Interrogating the Climate Cafe
by Guy Gladstone
Image credit: Nathan Dumlao
A variety of purposes
If a core assignment of psychotherapy is the development of a capacity to put oneself in question, then perhaps it is also worthwhile to put one’s practice as a climate café practitioner in question. The aim of this piece is to do that. So let’s ask what is the purpose of this praxis? The possible answers below are interwoven threads that comprise a tapestry. No single café has to feature all of them. Other facilitators within the CPA community will perhaps have their own answers. I should clarify that it is the in-person, localised café that I am considering, while recognising the advantages of virtual cafes, of convenient accessibility, avoidance of travel and potential for international participation.
These are climate cafés’ more obvious purposes, for starters:
- A social space for the relief and containment of Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE) distress, especially the need to process loss on an unprecedented scale.
- A vehicle for breaching the socially constructed silence around the CEE, a silencing that prevails in everyday life, at home and/or at work, and an opportunity to counter this by providing care and support in a group setting.
- A hybrid encounter that draws on both group therapy and the concerns of activists, functioning as a consciousness-raising platform. (The Latin root of both consciousness and conscience is relevant: con scio, to know with.)
- A forum uniquely suited to the expression of the moral injury associated with the CEE.There is widespread pain and indignation at the fossil fuel corporations’ contempt for scientific warnings, the complicity of governments and the deceit involved in greenwash. The casual pollution of the environment and the many violations of both human and non-human life are for many deeply troubling and an insult to our values.
Limitations
From within CPA, we take the subjective dimension of the crisis as a priori, a fact of life. Notwithstanding some therapisation of daily life, we might overestimate the proportion of the population that are psychologically-minded and this lacuna imposes real limits on the climate café’s reach and appeal. It is also worth noting that the Climate Café is an event that has evolved within and is limited, as far as I know, by being largely situated within the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic) world, a context relatively insulated from immediate life-threatening impacts of the climate crisis. In a recent café I noticed a usually eloquent and emotionally articulate member was glum and silent. Enquiring, it transpired this was exactly what was bothering her. Likewise, at the three locations I hold a monthly café, the lack of diversity has been disappointing (in accord with the general XR experience).
Image credit: Salah Darwish
Mutual aid and reduction of defensiveness
Climate cafés can support a community building initiative, ancillary to other such efforts that are supportive of activism, without being activism itself (in the sense of organising to take action). I predict that, as collapse draws closer, this potential purpose will become critical, as called for internationally by Bob Doppelt’s championing of I.T.R.C (International Transformational Resilience Coalition), wherein he emphasises the essential preliminary facilitator role of fostering "presencing" and "purposing" in the community.
A further looser and more circuitous definition of purpose could refer to what it is not. Without a base of knowledge (always incomplete) of what is now the case regarding the planet we live on (i.e., the objective crisis), there would be little justification for climate cafes. Polls and surveys suggest a high level of common knowledge and concern about the CEE, but miss the high levels of defences (most commonly disavowal) against the implications of that knowledge, defences that preclude a corresponding engagement. As it is not the purpose of climate cafés to provide objective knowledge e.g., communication of the science, any such education that does occur is incidental, a by-product of the café (in my experience there is still some along the way). To front end a climate café with an expert input such as a talk and/or to give it an action focus is to steer it away from what I believe to be its essential purpose, namely a reduction of defences.
So climate cafés can be construed as opportunities for necessary dialogue on how we live with what we already know, given how disturbing this knowledge is and rightfully should be. As the poet T. S. Eliot declared in the wake of World War One: “Humankind cannot bear too much reality”.
Left not right
The political purpose I suggest here is more contentious. Emotions motivate or demotivate. Accordingly emotionality must have an inescapably political dimension, as, to state the obvious, does the CEE, criss-crossed by vectors of power. In this political context, given the contemporary right seems to understand the part emotions play better than the left, the café arguably needs to cultivate and extend a specifically left-leaning emotional literacy, one that is inherently communal and politically critical.
Note I am here discounting a supposed centre ground, one that for therapists is perhaps a fantasised projection/extension of clinical neutrality; or alternatively is a resistance to consideration of the extra-psychic and systemic forces impacting their clients, for example pandemics, war, AI, and in this case the CEE. No thank you, the centre today is the (un)happy hunting ground of the liberal wing of neoliberalism, with an individualistic orientation towards business as usual. Within the climate café, any such neutrality, if adopted by the facilitator, would be specious.
Image credit: Mike Erskine
Groups and storytelling
Yet another purpose of the climate café could be storying. The need for new stories to live by is now widely recognised, not least a New Story to displace the neoliberal story (as floated by George Monbiot). During a recent CPA Therapeutic Support Peer Supervision I facilitated there was a great interest in the contribution of storytelling to Climate Cafés. I wondered at how a group modality was taking priority over the one-to-one work that was the nominal assignment of the session. Later I clocked this as an instance of “The First Law of Group Dynamics”, as conveyed to me years ago by Simon Meyerson, a maverick Tavistock group analyst: namely that “the unresolved unconscious conflicts of the leader will attempt to be enacted in the group”. It so happened that at the time I was struggling with writing this very piece you are now reading.
The Climate Café form provides opportunities for participants and facilitators to weave into the narrative, reminiscences and anecdotes that relate to and make sense of their experience of the CEE. Storytelling is a significant act of meaning-making and a way of containing the often intense feelings in play, in addition to the community building dimension. This would also chime with the argument that it is groups rather more than siloed dyadic work that provide the needed solidarity for facing the CEE. It enables us to tell our climate stories (as in “Living with the Climate Crisis”) and have them witnessed, albeit in fragments given the time constraints and the imperative of time sharing. We are likely to recognise our own stories in those of others, reducing our sense of isolation. We might also expect that unvoiced personal stories could surface for participants in the aftermath of a café. The Climate Café could therefore be linked to, situated within, and justified by, an older tradition of communal narrative art, but in an artless way.
Author's Bio
Guy Gladstone is a member of CPA and semi-retired group and body psychotherapist, now holding several monthly Climate Cafes on the South Coast (see Calendar of Events).
