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Deep Dive: Building Emotional Resilience

Lise van Susteren, psychiatrist and author of Emotional Inflammation, and Dekila Chungyalpa, innovator of faith-led environmental partnerships and director of the Loka Initiative, headline this 75-minute webinar to discuss positive ways to find equilibrium while experiencing the ongoing effects of the polycrisis.

LaUra Schmidt of the Good Grief Network will lead an interactive session featuring grounding exercises, reflections on the webinar with Lise van Susteren and Dekila Chungyalpa, chances to share your experiences with eco-anxiety, and deep listening among colleagues.

The need to address mental health in response to the climate crisis (and related calamities) is not new. In his 2007 book Peak Everything, Richard Heinberg described important research findings on how people respond in the aftermath of disasters, such as drought, famine, and societal collapse. The research he presented is all the more relevant today, given how industrial societies have failed to reverse overshoot.

Individual psychological resilience is valuable for its own sake. But it may also be essential to the bigger and more important project of creating a human world that’s actually sane—i.e., one that serves the long-term survival of our species within a healthy ecosphere.

There may be no way to explain how you feel because nobody can inhabit your body with you, and for all the skills of a poet, the mirrored and empty wastelands of fear are a terribly lonely place. We are invisible there, and not being able to find the words makes us feel invisible here.

Journalist and podcaster Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) interviews Dr. Omnia El Omrani, a medical doctor and Climate and Health Policy Fellow at Imperial College London. Omnia shares reflections on Connecting Climate Minds—a landmark project looking at climate and mental health across the globe, with a specific focus on the lived experiences of youth, Indigenous communities, small farmers and fisher people.

Journalist and podcaster Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) interviews Caroline Hickman, a practicing psychotherapist and researcher who focuses on eco-anxiety, especially in young people. Caroline defines eco-anxiety, explains how it’s natural to feel distress if you care about the state of the environment, covers how to communicate with others about eco-anxiety, and suggests ways to move through feelings of anger and despair to achieve emotional resilience.