Grieving the Climate Crisis: Collective Loss & Action with a Grief Therapist for Young Adults in Manhattan
This week’s guest blog is by Ari Simon (they/them), a long-time friend and collaborator of mine.
As a grief therapist for young adults in Manhattan, I’ve had the honor of connecting with many thoughtful, heart-centered professionals, and Ari is one of them. Professionally, they are a facilitator, strategy & engagement specialist, climate policy convener, producer, coach, and grief care worker. In this piece, Ari delves into the powerful intersection of grief and climate work.
Where Climate Crisis and Grief Collide
Engaging people around environmental policy and resilience has been my career home base for a while now. But when I started integrating my callings towards grief and trauma-aware facilitation, I was met with a lot of concerns, such as:
“That sounds so hard!”
“I don’t think people will be drawn towards that.”
“How do you cope?”
“Won’t that depress you?”
Usually, I kept opinions like that at bay. But when I began a training course on transforming climate trauma, those thoughts surfaced within me, too. Knowing I’d have to show up week after week to grapple with climate emergencies and the presence of traumatic experiences, I wondered if taking this on would overwhelm me and make me more distressed, especially amidst processing some grief of my own. My reaction, however, surprised me.
Throughout the course, I experienced primary feelings of excitement and hope. How, I asked myself, could something so heavy and daunting as our psychological states of being amidst climate catastrophes caused by our own doing (and not doing) possibly elicit positive feelings?
Faith in Transformation: “It’s Already There”
One answer I’ve found is perhaps best expressed by the late Rep. John Lewis. In a noteworthy episode of the podcast On Being, Lewis shares about experiencing racial violence and finding beloved community to fight against injustice when he says:
“I wanted to believe, and I did believe, that things would get better. But later, I discovered that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened. And you live that you’re already there, that you’re already in that community. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there.”
“It’s already there” is such a powerful belief to embody when used to summon us to see and enact what’s possible rather than just pacify us. Can you hold the sense that climate readiness and resilience, and honoring the land and fossil fuel-free systems and healthy environments that help us live healthy lives, is already here, already doable?
If you’re doubtful, then I’m right there with you. I’m not always sure myself when things appear to only worsen. This way of believing requires trust in the possibility of transformation, and a determination to bring what’s “already there” out into the world.
Why Grieving is Essential
I see grieving — the wide container of sensations, emotions, and experiences that result from processing and navigating loss — as a critical part of this process. This kind of intentional reflection and emotional integration is at the heart of what grief therapy often aims to support.
Without grieving, we can get trapped:
In a state of perpetual denial (ignorance is bliss, avoid avoid avoid, I don’t wanna go there!)
In a place of seeking suffering, where we redirect our desires for transformation towards wanting others or ourselves to suffer for being wrong or not having learned lessons, and/or
In debilitating despair, feeling too overwhelmed by the terribleness of everything to do much of anything.
If these sound familiar, it’s because they’re essentially the primary responses to trauma: flight, fight, or freeze.
Grieving as a Path to Healing
Allowing ourselves to grieve, in all its many forms, helps get us unstuck from these places. Neurologically speaking, while experiencing major loss, our brains get stuck trying to fire neurons along existing neural pathways that are not up-to-date with new and very different conditions. This disconnect — and resulting neurological rupture — is why it’s, by design, hard to perform everyday functions amidst loss. Grieving is the process for repairing this rupture, helping our brain create new pathways that allow us to be in this moment in time.
Beyond our individual brains, Rep. Lewis’s vision of being “already there,… already in that community” evokes another key role grief plays: Grieving is an inherently collective act. It’s something we must fully tend to for ourselves, but we cannot do it alone. At an event I organized at Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, in Fall 2024, we wove together a panel and interactive workshop around the idea of “a planetary cemetery” — what monuments, memorials, and gatherings could look like for grieving ecological loss. In groups, we discussed landscapes already lost, species we’re seeing change, and places we’re scared to lose. We drew everything from maps to totems, to poetic word clouds. The act of imagining such a cemetery was in itself a collective ritual, helping us see the creativity and thoughtfulness, and care around climate loss that’s already here.
Transformation is Already Within Us
Grieving helps us restore our sense that transformation is inevitable, as proven by our own experience of changing and progressing out of loss. And that’s why I felt, dare I say, good amidst my climate trauma training course: because a hundred of us showed up believing that we are teachable in how to transform climate trauma. If we believe some people know how to do this, we can therefore know how to do this. And thus, in that sense, it’s already within us. It is already there.
A grief therapist for young adults in Manhattan can help you move through this kind of transformation, navigating the pain of loss while reconnecting with hope, meaning, and possibility. I’m so grateful to surround myself with examples of how capable we are of healing each other, in heartbreak or sickness or violence or even climate disasters. We all know how to do this. We humans have spent millennia living in a relatively healthy relationship with this planet, grieving and experiencing change all along the way. What, therefore, might our actions look like when they come from this place of knowing that transformation is already there?
If you’re looking for more support on your own grief journey, individualized grief counseling services are available to help you process loss with care and intention.
Begin Healing with a Grief Therapist for Young Adults in Manhattan
Just because your grief doesn’t follow a traditional script doesn’t mean it’s any less real. If you’ve been feeling the emotional weight of the climate crisis, you’re not alone. Support is available from a grief therapist in NYC who understands the complexities of collective loss and can help you find space to process your emotions with care and meaning.
Here’s how to get started:
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to explore your needs and see if our approach to grief therapy feels like the right fit.
Book your first grief therapy session and begin creating space for the emotions that arise around climate change, community care, and personal resilience.
Start building tools to move through grief with clarity and connection, so you can show up for yourself and the world around you.
There’s power in naming what hurts. Let’s explore what healing can look like, together.