When Climate Distress Lives in the Body: What Therapy Can Hold

I have been thinking lately about how climate distress arrives in the body. Not as an idea we can think our way around, but as something that shows up between the ribs, in the shoulders, in the thickness of sleep.

This shows up in my sessions often, and I carry it myself. A client describes a wildfire season that made going outside feel unsafe, and something tightens behind their sternum as they speak. Another describes a coastline that has changed in their lifetime, and their voice thins. The distress is not irrational. It is a body registering what it already knows.

I am a psychotherapist based in Vancouver, working online across Canada. What follows is about what therapy can hold when climate distress lives in the body, and what it cannot.

What the body is registering when it registers climate distress

Climate distress has started to be named in the clinical literature, and the naming helps. Leslie Davenport's Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change, one of the first clinician-facing guides on this subject, describes climate grief as a real and emerging clinical reality, with its own textures and stages. There is a specific grief, different from personal loss, that arrives when someone realises a landscape, a season, a species, or a sense of ecological future is being altered in ways that do not reverse.

The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word for part of this: solastalgia. It names the feeling of being homesick at home. The place you live in is changing around you, and you are grieving a home you have not left. You do not have to be a hiker, a gardener, or someone who identifies as environmental to feel this. You just have to have a body that has noticed.

Climate anxiety is another piece of what shows up. Not a pathological anxiety, but a proportionate response to a real situation whose scale we were not evolved to hold. A body scanning for threat that will not resolve. A nervous system that does not know when to stand down. For some people, this presents as a restlessness they cannot name. For others, a heaviness, a dropped-in exhaustion that is not quite depression but is close to it.

When this arrives in a session, the first part of the therapy is simply naming that what is happening is not a personal failure of coping. It is a body telling the truth.

Why therapy in the head cannot meet this

Much of conventional therapy works through language. We name what is happening, we understand it, we develop strategies for managing it. That work is valuable, and it is not the whole work.

Climate distress is not primarily a problem of thinking. It is a problem of a body that is already metabolising something real. If therapy only happens above the neck, the body is left doing the work alone. The restlessness that a client arrives with does not dissolve through insight. The tight chest does not release through psychoeducation.

Somatic educator Rae Johnson, whose book Embodied Activism has shaped how I think about this, describes how oppression functions through disconnection, and how much of the labour of justice work and care happens at the body level. The body is where climate distress registers. It has to also be where therapy responds.

This does not mean therapy becomes only physical. Words still matter. But in my work, climate grief is often met first by slowing the session down, bringing attention to the body, and letting whatever is present have a moment of being received before we analyse it.

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 arrives with climate distress, what a session can do is specific. Not grand. Specific.

It can name that what they are feeling has a name, whether climate grief, climate anxiety, or solastalgia, and that naming the thing in the room shrinks the shame around it. For people who have been told they are overreacting, being dramatic, or dwelling, hearing that their distress has been named in the clinical literature is its own kind of rest.

It can slow the pace and invite the body into the conversation. What is happening in the chest, the shoulders, the gut, as the client talks? Where does the distress live in the body today, and where does it not? This is not a technique performed on the client. It is a collaboration with their own attention.

It can offer grief a room to be grieving. Ecological grief, especially when anticipatory, often does not get witnessed. Friends change the subject. Family frame it as doom-mongering. A session can hold what other rooms cannot.

It can build sustainable pacing. No one metabolises climate grief by feeling it all at once. Part of the work is learning to titrate, to come close to the grief, to move away, to rest, to return. This is not avoidance. It is how the nervous system actually processes what is large.

What changes when the body is part of the response

When the body is included in the response, some things shift.

The exhaustion that was trying to signal something gets room to land. The tightness that was holding on gets permission to unclench. The restlessness that could not sleep at night finds a shape.

None of this solves climate change, and I want to be careful here. I am not offering embodied therapy as a solution to the climate crisis. That is not what therapy is for. What therapy can do is make it possible for a person carrying climate grief to keep showing up in their life and their communities, with more of themselves present. That is not a small thing. Movements, relationships, and the slow work of caring for what we love depend on people who can stay embodied enough to participate in them.

Hope, in this frame, is not optimism. It is the body's capacity to stay present to what matters.

If any of this is landing for you, I want to say this. You are not alone in feeling it. You are not wrong for feeling it. A body that registers climate distress is a body telling the truth about the world it lives in. There is nothing pathological about that.

If you want to talk about what is arriving in your body lately, my practice has room for that. Related posts on existential therapy for climate anxiety and on the body as an archive go deeper into specific pieces of this work. Come at your own pace.