Holding the Hope: Reviving Psychological and Spiritual Agency in the Face of Climate Change

Caroline is a senior lecturer on the MA Dance Movement Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths and holds a PhD in posthuman, eco-feminist research. She will be presenting her chapter, ‘Coming home to a post-human body: Finding hopefulness in those who care’.

Caroline is a psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Bath. She has researched and published widely on children and young people’s emotional responses to climate change and will talk about how to help them make meaning from their experience.

Chris is a resilience trainer, with a background in medicine, psychological therapies, groupwork and coaching. He will be talking about Active Hope Training, which he developed with Joanna Macy.

Fred is a registered mental health nurse specialising in working with children, young people and their families. He works at the University of the West of England as a senior lecturer in mental health, where he leads an undergraduate module in solution-focused practice. His focus will be on ‘solution-focused practice at the edge of despair’.

Hetty works globally in leadership development, facilitation and coaching, with individuals, teams and organisations. She is a writer, a coaching supervisor, a psychotherapist rooted in the transpersonal and psychoanalytic traditions, and executive editor of the AC global magazine Coaching Perspectives. Hetty will be talking about ‘Radical hope: A dimension of the rooted soul’.

Jo is a training consultant, facilitator and qualified psychotherapist, specialising in working with young people, parents and professionals who work with children. She will talk about growing resilience in the face of crisis.

Maggie is a psychotherapist who has published on psychosomatic health and self-harm, and in recent years has focused more on climate and ecological issues. She is a member of the editorial team of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) journal Explorations. Her talk will be about the role of climate and ecology fiction (cli-fi) in fostering awareness and resilience.

Matthew is a certified co-active coach and a co-founder of the Deep Adaptation Guides community. He will be presenting on his own model of deep adaptation coaching.

Nick Totton has been a body psychotherapist for forty years, and a supervisor and trainer for nearly as long. He has written a number of books, including Embodied Relating: The Ground of Psychotherapy, Wild Therapy: Rewilding Inner and Outer Worlds, and (forthcoming from PCCS Books) Different Bodies: Deconstructing Normality. He is the founding editor of Psychotherapy and Politics International, and a previous chair of Psychotherapists for Social Responsibility and the Psychotherapists and Counsellors Union. Nick has a daughter and two grandchildren. He lives in Sheffield with his partner and grows vegetables.

Niki is a professor at the University of Auckland, specialising in community psychology and the psychology Her chapter is titled ‘Towards a sacred framework’ and explores the importance of coming together as communities to respond in practical ways to the climate emergency.

Pedro runs an English-speaking therapy service in Lisbon for international clients and is founder of a collective of eco-aware psychologists in Portugal. He will talk about his own therapeutic practice with individuals who come to him with ‘Eco-Integration’, using a case study as illustration.

Robin Shohet has been supervising for nearly fifty years beginning when he met Peter in 1976 and they staffed a therapeutic community for people coming out of psychiatric hospital. They combined to write Supervision in the Helping Professionsin 1989 which is now in its fifth edition. He co-wrote In Love with Supervision with Joan Shohet and his next book, Supervision as Spiritual Practice, an edited one, is due out in December 2024. He has organised two international conferences on forgiveness and is aiming to do another for 2026. He is a long time student of A Course in Miracles.

Roger is a registered systemic family therapist, systemic supervisor and author, and writes and lectures on systemic psychotherapy and the epistemology and practice of ecosystemic psychotherapy. He will be talking about ‘What your biology teacher didn’t teach you: Reclaiming a Western indigenous relationship.

Yasmin is a transpersonal integrative counsellor and eco-therapist. She will discuss the need for a decolonising and anti-racist approach. She will describe how therapy can help cultivate qualities of kinship in our relationships which are foundational in our response to social and ecological injustices, including the climate crisis.