Becoming With the Blitz: Turning and Returning as Fuel for Climate Therapy

The realities of climate change, the social poly-crisis, and the regressions engendered by such crises, confer duties on mental health professionals. The experience, skills, and attitudes that mental health professionals possess allow a "turning toward" difficult realities, a process essential to the current time. Mental health professionals have additional duties related to preparing for and creatively addressing the mental health effects of heat and increasing disasters. Through description of her mother's wartime experience and its effects, the author illustrates characteristics of resilience and social transformation amidst trauma while highlighting the challenge of metabolizing trauma in ways that mitigate transgenerational effects. Given that climate stresses and traumas are expected to worsen and span generations, understandings possessed by mental health professionals of how new possibilities come into view as potential futures are grieved and senses of identity shift are essential to present-day circumstances which can evoke senses of impossibility.