The Places We Carry: Creative Counseling Through the Lens of Place and Belonging

Abstract

Environmental disruption, displacement, and shifting cultural landscapes increasingly shape clients’ experiences of identity, belonging, and emotional distress. Although environmental psychology has articulated constructs such as sense of place, place attachment, and place identity, and ecological grief, these frameworks have not been consistently translated into counseling practice. This conceptual article presents a place-informed framework for integrating geographic dimensions of experience into case conceptualization and intervention. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship, constructs of place attachment, place identity, place dependence, solastalgia, and ecological grief are applied to three case illustrations. Creative strategies, including ecological mapping, sensory memory reconstruction, landscape lineage exploration, and grief-to-agency integration, offer examples of how counselors may support clients navigating relocation, cultural disruption, and environmental change. Attending to place expands traditional counseling lenses and highlights the landscapes clients carry within them as integral to identity, resilience, and meaning-making.