80 : Climate Anxiety, Political Grief & Empath Burnout — A Healer's Guide
💫Episode 80 : Climate Anxiety, Political Grief & Empath Burnout — A Healer's Guide
"If you've felt something really heavy lately — if you have just had a sense of 'I don't know how to deal with what is happening in this world' — I want you to hear this conversation because my guest today is going to tell you: there's nothing wrong with you. That ache you are feeling is information."
That opening says everything. And the conversation that follows delivers on every word of it.
In Episode 80 of Collective Guidance, host Charla Goodnight sits down with Liz Moyer Benferhat — a woman who spent nearly two decades working in sustainable development and grassroots programs across Africa, South America, and through the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and who kept witnessing the same unspoken wound everywhere she went: the emotional toll of people doing world-changing work, and the grief nobody was naming.
In 2018, she left her nine-to-five to answer a calling that had been knocking at her door incessantly. She launched We Heal For All, and she wrote When the World Hurts: Why the World's Pain Makes Sense and What You Can Do About It — a book that is part primer, part permission slip, part guide for anyone who has ever wondered if something is wrong with them for caring so much.
What Is Collective Grief — and How Is It Different From Personal Grief?
We talk about personal grief all the time — the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the closing of a chapter. But Liz names something that most of us have been feeling without having language for it: collective grief.
The grief of watching the news and not knowing how to carry it. The grief of thinking about the world your children are growing up in. The grief of climate, of injustice, of division, of a future that feels uncertain. The grief of feeling responsible for something too large to hold alone.
This is not weakness. It is not sensitivity run amok. It is a deeply human, deeply normal response to an era in which we have unprecedented front-row access to global pain.
"We have such an up close and personal relationship with the world right now," Liz says. "And while crises are not new to this time period, what is unique is that we have a front row seat to all of it."
Our phones, our feeds, our news cycle — they have put the suffering of the entire world directly into our nervous systems. Of course we feel it. Of course it accumulates. The question is not whether to feel it. The question is how to be present with it in a way that doesn't flatten us.
The Problem With "Just Regulate"
One of the most important distinctions Liz makes in this episode is about nervous system regulation — and it's worth slowing down for.
She is deeply grateful for the conversations around regulation and emotional resilience. These are real and important tools. But she notices something: when regulation becomes the primary goal, it can start to read as a message that if you're not calm, something is wrong with you. That your grief, your agitation, your overwhelm is a problem to be fixed rather than information to be received.
Emotions, Liz explains, are energy. And energy — in physics and in the body — cannot be created or destroyed. It needs the right conditions to move. Emotions move in waves: they rise, they crest, and when properly supported, they come down on the other side, leaving behind what the healing sciences call adaptive tendencies — the wisdom that was always baked into the feeling.
The goal is not to suppress the wave. The goal is to create enough safety for it to move.
"Our heartache is not something to override or control. It can actually reveal to us what's important."
The Collective Container: Why Healing Together Works Differently
Here is the heart of Liz's work, and it's ancient in its wisdom: we cannot hold the weight of the world alone. These things are simply too big for any one of us.
Her answer is what she calls the collective container — a circle model that brings people together to process the changes within themselves, the changes in the world, and unearth the wisdom that lives inside both.
The structure of a circle session looks like this:
A warm-up to co-create the space. A short meditation to drop into self-observation — the watching self, the part of you that can notice what you notice. Then the majority of time in storytelling: equally timed shares, spoken from personal lived experience, grounded in I statements, received with active embodied listening. A resonance practice — a form of somatic empathy — where participants let others know when something lands, when their own body responds, through a hand on the heart or a wiggle of the fingers. And a closing that offers the collective energy up to something greater than the individual.
The guidelines are simple but powerful: no unsolicited advice. No fixing or saving. No dominating or criticizing. Just witnessing. Just presence. Just the radical act of being heard.
"Emotions just need safety. They need validation. They need witnessing."
What happens inside these circles is remarkable: someone comes in carrying agitation about something political, and someone else shares grief about something personal — and through the practice of genuine empathy, something moves in the first person that they didn't even know they needed to move. The circle processes things collectively. The tending that happens is not just individual. It's communal.
The Collective Consciousness Is Transforming
Liz draws on her roots in sociology to name something most of us feel but rarely have language for: we are not just individuals navigating personal crises. We are part of a collective consciousness — a shared field of values, worldviews, and moral understanding that shapes culture and society.
And right now, that collective consciousness is in rapid transformation.
"Because each of us are tied to the collective consciousness, and so much is changing culturally, socially, politically, environmentally — we are also evolving and changing alongside the world."
What the circle creates is dedicated space for that change. A place to show up not with all the answers, but with your own lived experience, your own wisdom, your own questions. A space to discover that the very things you've been feeling in isolation — others are feeling too. And that the diversity of those perspectives is not a problem to be managed. It's an asset. It's how we see the elephant whole.
About the Book: When the World Hurts
Liz's debut book — When the World Hurts: Why the World's Pain Makes Sense and What You Can Do About It — is described by readers as feeling like sitting with a good friend over tea. It is warm, accessible, experiential.
It includes a meditation (with a QR code in the print edition, and embedded in the audiobook coming in fall 2025), reflection prompts, and suggestions for staying emotionally connected as you read. It was written not to tell you what to think or what stance to take — but to walk with you through the feeling of it all, and help you find your own wisdom on the other side.
For Liz, the book is a primer for the work — a way to reach the many people who are doing their best to carry the weight of these times, and who need someone to say: what you're feeling is real. There's nothing wrong with you. And there's a way through.
How to Go Deeper With Liz
Get the book: wehealforall.com/books or Amazon — When the World Hurts by Liz Moyer Benferhat
Attend a circle: Liz offers circles and retreats through We Heal For All
Learn to facilitate: She offers a self-paced circle training course for those who want to bring this model to their own communities
Follow her work: On Substack and social media
Website: wehealforall.com
✨ If this message resonates with you, please share this post with a friend, subscribe to the Collective Guidance podcast, and join me on Instagram @charligirl7 or @collectiveguidancepodcast . Let’s create a world where sensitivity is celebrated.
🎧 Listen to the full episode on:
Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Amazon
Sending love, remembrance, faith, and creativity,
