are, in brief, these different quadrants and these fanning of feelings that things that touch into types of sadness, types of fear, types of anger and types of inspiration. And, to say, you know, on this map, where do you find yourself the most? Where do you find yourself today? And that ability to point to it and say, and I move from here to here, and when I have this triggering thing that happens, at work, then I move over here and it is very helpful to say this is normal. Everyone here is answering the questions in their own way. There's a lot of variation, but we're all on the map.
RAY: Yeah, we're all on the map together. We have feelings. We're humans with feelings. Yeah. Yes. Even that sometimes can be. Oh, great. Thanks for that.
DAVENPORT: We can be vulnerable here.
RAY: Thank you. I know that I'm in the interest of time. I don't want to. I have about 15 more questions. I will have to choose among them. You are writing another book? Climate Emotions workbook. I'm so excited. You have also written two children's books. I would love to find out a little bit about both. So my first question will be about the Climate Emotions Workbook. What will you add to it that you haven't already written about? How are you going to update all this stuff?
DAVENPORT: I am so excited about this book. It's close to being fully drafted. Going to be turning it in this fall, and then it goes through some more steps of course, before it's out in the world. But it takes so much of what we're talking about and more and really describes it. There's references for anyone who wants to dive more into the research and thinking behind certain ideas, but every chapter has worksheets, so there's for example, there's stuff on the window of tolerance, but then it asks you to identify things like, well, are you more prone to the lashing out or the checking out? And what are your triggers and what are the tools you can use and offer others suggestions? And it just there's a minimum of three practices in each chapter. So it's very like how do we take everything we're talking about and ground it and make it useful and make it personalized and use these in your classrooms and in your groups. And just very versatile too. I'm a very practical person, even though I love talking about all this stuff. I get the happiest when it gets applied in some way.
The other things it includes that haven't been a part of the first book that you pointed out is it does go a lot more into community. How to build community. What are the challenges that come with that? Especially when it comes to diversity and positionality and, how to recognize that and work with that? It there's a whole chapter on connection with the more than human world. Our nature is nature entering kinship.
RAY: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So these are the things you wish you had when you wrote Emotional Resiliency in an Era of Climate Change, the things that at that time were not quite come into your radar. Yeah. You were just barely dipping your toe in. And this is ten years later. You've done you've been in this world deep in it and sort of updating it.
DAVENPORT: Yeah. Yes. And a big part related to social justice and just the range of ways that different communities and populations are affected in unjust ways and ways that it's insidiously baked into the systems that we need to change. And all of that is much more explicit.
RAY: Yeah. Wonderful. Great. Can you talk a little bit about your children's books and what you think is a uniquely important for, let's say, parents, guardians, teachers, people who work with directly with children to know about what's happening with them and how to talk about climate change with them.
DAVENPORT: Well, one thing I'll say, because I'm very grateful and appreciative of this, the book that I'm finishing and the two kids books all are through the American Psychological Association. And I'm just grateful for their ability to kind of put their finger on the pulse of what's needed and know that these are very emerging needs and to help bring these into being.
RAY: Yes. You really I mean, absolutely, the amount of parents and folks who ask me, how do I do this, teachers in particular, how do I do this in third grade, how it is in second grade, I was K through 12. And I think the amount of people asking me this question, I'm not any expert on K through 12. So please provide these resources.
DAVENPORT: Well, you know, first I'll say one thing about everything we're talking about. That's why I want to encourage everyone who's listening, who's looking for a way to work with this and bring it into their life and work setting, is give yourself permission to be creative.
You know, I'm trying to offer guidelines, templates, things that will help, in the classroom that are evidence based. But everyone's trying to figure out how to bring this forward in all kinds of ways. So the book for younger kids, which is called What to Do When Climate Change Scares You, and that's for age ranges, of course kids really vary, but about seven through 12, they're all workbooks. They're all practical.
But just to give you an example, it starts out with three hearts. And in the first part of the first heart, kids are asked to write or draw what they love about the natural world. And it could be anything from swimming in the lake to eating an apple off their tree, to whatever it may be. It can be very it's all very kid centric. The second one is things they're curious to learn about. Maybe they've heard something about climate change, or just something about the natural world. What are their curiosity? Their interests. And the third one is their worries or their concerns or their feelings. And then throughout the book, it refers back to each of these how to build that relationship with the natural world. Like the first heart, there's nature based art exercises and things. The second one is how to find out reliable information and draw in the parents, and or adults who can be helpers in that. And the third one is working with the thoughts and feelings, and all of it are ways to participate, to and be involved in things. And it's so important to be kid driven because, you know, some kids are like just learning about it. Not a lot of schools yet have it woven into their classroom education.
RAY: Yeah, I read some statistic the other day that said something like, they get in K through 12, you get about a total maximum of about two hours per year.
DAVENPORT: Yeah. But.
RAY: I'll put that report in the show notes for people. Yes. I was stunned to hear that, especially when you know that something like 70% of American parents want climate education K to 12. So just some statistics, a point to contextualize what you're saying. Carry on.
DAVENPORT: And then there are the kids who, you know, maybe they have asthma and they're affected by wildfire smoke or who have had to evacuate or who have had a very different experience. So I make a lot of room for where are they based on those three initial hearts to guide, kind of what they're needed and where to go from there. So whatever they say gets referred to later as they fill out the other parts of the worksheets.
RAY: I love this too, because I think mostly what I'm hearing from parents and teachers is I have no idea even what to do here, and I really empathize with that. And so this, this tool, this activity book, really will help them do that work with their children or students. I also want to point out that you started off with love. That's the only thing I ever know to say to people is start with love.
DAVENPORT: Yeah.
RAY: That's right. Which is these kids, you know, what is going to make them care? What's going to make them want to stay engaged in something for the long term and not, you know, go into permanent dysregulation of hyperactivity or depression about it. Right? Is the fact that they can spend their life making meaning and finding purpose and, and nurturing the thing that they love in whatever way that is. Yeah. But they have to love to begin with. Yeah.
DAVENPORT: You just referenced again the window of tolerance. You know, how they won't go into hyperactivity or depression. So the workbook doesn't define window of tolerance, but it works with it the way you're describing. Like what do we do with these big feelings you know. Yeah. Yeah. And let me just to add to that for parents and caregivers and teachers, so much benefit comes from holding the space for kids to bring their questions, concerns, feelings, excitement. You don't have to know all the answers, but to have that safe space for kids can say, I'm really worried about this. I saw this thing on the TV and, you know, is it going to happen to me tonight when I go to sleep? Because they might not know that there was a flood on TV that happened three states away. They don't always have the context. And unless they have a place to bring these questions or concerns, they really can feel at a loss and it can really amplify.
RAY: Yeah. And on the one hand, that can be a matter of don't worry, this isn't you. On the other hand, that could be the beautiful wisdom of children having empathy for people three states away.
DAVENPORT: That's right, that's right. And it can be both right. It's that same thing. It's like how to provide some reassurance. That's appropriate and realistic, and how to begin that conversation that wades into the fact that these are happening.
RAY: Yeah. And it could happen here. Something awful could happen here. Yeah. That's right. I know that you are doing work with the California Institute for Integral Studies. You do the very first climate aware therapy certification. How can people get plugged into climate aware therapy either if they're seeking services or I, you know, as an organization or as an individual? And if a person wanted to become more involved in professionalizing in this training, what would you recommend?
DAVENPORT: Yeah. So thank you. I love this program that we've launched. We're about to do our fourth cohort this fall. And just to paint the picture of what it involves, it's offered live online, over the course of five weekends. It's a total of something like 42 hours. For people who are licensed. You can get continuing education credits for it. And, one of the things I love is we bring in a really sterling group of guest faculty. It changes a little bit each year, and we're learning as we go. So, for example, this fall's going to be the first time we're including a whole module on disaster mental health, like on site orientation, which is a very different approach than a therapy room or working in the community. It's open to all licensed professionals and open to what we call allied health professionals, which if you're working directly with the public in some way, that includes working with climate emotions. Then it's open to you as well.
And we're discussing the idea of trying to start a program for non clinicians, because every year we get a lot of people working in other environments as well. And it's hard to fully blend those two types of communities. So we're looking at ways to expand what we can do to support people who are seeking something like this.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. And for folks who are thinking, I need some therapy along these lines, I need it as my organization or I need this as, as a client. Well, yes. How do they find those people?
DAVENPORT: So easiest way is to go to the Climate Psychology Alliance. So the school I referenced has a website. Climate Psychology Alliance has a website. And they have a directory of what they call climate aware therapists. It's all over the U.S you can search by location. And there's also an international organization based in the UK that has a growing number of practitioners throughout Europe. Really great resources as well as other articles and videos and workshops and all kinds of things.
RAY: Thank you. Wonderful. I am, I'm guessing some folks who might be listening will be so inspired as to want to go do this work or go seek some support or both.
DAVENPORT: Yes, yes.
RAY: Thank you. Anything else you'd like to add? Before we wrap.
DAVENPORT: Well, I guess for anyone listening to this, if you're moved or recognize yourself in the conversations we've had, or feel inspired either to learn more tools to attend to your own self-care. Or if you're wanting to get more involved in activism, to maybe use this as a call to action and think about what that first next step I can take can be small. Might start with researching where I would do that. What do I want to do? Clarifying your interests, but to let this move from being informational to something that supports, kind of the next phase.
RAY: Yeah. Thank you. Leslie, you have a lot of climate magic. So thanks for joining the show.
DAVENPORT: And, thank you so much, Sarah.
RAY: You've just been listening to my conversation with the OG climate aware therapist, Leslie Davenport, author of Emotional Resiliency in an Era of Climate Change and faculty lead of the Climate Psychology certificate at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Here are some of the key concepts I gained from speaking with her, and I'd like to underscore them for you, too.
First, sometimes I think that worrying about climate change is foolish, or privileged or a waste of energy. Probably all of us have had our climate worries dismissed in some way or the other. So the first step here is to give yourself and others the space to feel and validate these emotions. We might also add a step of offering compassion to those who can't really face them yet, and respond by dismissing your climate concerns outright. Who knows what other healing needs to happen there before they can confront climate change?
But in the meantime, rest assured that your concerns aren't foolish or privileged. They're just a sign that you care about life on a healthy planet.
Then I think it's time to get curious about what your climate distress triggers are, as Leslie calls them. The key isn't to necessarily avoid those triggers, as it might be for, say, behavior change around addiction, but rather to observe yourself without judgment so that you can have more agency in the stories that you live in and among a certain amount of climate news for example, can help you know what your next best action should be. But often doomscrolling is not, and only you can discern what is a healthy amount of information and what isn't, and what you have control over and what you don't, and what kinds of stories you need to surround yourself with so you can be as useful as possible in solving these problems.
I wanted to offer a practice here that really applies to what Leslie's saying, or rather, applies what Leslie is saying in your own life so you can begin this exploration process. It's a practice that was popularized by the meditation teacher Tara Brach. And honestly, I use it for any time that difficult emotions arise in me, not just about climate change. This practice is called RAIN, which is an acronym for recognize, allow, investigate, nurture.
When big emotions arise, I tend to look outward trying to find someone to blame for making me feel so bad. But doing rain practice is what Tara Brach calls taking a U-turn, turning toward what's happening inside yourself not just so you can take responsibility for those emotions. That's not really the point, but it helps you figure out what you might do to feel better. And again, to be clear, the point of this practice isn't just to feel better, it's to be better equipped to take the proverbial glass out of your foot as Leslie put it so beautifully.
So with recognize the R in RAIN, you first need to just acknowledge in a non-judgmental way the emotions that you're feeling, maybe even naming them. This can be a really hard step for many people. We're often trained to judge and discipline our emotions before we're even aware of them. For others, maybe the A or allow step is the hardest one. We might be able to name an emotion we're having, but allowing it just feels too dangerous. So take some time with this step. Can you maybe even thank the emotion for trying to protect you? If we can find some compassion to allow the emotion, then it's time to get curious about it.
Which leads us to the I in RAIN or investigate. So maybe you can ask yourself what was the trigger? Why did I start feeling this way? When did it start feeling this way? What was going on outside of me when I started to feel this way? Maybe you can ask yourself what the emotion is trying to communicate to you. Are you in fact unsafe? What underlying need is this emotion trying to meet? Maybe. What is the thing that's threatening that need?
For me, once I can peel enough layers of this onion back, I often see a deep need being threatened by external circumstances and that these emotions arising from those triggers are just trying to help me meet that need. So this leads to nurture, the N in rain. How can I nurture that need in myself? What kind of external conditions would be required to nurture that need? How much can I take that nurturing into my own hands?
We're often used to thinking about resolving these big emotions so that we can just get along better with loved ones, or cope with a difficult job or other matters of just the daily struggle of being human, among other flawed humans. But with climate change, we can't just nurture that need and move on. It doesn't fix climate change, it doesn't get rid of these external conditions. So the point of doing RAIN or doing any of this kind of work to build inner tools that Leslie Davenport is offering here, is so that you can transform the ways that external conditions stymie you into increased capacity to address those conditions.
If, after doing RAIN on yourself, you find that your deep need is a feel, you live on a planet that supports life, then nurturing that need will inevitably mean taking some action to protect the planet and support life. As Lesley said, the thing that regulates our nervous systems and the thing that helps the planet can often be the same. Indigenous traditions know this deeply. The only way to heal the self is to heal the earth, not just vice versa. Although that's true too. So what does this look like for you? Everybody will be different and that's great. That's the whole point of finding your own climate magic.
And the second thing I loved about lessons ideas is her redefinition of the concept of resilience. Resilience kind of gets a bad rap and for good reason. The mainstream definition of resilience is essentially the capacity to bounce back to normal after a disruptive event. But the problem with this definition is that it often becomes an excuse to avoid systems change.
Like, for example, that community is so resilient, let's just keep piling injustice upon injustice on them and they'll be just fine. So resilience sounds like a compliment, but it actually weaponizes a community or a person's strength against them. This is why Leslie's redefinition is so great. For her, Resilience is about the capacity to stay empathetic and grounded in the face of distress. There's no back to normal in the climate crisis. The sooner we can let go of our attachment to some conception of normal, the sooner we can build this kind of resilience she's talking about.
She also likens resilience to having a strong window of tolerance, which is a key concept in polyvagal theory introduced by the neuropsychologist Dan Siegal. The thing is that figuring out how to be grounded, to stay in our window of tolerance, to make wise decisions, to act compassionately, these are all things that are signs of emotional intelligence and wisdom, but they're also things that climate change really needs us to do.
And here's where I want to point out that if we fail to do this stuff, these big climate emotions and environmental anxieties can lead to feelings like misanthropy, which is the sort of disgust or hatred of other humans which can easily slip into things that are even worse, like violence, fear of others, genocidal actions at the collective level, or as we're seeing in this country, all kinds of fears about immigration and, a kind of lack of responsibility for the well-being of others, lack of empathy, really.
So cultivating this kind of inner resilience is so essential, so that we don't let climate change turn us all against each other. How does big climate emotions turn into violence, and figuring out how to be resilient, and how to have capacity for empathy and groundedness and access to our why is itself is really key for avoiding that.
I also want to share some big news that since our recording, Leslie Davenport has been asked by a really amazing magazine called Grist Magazine to serve as their very first climate therapist for a new column they're producing called Ask a Climate Therapist. You should check it out. And if you want, ask Leslie your own burning questions. I'll share the link in the show notes.
I hope you enjoyed this interview with Leslie Davenport. As always, you can find more episodes of Climate Magic on khsu.org or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm your host, Doctor Sarah Jaquette Ray. And thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
HOST: Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
