Naming the Weather Within

Part 2: Eco-Emotions and the Shifting Landscape of Psychological Distress

Adapted from thesis research on environmental emotions and contextualised mental health care. This is the second article in a four part series. You can read Part 1 here.

As public awareness of environmental crises grows, individuals are increasingly reporting emotional responses that do not align neatly with conventional psychological categories. These include anxiety, grief, guilt, dread, and helplessness emotions linked not to personal trauma or intrapsychic conflict, but to large-scale ecological disruption.

This article explores the emerging category of eco-emotions, arguing for their inclusion in clinical conceptualisation and therapeutic dialogue. Drawing on environmental psychology, affect theory, and contextual behavioural science, it situates these experiences as legitimate, meaning-laden, and worthy of exploration.

Situating Eco-Emotions

Eco-emotions refer to affective responses associated with awareness of environmental change, loss, or anticipated ecological threat (Pihkala, 2020). They include terms such as climate anxiety, ecological grief, and solastalgia, each of which captures distinct but overlapping experiences.

Solastalgia, introduced by Albrecht (2005), refers to the distress experienced when a familiar environment undergoes transformation, leading to a sense of displacement without physical relocation. This concept challenges traditional models of grief, which are typically understood as reactions to discrete, past-oriented losses.

Eco-emotions may be acute or chronic and are often existential in nature. They reflect not only concern for immediate environmental degradation, but broader anxieties about intergenerational justice, human agency, and planetary future (Clayton et al., 2017; Saleeba, 2021). These experiences are not necessarily irrational or dysfunctional. In many cases, they represent an ethically attuned and emotionally responsive engagement with contemporary ecological realities.

A Misfit with Conventional Frameworks

Standard diagnostic frameworks, such as the DSM-5, focus primarily on internal symptom constellations and often lack sufficient scope for context-based emotional distress. As such, eco-emotions may be misunderstood, minimised, or subsumed into unrelated clinical categories (e.g., generalised anxiety disorder or dysthymia), leading to inadequate or misdirected care.

This misalignment can compound distress. Individuals may feel invalidated, confused, or unable to articulate the source of their suffering. When clinical frameworks individualise what are, in many cases, collective and externally rooted experiences, they risk pathologising moral or relational responses to systemic issues.

A broader conceptualisation of distress one that includes environmental and ethical context is needed to support meaningful engagement with eco-emotions in therapy (Watkins & Shulman, 2008; Pihkala, 2020).

From Pathology to Process: Integrating Meaning and Values

Contemporary contextual models, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), offer a more flexible framework for understanding eco-emotions. ACT situates suffering not as a sign of pathology, but as an inevitable part of engaging with what matters. In this model, emotions such as guilt or grief can be reframed as indicators of value-laden concerns, rather than symptoms to be eliminated (Hayes et al., 2012).

This approach aligns with previous research suggesting that emotionally charged responses to environmental change can function as precursors to meaning-making and values clarification. Rather than bypassing or suppressing eco-emotions, clients may benefit from learning to name, contextualise, and integrate them.

Practice Considerations

Working with eco-emotions requires an openness to material that may not be neatly resolvable. Clinicians do not need to be climate experts, but they do need to be willing to acknowledge the reality and weight of environmental loss. Practice considerations include:

• Validating eco-emotions as legitimate and coherent within environmental context

• Creating space for non-solution-oriented reflection

• Supporting clients to explore values, agency, and coherence in the presence of ecological uncertainty

• Avoiding premature reassurance or cognitive reframing that may invalidate the emotional significance of ecological disruption

These conversations may be unfamiliar within traditional therapy frameworks, but they are increasingly essential. Environmental realities are not peripheral they are part of the lived world in which mental health unfolds.

Conclusion

Eco-emotions are not a clinical novelty. They are an emergent dimension of psychological life in a time of systemic ecological change. As such, they warrant careful attention, conceptual clarity, and therapeutic space.

Supporting clients to name the weather within is not about resolving discomfort, but about restoring legitimacy to emotions that are often marginalised. It is about recognising that psychological integrity includes our relationship to the wider world, and that this relationship, too, can be a source of suffering and meaning.

 Suggested Clinical Prompt

“Have you experienced an emotion in response to environmental change, whether recent or anticipated? How did you interpret that emotion? What might it reflect about your values, concerns, or sense of responsibility?”

References

Albrecht, G. (2005). Solastalgia: A new concept in human health and identity. Philosophy, Activism, Nature, 3, 41–55.

Clayton, S., Manning, C., Krygsman, K., & Speiser, M. (2017). Mental health and our changing climate: Impacts, implications, and guidance. American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Pihkala, P. (2020). Anxiety and the ecological crisis: An analysis of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety. Sustainability, 12(19), 7836. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12197836

Saleeba, M. (2021). Combatting the climate crisis: Cueing threat perception and biophilia to trigger intended pro-environmental behaviour (Thesis, Murdoch University). Murdoch University Research Repository.

Watkins, M., & Shulman, H. (2008). Toward psychologies of liberation. Palgrave Macmillan.