Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

For a growing number of people in the UK climate change is an important consideration when deciding whether to have a child. Motherhood in a Climate Crisis is a collaborative theatre-making project, held within structures of radical care, to create a brave space where women with diverse choices and experiences relating to motherhood could share their thoughts, feelings and concerns in safety and support. Outcomes of the project are described and implications for the issue in the consulting room are developed, alongside how an ethics of care is essential to imagining and building just futures.

ABSTRACT: Despite being on the front lines of climate catastrophe, the voices and actions of critically affected groups are often overlooked. The present research partnered with Haitian youth - who are marginalized from climate decision-making on the basis of nationality and age - to explore and address sustainability challenges in their coastal community. This study explored processes of individual and collective empowerment made possible through a community-based arts center course that integrated the arts and sciences to position youth as change agents for a more sustainable Haiti.

This chapter suggests that in order to respond to our ecological crisis and offer clients a way to do the same, therapy needs to change; but also, many features of an ecosystemic therapy are already present within the field, often unrecognised as such. It explores how the inherent wildness of psychotherapy can be brought out, and what the implications are for practice.

Originally delivered as a talk and published in Self and Society (2007), Totton argues that psychotherapy - and body psychotherapy in particular - is already implicitly engaged in the project ecopsychology names explicitly: finding a good, embodied way for humans to live on earth. He sets out three strands of ecopsychology (the therapeutic effect of contact with the nonhuman world, practical work to shift human-nonhuman relations, and the philosophy of that relationship), then develops the idea of 'wild mind' - spontaneous, co-creative, self-balancing and inherently wise - as a counterpart to physical wild ecosystems. Drawing on Reichian body psychotherapy, Taoist philosophy, Bateson's systems thinking, and examples from indigenous land management (notably Kayapo agroforestry), Totton traces how Western culture's mind-body and culture-nature splits produce a fear of spontaneity rooted in early experiences such as toilet training, and how this fear underlies both personal alienation and ecological destruction. He proposes that therapy's task is to act as guardian and cultivator of this 'wild mind,' relaxing the defended, controlling ego enough for embodied, relational wisdom to re-emerge - in the client, and by extension in how humans relate to the nonhuman world.

Originally published in Therapy Today (March 2011) as a taster for his book Wild Therapy: Undomesticating Inner and Outer Worlds, Totton argues that ecopsychology and therapeutic practice have rarely been properly integrated, each tending to be bolted onto the other rather than fused into something new. He traces contemporary anxiety about control back to the Neolithic shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society, arguing that humans domesticated themselves as much as other species, producing deep-seated trauma, dissociation and denial that now obstructs collective engagement with ecological crisis. Central to the piece is his concept of Wild Mind - a state of spontaneous, self-organising awareness connected with the nonhuman world - which he proposes therapy is uniquely positioned to support and protect, alongside qualities such as interdependence, relationality, liminality and embodiment. Totton suggests that most people are already close to overwhelm, protecting a fragile bubble of personal stability against threatening information, and that therapists should name this overwhelm directly rather than compounding it, helping clients build enough safety to access embodied emotion. He extends this individual approach to collective climate distress, arguing that supportive rather than alarmist strategies, alongside reconnection with love and awe for the nonhuman world, offer therapy a meaningful role in the broader cultural shift needed to avert environmental catastrophe.

A collection of essays on climate change and cultural transformation, drawing on psychotherapy, Buddhist and other contemplative traditions, and the history of ideas. The title essay, 'Everything and Nothing: Radical Hope in a Time of Climate Change' (originally a CPA paper), considers Jonathan Lear's concept of radical hope alongside Buddhist teachings on emptiness, asking whether contemplative practice can support engagement with the climate crisis without collapsing into denial or despair.