It is relatively easy to paralyze people with fear about climate change. It is much harder to support them as they come to terms with the emergency and find the effective action that only they can take.

Once, more than ten years ago, I realized I was paralyzing people with a training I'd developed about climate change. People would cry, and freeze up, and not be able to speak. It was awful. So, I just stopped doing it, for a good long while, at least 1/2 year.

I worked with my own grief and I learned from others who had modalities for helping people face fear and sadness and anger and loss.

Now I know my reactions, and I'm pretty good (I hope, I think) at knowing when I need a breather, a cry, a walk.

For me the signs are a feeling behind my eyes, a stronger than usual sarcasm, and a heavy feeling of disappointment in 'people' as a broad abstract generalization. Probably the signs are different for you, but I am willing to bet you can figure out the code.

I am not saying to hide these feelings, but to try to get to the deeper core. For instance, what's beneath that bitterness? When I look at my own, I find sadness there and a lot of mad, the kind that means something precious needs protection.

The bitterness isn't that useful I find, but the sad and the mad, those universals, they break the trap of isolation when someone shares them, don't they? Aren't you almost always grateful when someone shows up real, devastated, pissed off, whatever?

Doesn't that help you understand what you are feeling? Doesn't it make you feel less alone? Those examined feeling are gift to one another.

The distressing impacts are going to get stronger and the feelings are too, the deeper into the climate crisis we get. The work of examining, feeling, processing, those feelings is really important, so they can do their 'job' which is to help the organisms feeling them survive.