Key Takeways
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how climate distress shows up in the body. It’s not just a thought we can reason away. It can appear as tension in the ribs, shoulders, or even affect how deeply we sleep.
I often see this in sessions, and I feel it myself. One client talks about a wildfire season that made going outside feel unsafe, and their chest constricts as they speak. Another describes a coastline that has changed during their life, and their voice becomes thin. This distress isn’t irrational. It’s the body recognizing what it already knows.
I’m a psychotherapist in Vancouver and work with clients online throughout Canada. I want to share what therapy can offer when climate distress is felt in the body, and also talk about its limits.
What the body is registering when it registers climate distress
Clinical literature has begun to name climate distress, and having a name can help. Leslie Davenport’s Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change was one of the first guides for clinicians on this topic. It describes climate grief as a real and growing issue, with distinct stages. This grief is different from personal loss. It comes when someone realizes that a landscape, season, species, or sense of the future is changing in ways that won’t return.
Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht created a word for this feeling: solastalgia. It means feeling homesick even though you’re still at home. Your surroundings are changing, and you grieve a place you haven’t left. You don’t have to be a hiker, gardener, or environmentalist to feel this. It’s enough to be someone whose body has noticed the change.
Climate anxiety is another part of this experience. It’s not a disorder, but a natural response to a huge problem we weren’t built to handle. The body keeps looking for threats that never go away, and the nervous system stays on alert. Some people feel a nameless restlessness, while others feel a heavy exhaustion that’s almost like depression.
When this arises in a session, the first step is to name what’s happening as not a personal failure. It’s the body telling the truth.
Why therapy in the head cannot meet this
Most traditional therapy uses language. We talk about what’s happening, try to understand it, and look for ways to manage it. This work is important, but it’s not everything.
Climate distress isn’t mainly a problem of thinking. It’s something the body is already processing. If therapy only focuses on the mind, the body is left to handle it alone. Restlessness doesn’t go away just via understanding it, and a tight chest doesn’t relax just from learning about it.
Somatic educator Rae Johnson, whose book Embodied Activism has influenced my thinking, explains that oppression often works by creating disconnection. Much of the work for justice and care happens in the body. Because climate distress is felt in the body, therapy needs to respond there too.
This doesn’t mean therapy is only about the body. Words still matter. In my sessions, we often begin by slowing down, noticing the body, and letting feelings be acknowledged before we try to analyze them.
Whose body-knowledge this work draws on
A note that matters here. The idea that the body holds what is too much for the mind to carry alone is not original to Western somatic therapy. Indigenous knowledge systems, Black somatic traditions, disability justice lineages, and queer embodied theory have held this for a long time, often in the face of active violence against those bodies.
The Anishinaabe educator and visual artist Quill Christie-Peters, in their 2025 book On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation, writes about the body as something far larger than flesh. The body, in their framing, extends to ancestors, homelands, spirit relations, and land. Settler colonialism, Christie-Peters names directly, works through the disembodiment of Indigenous peoples, and the reclamation of embodied wholeness is both resistance and a pathway to collective liberation. I owe gratitude to this book. I am not speaking from inside Anishinaabe cosmology, and this post is not an attempt to borrow from it. What I can say is that reading Christie-Peters has shaped how I hold the settler part of my own body in this work.
Climate change is not an even distress. The people and lands paying the highest cost are disproportionately Indigenous, Black, disabled, poor, and queer. Any honest embodied therapy for climate grief has to hold that, not bypass it.
What a session can actually hold
When a client comes in with climate distress, what a session can offer is specific. It’s not dramatic or sweeping. It’s focused and real.
A session can help by naming what someone is feeling, whether it’s climate grief, climate anxiety, or solastalgia. Naming it can reduce shame. For people who’ve been told they’re overreacting or being dramatic, learning that their feelings are recognized in clinical literature can be a relief.
A session can also slow things down and bring the body into focus. We might ask what’s happening in the chest, shoulders, or gut as the client speaks. Where is the distress today, and where isn’t it? This isn’t something done to the client. It’s a partnership with their own awareness.
A session can give loss a space to be felt. Ecological grief, especially when it’s about what’s coming, often goes unseen. Friends might change the subject, and family might call it doom-mongering. Therapy can hold what other spaces cannot.
Therapy can help set a sustainable pace. No one can process all their climate grief at once. Part of the work is learning to approach the grief, step back, rest, and return. This isn’t avoidance. It’s how the nervous system handles big feelings.
What changes when the body is part of the response
When we include the body in our response, things can start to change.
The exhaustion that was trying to send a message finally has space to be felt. The tightness can begin to relax. The restlessness that kept you up at night can take a clearer form.
None of this will fix climate change, and I want to be clear about that. Body-centered therapy isn’t a solution to the climate crisis. That’s not what therapy is for. But therapy can help someone with climate grief keep showing up in their life and community, more fully present. That matters. Movements, relationships, and caring for what we love all depend on people who can stay connected enough to take part.
In this view, hope isn’t just optimism. It’s the body’s ability to stay present with what matters.
If any of this connects with you, I want you to know you’re not alone. You’re not wrong for feeling this way. When your body feels climate distress, it’s telling the truth about the world. There’s nothing wrong or unhealthy about that.
Related posts on existential therapy for climate anxiety and on the body as an archive go deeper into specific pieces of this work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is climate grief a real clinical concept?
Climate grief is recognized in clinical literature, even though it’s not an official DSM diagnosis. Leslie Davenport’s Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change was one of the first guides for clinicians to describe it as a real and growing issue. Climate anxiety is also now part of mainstream mental health discussions. Having these names helps reduce the shame many clients feel about their reactions.
What is solastalgia?
Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia. It describes the homesickness and grief that come when your landscape, season, or neighbourhood changes in ways that won’t return. You can feel solastalgia without ever leaving your own area.
Can therapy actually help with climate grief or climate anxiety?
Yes, therapy can help, but in specific ways. It won’t solve the climate crisis. What therapy can do is give climate grief a space to be seen, help the body find some calm, and support people in staying present so they can keep taking part in their lives and communities.
How do you work with climate distress in sessions?
The process begins by naming what’s happening. When a client’s experience is recognized as real and given a clinical name, it helps reduce isolation. After that, we slow down, focus on the body, and let the distress be felt before analyzing it. We also work on pacing, helping the body approach grief, step back, rest, and return.
Do I need to identify as an environmentalist or an activist to bring this to therapy?
No. Most people I work with who feel climate distress don’t see themselves as environmentalists or activists. They are simply people whose bodies have noticed something, and whose nervous systems are trying to understand it. That’s enough.
