Case notes: Exploring powerlessness during the climate crisis
Therapy Today, October 2023

Declan* was a 21-year-old young black man from Leeds. His parents were well off, with his father working for a major oil company in the Caribbean where he made most of his money. When Declan decided that he wanted to do some work on himself in therapy, his parents sought my practice for some private support for their son.

Declan’s presenting issues were depression and anxiety, which he said he had endured since being sent to boarding school at age ¹¹. Declan told me that he wanted to work on the depressive episodes he endured. Quite early in our work, he also shared that while his past had played a significant role in his malaise, the other issue involved his father’s work and its conflictual connection to the planet, which had created difficult feelings about both his parents and their careers, and his place in the world in the context of the climate emergency.

That Declan had to struggle with a number of issues was without doubt. As well as the struggles he had experienced at school, there was the psychological difficulty of not feeling respect for his father while also having a deep-seated affection for him, which often left him feeling conflicted. One area however that particularly troubled Declan was his vision for the planet. He keenly felt the differences in his and his parents’ views on climate issues and the world in general, and found it hard to find a like-minded outlet to explore his painful emotions on the climate emergency. Being a man of colour from an immigrant background he felt doubly silenced, seeing the protests reported on news feeds as dominated by the white middle classes.

There is an obvious psychological element to the experience of many of my clients like Declan in witnessing this growing catastrophe, with many therapeutic practitioners calling the existential angst they are witnessing a type of climate anxiety.¹ Our work therefore involved finding a language and a means for Declan to both explore and express his dissatisfaction with the world around him, and in doing so acting, hopefully, as a release valve for stresses he had to endure as he made his way through the current cultural landscape. Declan’s case is an example of how bringing cultural nuance to this exploration can aid clients, and how our work as therapists can assist clients of colour to explore and understand their position in this ongoing global crisis.

Thingification

Among the many clear and stark warnings contained within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change press release from August 2021 was a clear recognition that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.²

It is strange therefore that it has only been in the last generation or so that we have even begun to explore the link between the climate emergency and mental health.³ Unlike the sudden and rapid impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,⁴ this slow-moving marginal crawl to collective disaster is having a subtle but also deep impact on our clients from all cultures and races.

Rather than recognise that the animals, plants and other species that rely on the earth for sustenance and survival, and ourselves as human beings, are all part of the same system, our relationship to the earth is one of dominance and superiority. We see the earth not as our provider, something to hold in reverence, but as the ‘other’. Or, more directly, as a ‘thing’ to be dominated.

The ‘thingification’ of the other is a term originally used by Césaire to discuss a process involving the dehumanisation of the other to justify slavery, with its roots entrenched in religion.⁶ Thingification has often been used to describe the divorce between peoples and the institution, or between the subject and object, within any process of othering.⁷ A difficult term conceptually, it also holds connections to the objectification of the other, stereotyping and othering. This more cultural choice of language offers a beautiful and painful means of understanding just what we have chosen to do in order to use the planet for our own resources.

When combined with the work of Edward Said,⁸ thingification takes on another perspective, which speaks to the power dynamic we humans believe we have over the planet. Holding echoes of Orientalism, where Said’s work fits here is in the idea of the colonisation of the planet, as similar as the colonisation of the human other by slavery or of colonialism itself.

Yet the historical ravages of colonialism and the transgenerational hatred meted out under the guise of the thingification of the racial other are not considered at all when we consider the planet and what we do to her. Ours is not a relationship with the other, it is one of supremacy over the Mother Earth we all reside on. It is as much based around the needs of the patriarchy, of white supremacy, and of capitalism as any of the other experiences of oppression are.

Intersectional powerlessnes

The powerlessness of the other during the climate crisis has several intersectional strands. Class is at its heart, as so many of those who will be worst hit are from working-class or immigrant backgrounds, with the growing migrations from poorer countries already a testimony to this. Race and culture are also key, defining who will be helped and who will be left to fend for themselves. We know that the burden is also heavily weighted towards women and children, and that their mental health is already suffering as a result.²

In our work as therapists, when clients of colour like Declan talk about the climate crisis and how impacted and worried they are about the existential ‘event horizon’ approaching our shores, we have a number of clear roles. Being with them in that process of existential angst and recognising the thingification of our world and how that will have hurt and impacted so many are essential starting points. Our role is to acknowledge and help clients to be with their world, including their position on the climate and climate change. This may involve helping them to recognise their own internalised capitalist who continues to thingify the world around them, and a recognition of the archetypal rebel or resister who will fight for the planet. Or it could be focused on bringing to the surface the inner existential angst, which can at best be debilitating, or at worst leave them bereft of hope.⁹  

Existentially for Declan, the loneliness he was experiencing echoed the bullying and isolation he endured while at boarding school.¹⁰ Yet what was also important was the racial and cultural parallels brought on by his isolation and his separation from his cultural background but also from witnessing the ravages of the planet performed by so many around him as well as by his own family. This cultural separation and existential disconnect from the world led to us trying to find ways and means for him to better connect not only to his roots but also to his own world and his place within it. And while there were challenges for Declan, finding the fire to express himself and do his part led to him leading a more fulfilled, activist lifestyle while at university 

Our work involved an engagement with both an internal and external struggle – there was an inner exploration to discover that hidden, shadow, archetypal voice, which might allow him to do his part in the fight for the planet, while externally fearing, or knowing, that this discovery and any subsequent activities might put him on a direct collision course with his own background, and in particular his own family. Living with this tension, and allowing himself to be Declan, separate from his family, his father and the ideals they upheld, led him to finding his voice and his way forward over time, and feeling more secure within himself overall.

*Client name and identifiable details have been changed.