“A traumatized sensibility has learned from experience that annihilation is thinkable.
Just as annihilation is thinkable, despair is bearable.
A traumatized sensibility can draw strength from vulnerability and dependence rather than erect defenses.
A traumatized sensibility acknowledges living in a material body.
A traumatized sensibility knows that the temporality of trauma is different.
A traumatized sensibility knows that human exceptionalism is not real.
A traumatized sensibility goes on learning from experience.
A traumatized sensibility allows for the unsayable to be said.
Vitality and vibrancy, life itself, are not incompatible with a traumatized sensibility.”
I look Janet in the eyes – and she smiles at me, warm and expectant, “Shall we let them in?,”, she asks. I swallow and nod, glance at my reflection from the Zoom screen, and smile back at her, “Yes,”.
With the familiar ‘ding’ “ding’ ‘ding’ the screen becomes Brady-Bunch-esque, squares filled with faces, soft and uncertain. I reflect on my own fear somewhere in my knotted stomach. It is natural to be anxious, I tell myself. This is certainly an unusual thing to do. Gather, as strangers, to talk about our feelings about the climate crisis – to reflect on this time we are living in. To face, in whatever ways we can, our climate reality.
Janet starts. She has years of clinical experience as a psychoanalytic group therapist. She is strong, clear – and her way of thinking makes sense to me. As her voice enters my earbuds, my shoulders relax.
“Welcome to the Climate Cafe – we’re here together to reflect on our feelings about the climate crisis.” So begins the group as we gather to deliberately move towards understanding the climate crisis on a personal, and emotional, level. Embedded in this is the understanding how we feel about our warming planet has a direct impact on how much, or in what ways, we can get involved.
Susan Kassouf’s ideas regarding “the traumatized sensibility” frame a fundamental element of experience within a Climate Cafe. She defines traumatized sensibility as a state of mind that “moves in tandem with an awareness of permeability to a more-than-human environment as well as the social and environmental collapses now at hand.” (Kassouf, 2022, p.70).
For Kassouf, the traumatized sensibility pushes to extend the definition of “trauma” to include not just loss and non-experience (though by no means minimizes these things), but also some type of capacity that allows for “catastrophic thinking” (p. 61), which she links as key to climate-related thinking. This capacity is not about certainty or doomsday proclamations, but rather an integration of an awareness of trauma that allows for curiosity about the catastrophic to dwell in conscious reach. It’s the strange discordant state that psychological survivors of trauma know – aware of their unique strength in tandem with their brokenness – empowered and humbled all at once. Kassouf describes this state of mind as “with those whose interpersonal trauma had not broken them but broken them open, making them aware of their own permeability in generative, livable ways.” (p. 64).
This line of thinking captures a unique psychological component of climate emotion support groups. Climate Cafes invite conversations that provide reflection space that lives at the level of traumatized sensibility -— structurally offering an awareness of vulnerability without collapse or defensive strategies, not divorced from precarity, but able to think, act, and live within a resilient self that is neither in denial nor pervasively overwhelmed. Inherently, Climate Cafes hold the promise that engagement with the difficult and frightening is worthwhile – ultimately leading to a strengthening within the individual -— “a productive capacity to think and act upon catastrophic thoughts on our changing planet.” (p. 70).
So, we sit together, in this little circle of people from different places with different stories, and start a conversation about our climate-related reflections. Together Janet and I offer the participants the guidelines for the group. We let them know that this group is not about undertaking action, engaging in political or policy discussion, or giving each other advice. In this group, the action that is available is internal – within ourselves, in the space of the Cafe.
Climate Cafes incorporate the awareness that denial is an ever-beckoning siren – one only available to those who aren’t in the direct line of imminent climate loss. For those who aren’t directly confronting a climate-related disaster, an uneasy fugue state offers a time-limited privilege of hiding, shielding from the vast inequities and human disregard for other humans and all forms of life. The reality of the uneven distribution of suffering is key to the complexity, and it drives the uneven responsibilities between emitting nations and those suffering the greatest consequences from climate change.
The cost of denial extends to the inner space of individual functioning – not just a concrete cost of loss of adaptation and mitigation time (though those are significant costs), but the cost of lost human experience. To shut out the climate crisis takes energy – requiring psychic work that leaves less space for reflection, creative ideas, and, ultimately, sustainable action. As the externally dangerous situations – weather disasters, geo-political chaos and conflict, mass migration, species extinction – knock ever more loudly on the doors of denial, people not directly impacted have to work more and more to not feel their feelings – reducing their overall experiences and energy in order to keep the climate situation out of mind.
As climate-related losses ramp up, the psychological work to deny the crisis will only become increasingly laborious – causing fatigue, regression, splitting, and psychotic states that occur during times of intense psychological pressure. “To put it bluntly, the work of denial is not necessarily easier than the work of nondenial” as Donald Moss writes in his 2019 paper, ”Where are all the bodies? Defensive representational strategies in a time of cataclysmic change”. (Moss D., 2019, p.118).
What do we turn towards when we decide to face the emotions of this crisis? How can we learn more about who we are – individually and collectively – when we deliberately engage with our climate reality and all it entails? What aspects of self-identity are fundamentally different when developing within an environment that is made inhospitable by one’s own species?
This, to apply Winnicott to a warming planet, is why there’s no such thing as a human. (Winnicott, 1975, p.100 “There’s no such thing as a baby”). A human is not a human without their natural environment – they are intertwined. The human psyche in the time of the climate crisis is, at least from a psychoanalytic lens, a different human.
So now we are trying something different. The reality of our times required it.
And why the Climate Cafe is underway.
Stories emerge of childhood summers, swimming in oceans, mountains with melting glaciers, bugs no longer on windshields, plants that bring surprises and seeds that carry ancient secrets. Sometimes people speak of deep sadness – thinking of grandchildren, or the children they didn’t know if they should have. Sometimes people talk of hope, of the wisdom available to us, of the important work they do – or the work they wish to do. Concern makes voices quiver sometimes. Eyes become wet. Cats occasionally cross the screen. People talk of their anxiety, their rage, their bewilderment, and confusion. They talk of love, in many places.
And there are moments of silence. Sometimes many moments. Because at times there is nothing to say – no adequate words. So we sit, we wait, and then someone speaks. And then someone else. And then another. I take it in – what they say – and even if it is not true for me, even if I do not like it – it helps me. I am grateful for each thing they share, and how they join me in listening.
The participants who seek out and choose to attend a Climate Cafe do so because they believe engaging directly with their climate-related reflections in the company of others is a way of shifting something within their personal experience of the crisis – helping them bear the fear, share the sorrow, remind them of hope, discover accompaniment. To find the spot of “traumatized sensibility.”.
“It’s a garden in my care, but not in my control,”, one of the Climate Cafe participants said. She talked about the wildflowers that popped through the cracks in her neighborhood sidewalk, and how the persistence of nature gave her comfort in knowing the limits of our human power with its destructive forces. “I feel that way about the ants,” another person jumps in. “It used to make me so mad when they’d come throughout the house in the rainy season – but now I kind of love it. Like they’re taking over – and I’m like, ‘good – you guys will probably do better with this planet than we have.”
As facilitators we sometimes make connections between people, attending to the group so all are included, watching the time, and inviting a deepening of the conversation. We hold the frame firmly. But mostly we listen openly – inviting ourselves to be permeable to the words and people who help make this group.
This Climate Cafe Facilitator role is not exactly clinical – but it seems ripe with psychological elements and uses. For me, as a clinician, Climate Cafes feel spacious enough for participants to find authentic experiences of themselves and others. There are few prompts and we make room for differences, always holding respect and regard. It feels psychoanalytic to me – without memory of other groups, and without desire or force to make the group any particular way. Together Janet and I honor, as fully as possible, all that each cafe holds in its 90-minute crack-in-the-door to this experience that we must experience – to its water-drop-in-a-bucket function in helping us grow.
“I’m living in two or more worlds at once,.”, a Cafe participant says. Her voice is tightly strung, her eyes pierce the screen. Some nod. All hold her gaze. She talks about accompanying her high school son as he visits various colleges – his hope, her hope, the optimistic exaltation of stepping into young adulthood and the split-screen of climate-related fires and floods over the same period of time. She speaks about moving through the rituals of parenting alongside her other painful questions about the planet. “It brings in a fierce savoring.”
The sense of isolation that enshrouds climate-related emotions can leave people particularly vulnerable to shame. Speaking about the feelings and having them heard by others brings some antidote to that shame -– and makes me aware of how fundamentally important listening and group holding are as keys to healing and engagement, across time, people, and traditions.
I glance at the clock – my frame, my limit, my container. We had 4 minutes left. Janet looks at me and nods. “Well, we’re coming to the end of our time together,” I say as I bring closure to our conversation. We sat another moment or two – a little chalk circle that would soon click “end” and only hold the cafe in memory.
Shall we let them in? It’s not just what we let in, but whom.
When we participate in any group that opens the space for personal reflection on the crisis, the question “Shall we let them in?” becomes not just about engaging with the feelings within us, but also the broader connectivity with the living earth. From the position of curiosity about our personal emotions, the link to others is often natural and inherent. The uneven burdens on the most vulnerable, losses to species that have no voice, responsibilities on the privileged emitting nations, and the intrinsic intersectional inequities that are built into the system of the climate crisis are part of what we “let in” that requires understanding, resilience, and inclusion in our solutions, psychologically and in adaption models of the future.
The Climate Cafe format provides a particular conversation – both in its sparseness and focus. With an awareness of denial’s powerful pull, Climate Cafes are meant to be broadly accessible and open to all who feel curious about attending. Offered at low or no fee, low-commitment, virtual and in-person formats, participants can step towards their own feelings about the climate crisis within the contained frame and hospitable tone.
Through these increasingly accessible options, Climate Cafe participants are part of the necessary incremental pivot towards the integration of climate reality – holding the unknown of our future, and the hope that we the people are stronger than the pull towards denial. Climate Cafes are unique experiences that benefit from the concept of Susan Kassouf’s “traumatized sensibility” – a permeability to reflect on the climate crisis in personal ways, bear catastrophic thinking, and neither collapse nor deny reality.
I want to acknowledge that my Climate Cafe Co-Facilitator, Janet Castellini, has graciously mentored and accompanied me in the facilitation process.
This paper does not represent any one Climate Cafe participant, but is a composite of several people who attended Climate Cafes.
References:
Thinking Catastrophic Thoughts: A Traumatized Sensibility on a Hotter Planet, Kassouf, S.
From American Journal of Psychoanalysis 82:1,
2022 Human Sciences Press
Where are all the bodies? – Defensive representational strategies in a time of cataclysmic change, Moss D.
From International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 16,
2019 Whurr Publisher TLD
Winnicott, D. W. (1975) Chapter VIII. Anxiety Associated with Insecurity [1952]. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis 100:97-100
