practitioners are getting trained in climate-related trauma, says Mary Good, an ecopsychologist based in Sebastopol. “When I decided to go into ecopsychology, when I would talk about eco-anxiety, I would just get blank stares or confused looks. Now it’s not quite a household term, but it’s not really very foreign. You have more therapists who
in it,’” Good says. And if adults can feel supported, then they can support others, whether their community or their own family. “If the whole family goes through a disaster that leaves a child with trauma symptoms, chances are the parents are also experiencing their own symptoms from that. So, it’s helping the adults help themselves, or get their own support. It’s so hard to meet the needs of a child when we’re still going through all of our own emotional processing,” says Silverstein, who is a member of the CPANA executive committee.
Leslie Davenport [Photo credit Patricia Kay Spinks]
Laura Christine Strom [Photo courtesy of InHerImage]
are at least informed. It used to be if you went
into a therapist’s office and said, ‘I’m really disturbed about what’s happening to the natural environment, you might have a therapist who’d say, ‘Oh well, but really, how do you feel about your mother?’” she says with a laugh. Santa Rosa’s Laura Strom is a Stanford University-trained trauma therapist who worked with people who experienced the 2018 Camp Fire, which devastated the town of Paradise. “Those people were absolutely terrified that they were going to lose their lives. Some of the things they saw were just horrific” as residents tried to escape one of the two routes out of town that were surrounded by fire and couldn’t quite see what they were driving toward, Strom says. “People were crying and screaming hysterically in their cars. They were so traumatized by that.” As past president of both the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) and the Redwood Empire chapter of CAMFT, Strom made sure to include trauma experts as part of the annual conferences and offer trauma training in the groups’ continuing education classes. Members gathered after the Tubbs Fire to talk about what the community needed, trained more than 500 mental health workers in skills for psychological recovery (SPR), and offered trauma-informed yoga and forest bathing for those hesitant or unable to see a therapist in a traditional office setting as well as bilingual grief groups for months. Like Swanson, Strom believes it’s essential that mental health practitioners prepare as best they can to meet their clients’ needs dealing with our changing climate. “Every therapist needs to be trained in some trauma treatment. They need to know techniques to help with PTSD,” she says. Good wanted to incorporate ecopsychology in her practice, thinking she’d be helping her clients reconnect with the natural world. But then the Tubbs and Nuns fires happened and Good got trained in psychological recovery and joined local therapists to offer free counseling to survivors and others in the community. “These experiences tend to be a bit disenfranchised. I think people can have empathy for losing a home, but what if your home was saved but the land around you was absolutely destroyed? You try to talk with your friends or family who maybe didn’t experience it and you try to talk about the deep sorrow you have, and they might not quite understand. And that can really compound a feeling of isolation. They don’t even know if what they’re experiencing is valid,” Good says. And that, Good says, can keep people from getting the help they need. “It’s not all about, ‘Oh you’ll be able to rebuild’ or, ‘Time heals all wounds.’ I don’t think it occurs to them that, ‘Oh, this is actually a legitimate psychological process, and I can be supported
And, she says, therapists who may have lost their own homes in a natural disaster or had to evacuate have had to heal themselves while also working to help their clients and entire community heal, which is also not something taught in their training. “How do you provide therapy to someone when you’re in the middle of the same crisis they’re in?” she asks. There are more resources now to address that. Davenport integrated climate psychology into her practice about 15 years into her 30-year therapy practice. “It came to me one day that we are facing such an extreme and important reality with this warming world, and it really wasn’t being talked about then, especially the mental health part. So, when I had my climate awakening, I thought, how can I get involved. I made a decision to pivot my personal and professional life fully in that direction,” says Davenport. Her awakening led her to write her first book, Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change, a guide for mental health clinicians, in 2017. A call for training “Even now, there is no requirement in any licensure track for therapists or mental health professionals in what to do with climate-triggered distress,” Davenport says. That’s problematic, she observes. “Why is there a need for special training in working with climate issues versus if you have tools working with trauma or loss, just use those. But the fact that we’re on this escalating trajectory that things are going to get worse, whatever we conceptualize about going back to normal and rebuilding our lives is on shakier ground it is one of features why there needs to be specialized training for the mental health field,” says Davenport, who created and leads the Climate Psychology Certification Training at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, now in its fourth year. The training also helps climate psychologists find community and support as well as a space to consider how to offer people help outside of a traditional therapist office setting. “Not everybody has the funds, the availability, the inclination to do one-on-one therapy so how can we take these tools and make them much more widely available,” Davenport says. “There are discussions about how can we, as therapists, either train community groups, community leaders, faith leaders, civic leaders or branch out beyond out 50-minute sessions behind closed doors to really meet this rising demand and how does it change the professional ethics of even things like confidentiality.” That’s what drove Silverstein to stop her private practice after
36 NorthBaybiz
May 2025
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