Cate Parker, a busy psychotherapist in Pasadena, California, has had a chaotic few weeks. Just as she was settling back into the post-holiday swing of things, she and many of her clients found themselves among the tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate as the Eaton Fire engulfed neighboring Altadena.
Parker has long had a special interest in working with climate anxiety and grief, and she was aware of the climate risks inherent to living in the fire-prone Los Angeles area. But she was still blindsided by the effects of the Eaton Fire, which broke out on Jan. 7, 2025.
Inside Climate News spoke with Parker a little over a week after the fires started. Though they haven’t reached her neighborhood and evacuation orders for her area have been lifted, over 100,000 Angelinos remain displaced and fires continue to rage across Los Angeles.
At the start of the interview, Parker struggled to find words for what she and her community have been through. She wants people to recognize that everyone in LA is impacted by this emotionally—not only those who are displaced—and she also took a moment to acknowledge her own anxiety and difficulty making sense of the situation.
“This feels like a full-circle career moment that I never wanted to have,” said Parker.
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Parker used to work in climate change and renewable energy. But after taking a reading and writing seminar with Mary Annaïse Heglar—then writer-in-residence at the Earth Institute at Columbia University—on the emotional impacts of the climate crisis, Parker was inspired to pursue a master’s in clinical psychology from Antioch University Los Angeles. She eventually became an associate marriage and family therapist.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
NINA DIETZ: What advice would you offer to Angelinos who might not have access to mental health care?
CATE PARKER: There are many resources for free or low-cost therapy and body work for those impacted by the fires in Los Angeles. [Also called somatic work, body work is a form of therapy that operates on the principle that the mind and body are not separate, but are constantly influencing each other.]
DIETZ: How do you see these fires affecting mental health at the community level?
PARKER: There’s a whole community psychology part of [trauma] too. I’m not an expert on this, but I hope the disaster response teams and government are hiring the people who are.
I’ll say that it’s never been more apparent to me how important the ties we have with our community are. And it’s not just the ties with our own people, but also the fact that those people have ties with other people, and those people have ties with others and on and on. That’s how [many Angelenos] found short-term places to live. You need that human connection to find safety after something like this. Mutual aid has been such a vital part of the recovery in Altadena.
DIETZ: Are there any concrete steps you can recommend for dealing with overwhelming tasks that might be useful for people trying to rebuild their lives?
PARKER: During and after any traumatic event, we become dysregulated—when we feel like we are under attack, our body and mind focus on survival. All of that psychic energy that is typically available for higher-level thinking in times of safety is essentially re-routed to focus on surviving the threat. For many, it will be a very difficult time to focus or make decisions.
Those who have been displaced face dauntingly long to-do lists and questions about what comes next, and yet they may find it exceedingly difficult to concentrate. This in itself is an overwhelming experience. Remind yourself that this is normal. As much as possible, try to find ways to slow down and remind your body that you are safe. Give yourself as much grace as possible. It is a natural response to find it difficult to focus right now. As your sense of safety slowly returns, so too will your ability to think more clearly.
DIETZ: What do you hope the government and institutions learn from this?
PARKER: People utilize defense mechanisms to “not see” difficult realities—oftentimes this is quite appropriate and even healthy. For instance, you need a certain amount of “looking away from the danger” to be able to drive a car on the 405.
When governments and institutions and corporations do this same thing at a macro level—“looking away” from truths we know about the causes of climate change—they put all of us and future generations in danger. I think psychology has a lot to offer right now in terms of how we might utilize what we understand about the human mind to ensure that we are not perpetuating systems that “look away” from climate change.
DIETZ: How can people best support the emotional wellbeing of affected members of their community?
PARKER: The first thing I’d say is to check in with yourself to see if you have the emotional capacity to be caretaking right now, today, this week. Your neighbors and friends who are displaced will need help for a long time. You can take a break and check back in when you are able. You are helping your community when you care for your own mental health.
DIETZ: Emotions are often really heightened following a trauma. Is there anything about grieving/trauma processing that you would want to share with people who may not have access to counselling or mental health care?
PARKER: For me personally, one of the ways I am thinking about all of this is to remind myself that anxiety, grief and change can be so uncomfortable, but they also are not useless or bad. If you can survive it, if you can allow yourself to feel your emotions and you also have ways to regulate and feel safe, that is healthy and that is human. But that takes time and practice, and many people are not there yet.
For people impacted by this, which is most people in Los Angeles, there’s so much anxiety that it’s hard to think and that’s generally not a great place to make decisions from. That’s a part of what’s so hard right now. This is going to be a very, very long process. We have to go easy on ourselves and we have to help each other.
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DIETZ: How do you think this will change the climate conversation in LA?
PARKER: That feels very hard to predict. For many people, it won’t be possible for life to go back to how it was. So many families, especially Black families, will lose their generational ties to this land. So there will be change, and unfortunately some will be more negatively impacted than others.
I hope collectively we can take steps to build climate resilience, which includes social justice, into whatever we do next. I hope we learn from Indigenous cultures that collectively understand we are just one part of Earth and we are clearly not more powerful than it.
We need to adapt to climate change rather than ignore it. For that to happen at a massive scale I think we need to become much more conscious of how dependent we are on Earth and on each other for our survival.
“We all knew this could happen, and at the same time, we never imagined it would.”
DIETZ: How would you contextualize the climate anxiety you are seeing in LA right now?
PARKER: I don’t think it’s possible to “get rid of” climate anxiety. I’m not sure it’s even appropriate to try to get rid of it, because look, it is reality that your neighborhood could burn down. There are a lot of unknowns right now in Los Angeles about what is safe and what isn’t—I believe that uncertainty fuels a lot of anxiety. If you’re feeling that, I think you are very human.
That said, we all have defenses against anxiety for a reason, and we need them. I believe, with climate change, in Western society at least, there’s been a sort of generational passing down of denial that has happened.
Maybe you need a little bit of that to live in Los Angeles today, I don’t know. It’s like, we all knew this could happen, and at the same time, we never imagined it would. It’s fascinating to me that our minds can do that. Collectively, we need to figure out how to use climate anxiety in a healthy way. Individually, we need to do the same and that will absolutely involve finding ways to get some relief from it, too.
DIETZ: Do you have any advice for rebuilding a sense of security after these fires?
PARKER: Like with any trauma, I think it has to start with re-finding a sense of safety. Taking care of basic needs like housing and food and connections with people that can hear you and can help you and can support you. Making space for the things that bring you personally a sense of comfort, groundedness. I think it has to start at that very basic level.
DIETZ: What signs should people be aware of for when it might be time to take a step back and take care of their mental health, take a day to regroup, ask for help following a traumatic event?
PARKER: Anxiety can be unpleasant, but it is a normal part of life. When it is experienced within tolerable limits, it can even be useful or motivating. In the same way that feeling anxious may prompt you to study for a difficult exam, it may also prompt you to vote for representatives who will hold damaging industries accountable for the destruction they are causing to our shared planet.
But when there is too much anxiety, in other words when the experience is outside of tolerable limits (as it is for so many in Los Angeles right now), we cannot use it. It impairs our functioning and our ability to think. We feel overwhelmed, scattered, shut down, dysregulated, out of control. Then our work is to slow down and find support.
DIETZ: We touched early on the range of emotional responses to traumatic events like this. Can you speak a little to the different roles of grief and the different ways of coping with it?
PARKER: Grief is a process and, like other types of grief, this is not going to be linear. And that’s OK. If there are moments of lightness, if there are moments when you are not sitting in it so heavily, it is OK to enjoy those moments.
Sometimes there can be guilt around that. And there can be survivor’s guilt if you didn’t lose your home, but you still lost your neighborhood or your way of life or your sense of security. We have all lost something here, and so it makes sense that there is so much grief. The main thing that’s become blindingly evident to me is that we need to be turning to our connection right now. Being with friends, being with neighbors, volunteering, talking, that’s been a lifeline for everyone I know that’s going through this.
There’s a lot to learn from this in recognizing that the bad and the good go together. How to allow the pain and grief and immense suffering and also know that you can still sing, dance, commune, share a drink with someone, whatever your version of it is. I think just finding ways to still keep going, that’s part of resistance, resilience, survival of this.
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