Threshold · Auricle Productions

Threshold Conversations | Climate Emotions with Audrey Martin

December 9, 2025·22 min·1 clip

Therapist Audrey Martin explains how avoiding climate feelings actually shrinks your mental capacity and leads to anxiety disorders.

Host Amy Martin opens by describing her first Climate Cafe experience — a 90-minute conversation with strangers about climate emotions — and introduces her sister Audrey Martin, a psychotherapist and leader of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. Amy explains that as a climate journalist she frequently encounters big feelings in herself and her subjects but rarely stops to process them, partly because it feels less urgent than the work itself. Audrey begins by explaining that climate emotions are uniquely difficult because they involve fear, grief, and a sense of massiveness that most people have no framework for. She describes the hardwired fight-or-flight response and how, since fleeing a planetary crisis is impossible, people create psychological escape routes instead. Audrey shares her own history of pushing climate awareness away for most of her life, intellectually knowing the crisis was serious but emotionally unable to engage with it. She describes how the combination of pandemic isolation and Northern California wildfire smoke — days without sunlight, a red-tinted sky — finally penetrated her denial. She frames this as a 'cracking egg' moment where feelings rushed in, and credits having supportive people around her with allowing her to process without being overwhelmed. Audrey explains that after this shift, grief, worry, and anxiety became acceptable parts of her experience rather than forbidden states, and that a channel for hope opened alongside them. She then describes what a Climate Cafe is: a 90-minute facilitated conversation for five to twelve people, structured around personal reflection rather than advice, strategy, or action planning. The format is deliberately sparse, modeled on Death Cafes, which were designed to hold grief around mortality. Audrey explains that grief is highly individual and looks different from person to person and moment to moment, so the cafes are designed to give room to whatever participants bring rather than directing emotional states. Amy describes her own first Climate Cafe as disorienting in its openness but also unexpectedly moving — the difference between knowing abstractly that billions of people care about climate and sitting in a room with seven specific strangers who showed up just to share their feelings. Audrey explains that feeling climate grief in isolation perpetuates overwhelm and denial, while recognizing shared feelings in others produces an immediate, primal soothing effect. She emphasizes that just showing up to a Climate Cafe is an act of personal courage that can open a new channel of engagement. Amy pushes Audrey to make a direct case for reflection, and Audrey argues that whether or not people consciously reflect, their systems are absorbing climate reality. Suppressing that awareness requires ongoing mental work that shrinks operational mental space and can lead to anxiety disorders, panic attacks, depressive states, reduced creativity, and diminished relational capacity. She frames emotional engagement with climate as 'the work of our times.' Amy connects this to climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe's argument that talking to others about climate is the single most important action a person can take, and Audrey extends this by noting that unprocessed personal feelings make it unlikely someone will raise climate with others at all. The episode closes with information about how to find Climate Cafes and climate-aware therapists through the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America.

As heard by us

A measured look at Climate Cafes as shared space for climate grief, anxiety, and action.

Climate emotion is treated here less as private dread than as a shared psychological reality: something people can notice, name, and sit with together.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when your climate dread feels lonely and you need a steadier room to sit with it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Threshold