The sky over the city is that pretty reddish-orange again – but half a second after feeling awe for the sky’s colour you remember that this is due to terrible fires across the province. You check the wildfire app on your phone to see what the status of the fires is now, and text a friend who is in an area under evacuation alert. When you open social media it is full of folks who are scared, grieving, furious, and have no where to put those emotions.
You are trying to help hold these feelings for the folks you care about – but you aren’t sure if this is sustainable for you or if you are actually helping.
You may not be feeling the stress now, but perhaps you are feeling the stress from others and wondering how to hold it best. There is support. Did you know that climate anxiety therapy is on the rise? And you building your capacity to hold the emotions of others who are directly affected by climate change can by accessing therapy can be a way of being in solidarity with and redistributing your learnings to friends who may not be able to access therapy.
What Is Happening In The World Right Now
We are living inside what researchers and policy analysts call a polycrisis: multiple, compounding crises unfolding simultaneously, each one amplifying the others.
In British Columbia right now, wildfires are burning across the province. The Bald Range fire near Summerland triggered a provincial state of emergency. Thousands of people have been displaced. The smoke that results is not merely an inconvenience: wildfire smoke contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs), fine particulate matter (PM2.5), carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides. Between 2020 and 2024, increased wildfire smoke was responsible for an annual average of 1,400 deaths in Canada. A single week of wildfire smoke in June 2023 cost Ontario over $1.2 billion in health impacts. Wildfire smoke is strongly associated with increased risks of asthma exacerbation, COPD, cardiovascular disease, and premature death
Alongside the fires: federal investment in resource extraction continues. Pipelines expand. Corporations that accelerate ecological destruction receive public subsidies while communities lose their forests, their air, and their homes. Local governments are inadequately funded to respond. Provincial governments declare emergencies after the fact.
This is the context our community is living in. This is what we are being asked to hold.
Sources: Canada Climate Institute, July 2026; Matz et al., GeoHealth, January 2026. doi: 10.1029/2025GH001565
Who Bears the Weight of This Crisis
The health burden of wildfire smoke does not distribute evenly. A Health Canada rapid review confirms that racialized communities, including Indigenous populations, are inequitably impacted by displacement, loss of homes, disruption of traditional livelihoods, and adverse health effects from smoke inhalation. Racialized populations in Canada are more likely to live with low income and poor housing conditions, which exacerbates the impacts of wildfire damage. Historical land use policies have also placed racialized populations at higher risk of exposure to environmental threats, including wildfires.
Canada lacks data on how wildfire smoke specifically affects the health of low-income communities and Black, Indigenous, and other racialized people, which itself is a form of environmental racism. The communities most harmed are also the communities least studied, least resourced, and least represented in the policy decisions that shape their exposure.
This means that when the smoke arrives, it arrives into bodies that are already carrying more: asthma at higher rates, housing instability, less access to healthcare, and the accumulated physiological weight of chronic racial stress. Displacement, loss of homes, disruption of traditional livelihoods, and adverse health effects from smoke inhalation all take a toll. For Indigenous communities, this compounds historic and current injustices from colonialism, as the flames threaten their lands, homes, and cultural heritage.
The grief, the rage, the despair, the helplessness: these are not irrational responses. They are proportionate to the compounding crises of the community.
Sources: Health Canada Rapid Review, July 2024; The Narwhal, July 2023; Canadian Geographic, August 2023
The Feelings That Have No Container
People in your community are carrying specific things right now. Some of them look like this:
- Anxiety about bodies. Wondering whether the air is safe. Watching children cough. Weighing whether to open the windows. For people with asthma, COPD, or compromised immune systems, this is not abstract worry. It is a daily calculation about physical safety. For parents of disabled or chronically ill children, it is unrelenting.
- Grief over land and home. Watching forests burn that people grew up in, that hold cultural memory, that are irreplaceable. Watching neighbours lose everything in hours. For Indigenous communities and others with deep relational connections to specific land, this grief is particular and it goes deep.
- Frustration at government inaction. Watching federal investment continue to flow toward corporations that accelerate extraction and ecological destruction while communities lose their homes to fires that science predicted and policy ignored. This is not cynicism. It is an accurate read of the situation, and the psychological weight of accurate helplessness is its own specific thing.
- Despair about the future. Wondering what kind of world is being left. Struggling to imagine futures that are not defined by loss. The particular grief of caring deeply about something you cannot fix alone.
These feelings need somewhere to go. When they have nowhere to go, they compound.
Climate Anxiety Therapy Builds Capacity
Therapy, done well, builds capacity. Not the capacity to feel less, but the capacity to feel more without being consumed. To hold more without collapsing. To stay present with someone else’s pain without drowning in it.
This is not a small thing when the people around you are drowning.
When you do your own therapy, you develop what clinicians call a regulated nervous system and what the rest of us might call the ability to be present without shutting down or spiraling. Sitting with your cousin’s grief about losing her home without immediately trying to fix it or deflecting becomes possible. Holding your child’s climate anxiety without transmitting your own becomes possible too. Hard conversations with your community about systems and futures no longer collapse into despair or rage-quitting.
This is how individual therapy becomes a community resource. Not through the redistribution of clinical knowledge, which is not what therapy is, but through the redistribution of capacity. When you have done enough of your own work, you can show up differently for the people around you. You become a more stable container. And in a polycrisis, stable containers are in short supply.
Therapists who practice from a disability justice framework bring something additional to this work. They understand that bodies carry different burdens and different capacities. They understand that chronic illness, disability, and neurodivergence are not obstacles to healing but different relationships with a body and a world that require care, not correction. In a moment when smoke-related health conditions are compounding, when people’s bodies are under physical stress on top of psychological stress, a disability-justice-informed therapist holds the full picture: the body and the mind, the individual and the systemic, the personal and the political.
On Financial Privilege
If you can afford therapy and you have not made it a priority, there may be something getting in the way besides just time.
Some people with financial access to mental health support do not pursue it because they feel guilty about having that access when others do not. They do not want to mention therapy to friends who cannot afford it. They feel that acknowledging their privilege in this specific way requires them to be silent about it, or to opt out of it, as though not using the resource is a form of solidarity.
It is not.
Opting out of something you have access to does not redistribute that access to the people who do not have it. It just means one more person is operating without adequate support. And when you are the person in your community with the capacity to show up, to hold space, to stay regulated in a crisis, the people who cannot afford that resource need you to have done your work.
The solidarity move is not to go without. The solidarity move is to invest in your capacity precisely so that you can show up better for the people around you, and to be honest about it when it is safe to do so. Not to perform your wellness, but to be willing to say: I am doing therapy, it is helping, and here is what it is making possible for me – so that I can hold this with you. That kind of honesty normalizes the practice of using your privilege as a tool of solidarity and reduces the stigma that keeps others from seeking it when their circumstances change.
What to Look for in a Therapist Right Now
Not all therapy is created equal. In this specific moment, here is what matters:
- Political awareness. A therapist who understands that your grief about wildfires, extraction, and government inaction is not disproportionate, but a proportionate response to documented harm, will not try to reframe your anger as a cognitive distortion.
- Ecological grief competence. An emerging but growing area of practice. Ask your therapist specifically how they work with climate grief and ecological loss?
- Disability justice framework. A therapist who understands that bodies carry different burdens, that chronic illness and disability are not personal failures, and that the physical and psychological are inseparable, especially right now.
- Anti-oppressive practice. A therapist who holds that your mental health exists inside a political context and that the systems causing harm are part of what needs to be named, not bracketed.
Ready to invest in your capacity, and by extension, your community’s? Browse anti-oppressive, trauma-informed therapists in Vancouver
The Polycrisis Calls for People Who Can Hold Each Other
The wildfires will not be the last crisis. The extraction will continue until it does not. The government responses will remain inadequate until they are forced to change. The communities bearing the heaviest burden will keep bearing it until something structural shifts.
None of this is fixed by individual therapy. Therapy is not a substitute for political action, for policy change, for the redistribution of resources and power. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
But the people doing the work of resisting, imagining different futures, showing up for their communities in crisis: they need capacity. Grieving without despairing, staying angry without burning out, remaining present with suffering without shutting down: none of that happens automatically.
That capacity does not arrive automatically. It is built. Therapy is one of the most reliable ways to build it.
If you have the means, make the appointment. Not because you are broken. Because the people around you need you whole.
We are here. Find a therapist in Vancouver
Additional Resources
Browse BIPOC therapists in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland
Related Reading
- When the Land Burns: Climate Anxiety, the Ontario Wildfires, and BIPOC Mental Health
- The Types of Unrecognized Grief We Carry in Our Bodies
- When Collective Chaos Translates to Chaos in Our Minds
- Understanding the Nervous System and Why It Matters for BIPOC Healing
- BIPOC Burnout and Impostor Syndrome: When Success Doesn’t Feel Like Enough
- When Therapy Causes Harm: Microaggressions in the Therapy Room
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About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour connects BIPOC clients across Canada with therapists and allied professionals who practice from anti-oppressive values. We believe BIPOC people, in all our intersections, deserve therapy that supports our healing and liberation.
Learn more: About Us | Our Statement of Values
If you are in crisis, please reach out to Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 (24/7) or call or text 9-8-8 anytime. Hope for Wellness Help Line for Indigenous peoples: 1-855-242-3310.