Summit Counselling Services — Specialty
Eco-Grief & Eco-AnxietyYou are allowed to grieve the world. That feeling has a name.
The distress people feel about environmental loss, climate change, and our growing disconnection from nature is real, valid, and increasingly common. Our therapists offer a space to hold it — and to find a way to live meaningfully alongside it.
About Eco-Grief & Eco-Anxiety
This is a real form of grief. It deserves real support.
Eco-grief refers to the feelings of distress, sadness, and loss that arise in response to environmental damage — the disappearance of ecosystems, species, landscapes, and ways of life connected to the natural world. It also includes the grief that comes from our growing disconnection from nature itself: the quiet sense that something essential has been severed.
Eco-anxiety is the fear dimension of this experience — the dread about what is still to come. Where eco-grief looks back at what has already been lost, eco-anxiety looks forward with fear about the future of the planet. Many people experience both simultaneously, in a kind of oscillation between grief and terror that can be genuinely destabilizing.
These are not irrational responses. They are appropriate emotional reactions to real events. The challenge is that our culture has very little language for them, few spaces to process them, and a pervasive tendency to dismiss them as catastrophizing or excessive. They are neither. And the people who feel them most acutely are often those who care most deeply — which makes the dismissal particularly painful.
"Eco-grief is not a pathology. It is the natural response of a person who loves the world and is paying attention to what is happening to it."
What people bring to eco-grief therapy
- Fear of future environmental loss and climate catastrophe
- Distress around the climate crisis and ecological collapse
- Fatalistic or hopeless thinking about the future
- Anger and frustration at lack of systemic action
- Conflict in relationships around climate beliefs and values
- Existential dread — questions of meaning, legacy, bringing children into this world
- Intrusive or obsessive thoughts about environmental disasters
- Guilt and shame around personal environmental impact
- Post-traumatic stress following direct experience of climate events
- Grief and loss around specific ecosystems, species, or landscapes
- Feeling disconnected from or cut off from the natural world
- Burnout from environmental activism and advocacy
- A sense of being unable to enjoy the present because of fear of the future
Understanding the Difference
Eco-grief vs. eco-anxiety — two sides of the same loss
You can experience one or the other — or both at once. Either way, therapy offers a space to hold what you're carrying.
Eco-Grief
Eco-grief is oriented toward the past and present — mourning what has already been lost or damaged. It shows up as:
- Sadness and mourning for lost species, ecosystems, or landscapes
- A sense of disconnection from the natural world
- Grief about the world your children or grandchildren will inherit
- Feeling bereft around specific environmental events or losses
- A quiet, diffuse sadness that's hard to explain to people who don't share it
- Burnout from caring about something that feels endlessly under threat
Eco-Anxiety
Eco-anxiety is oriented toward the future — fear about what is still to come. It shows up as:
- Persistent worry or dread about climate change and environmental decline
- Difficulty enjoying the present because of fear about the future
- Intrusive thoughts about environmental disasters or collapse
- Hypervigilance about environmental news and data
- Difficulty making plans or decisions because the future feels uncertain or hopeless
- Existential distress about meaning and purpose in the face of ecological crisis
How Therapy Helps
Holding the grief without being held by it
Eco-grief therapy doesn't try to talk you out of your feelings or convince you that things aren't as bad as they seem. The feelings are appropriate. The task of therapy is not to eliminate them — it's to help you carry them without being crushed by them.
That means finding language for what you're experiencing, connecting with others who share it, processing the grief so it doesn't calcify into despair, and building a relationship with the natural world that can sustain you rather than only wound you. It also means working with the existential questions that eco-grief raises — about meaning, about what matters, about how to live with intention in the face of uncertainty.
For many people, eco-grief therapy becomes an unexpected source of both groundedness and purpose — a way of metabolizing distress into meaningful engagement with the world.
Specific Areas of Focus
What eco-grief therapy can address
Eco-grief and eco-anxiety intersect with many other mental health concerns. Therapy addresses the full picture.
Climate Distress
Processing the emotional weight of climate change — the fear, the anger, the helplessness, and the grief — in a space where these feelings are treated as valid rather than excessive.
Activist Burnout
Environmental advocates and activists carry a particular burden — deep care, sustained effort, and frequent disappointment. Therapy supports sustainability in this work without requiring you to care less.
Existential Questions
What does it mean to have children, build a life, or invest in the future when the future feels so uncertain? Therapy creates space for the big questions that eco-grief often raises.
Relationship Conflict
When the people around you don't share your level of concern about the environment — the isolation, the frustration, and the relational strain that creates — therapy helps you navigate without rupturing your connections.
Reconnection with Nature
For people who feel cut off from the natural world — by urban life, by grief, or by anxiety about what they'll find — therapy can support a gradual, meaningful reconnection. See also our Eco Therapy page.
Finding Meaning & Agency
Moving from paralysis or despair toward a sense of agency — however small — and meaning in relation to the natural world. Not toxic positivity, but genuine groundedness.
Related Approach
Looking to take therapy outside?
Eco Therapy — Walk & Talk Sessions
For some people with eco-grief, being in nature is part of the healing itself. Our Eco Therapy page covers walk-and-talk sessions and nature-based therapeutic approaches — sessions conducted outdoors, in relationship with the natural world rather than just talking about it. This can be a powerful complement to or alternative to traditional indoor therapy for eco-grief clients.
Therapeutic Approaches
How our therapists work with eco-grief
Our therapists draw on a range of approaches — selected for the person and what they're carrying, not applied generically.
Eco Therapy
Nature-based therapeutic approaches — including walk-and-talk sessions conducted outdoors. For eco-grief clients, being in the natural world as part of therapy can be both healing and meaningful in ways that indoor talk therapy alone cannot replicate.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is particularly well-suited to eco-grief — it works with difficult emotions not by eliminating them but by changing your relationship to them. Building psychological flexibility, clarifying values, and committing to meaningful action even in the face of uncertainty and loss.
Mindfulness
Building the capacity to be present with difficult feelings without being swept away by them — and to access moments of genuine connection with the natural world, even as it changes. Mindfulness practices can help regulate the anxiety and rumination that eco-grief often triggers.
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)
Working with the emotional experience of eco-grief at depth — the sadness, the rage, the grief, the despair — and transforming the way those emotions are held. EFT helps process ecological loss at a felt level, not just cognitively.
Solution Focused Therapy
For clients who want to move from paralysis toward agency — identifying what meaningful engagement with the environmental crisis might look like for them specifically, and building concrete steps in that direction without dismissing the grief.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Addressing the thought patterns — catastrophizing, fatalistic thinking, black-and-white framing — that can transform eco-grief into paralysing despair, while respecting the legitimate reality of the concerns underneath those patterns.
Book a Session
Find us in Edmonton, St. Albert & Windermere
Eco-grief and eco-anxiety therapy is available in person at all three Summit locations, and virtually across Alberta.
Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver)
Grandin Plaza, 2nd Floor
Edmonton, AB
Common Questions
Eco-grief therapy — your questions answered
Our Therapists
Therapists who specialize in eco-grief & eco-anxiety
The clinicians below specialize in eco-grief and eco-anxiety. Start with a free 15-minute consultation — no commitment, just a conversation about fit.
Related Support
Other areas we work with
The world deserves your grief. And you deserve support.
Your first consultation is free — no commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are and whether we're the right fit.
We acknowledge that our practice is located in Treaty 6 territory, on the traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux Peoples, including our Brewery District office in Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver). We recognize that healing and reconciliation is a responsibility shared by all and are proud to partner with organizations that help Indigenous community members access culturally safe mental health care.