We Need to Talk! Group Therapy Can Help the Climate Crisis

Introduction

As group therapists, we regularly get to see how group therapy transforms lives. Have you ever considered that it might also have the power to save humanity?

In her book Saving Us, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe makes a compelling argument that the most important thing we can do about climate change is talk about it. She explains that talking is the way to get more people to care about climate change, especially if we connect over shared values.

I couldn’t agree more, but, as we therapists know, talking constructively when we’re emotionally stirred up can be incredibly challenging. And there are few things more stirring than the climate and environmental crisis unfolding around us. The emotions it demands can feel practically unbearable—things like terror, rage, grief, despair.

It’s no wonder we as a society are stuck—with so many of us paralyzed with resistance to feeling these feelings, and unable to face the imminent danger we barrel towards. Fortunately, group therapy is an ideal format for working through exactly this dilemma. We group therapists are experts at working with resistance to difficult emotions and helping people develop the bandwidth to have uncomfortable conversations. In other words, we have some critical skills that the world desperately needs.

I am a Modern Analytic group therapist in Austin, Texas, and I have been working to bring my experience with group treatment to bear on the climate crisis. I have developed workshops for therapists to learn about group technique and how it can be applied to climate change, led time-limited groups for activists and members of the community to talk about climate change, and most recently started a training group for mental health professionals to learn group technique and support each other in their own climate-related work.

What I’ve learned is both hopeful and daunting. I’ve learned that group work provides a powerful format for people to find common ground on the climate crisis. Members share with each other, work through challenging differences, and discover that they are more able to tolerate profoundly painful feelings and even move into action, when they are not alone. I’ve also learned that despite the potential benefits, there is a tremendous amount of resistance to engaging in this process. 

You may even be noticing your own resistance to reading about climate change in a group psychotherapy newsletter, wondering what it has to do with our work. Trust me, I can relate! For years I never considered addressing climate change in my professional capacity. However, the crisis demands an urgent response and I’ve become convinced that human society needs as many skilled, well-trained, and brave climate-aware group therapists as we can possibly get.

Background

My own journey to doing this work illustrates some of these dynamics. My childhood instilled a deep love for nature and especially for animals: when I was 5 years old my family bought a piece of land about an hour from the city where I grew up, and over the next decade we spent most weekends out at “the farm”. My favorite activity was riding our two horses, one camp-worn and the other half-blind and skittish, over the fields and through the woods alongside my younger brother, marveling at the box turtles and toads and snakes we encountered on our adventures.

My love for animals evolved into intense curiosity about how they “worked”; my first dissection project in 9th grade biology class was a revelation and I resolved to pursue biology in college, which then led to a doctorate in evolutionary biology in 1995. It was during this graduate program that I first learned about climate change. It worried me, of course, but I also believed the threat to be fairly distant.

As we moved into the 2000s, and especially as my husband and I brought two beautiful daughters into the world, my anxiety about climate change ramped up. Hoping I was being alarmist, one day I decided to go to a bookstore and give myself a reality check. To my horror, I quickly learned that the reality was worse than my scariest fantasies. One book, Bill McKibben’s Eaarth, shocked me to my core. The world as we have known it is already gone, he says. I called my brother, a gentle and loving soul, bawling over the phone line: “Why isn’t every headline in every single newspaper about climate change?!?”

By this time I had switched careers, earning a doctorate in clinical psychology, and was busy parenting and shepherding a growing private practice. But my anxiety about climate change was persistent and intense, and it was very challenging to talk about it with most others, even in my own therapy groups. My sense was that people didn’t want to talk about it, and that I was being difficult and unlikable if I tried.

On the advice of a close friend, I decided to channel my feelings into action and find a local group where I could volunteer. This was in 2012, and to my surprise there was no such dedicated group in Austin at the time. Eventually, I co-founded the Austin chapter of the volunteer-based group Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), whose mission is to build the political will for a stable climate (first and foremost by advocating for a price on carbon).

For years I threw myself into this work, hosting monthly meetings, writing op-eds and letters to the editor, delivering presentations on carbon pricing, and paying my own way to Washington, DC every June to meet with members of Congress on Capitol Hill. One of CCL’s slogans is “action is the antidote to despair,” and there is much truth in this. Working with other passionate volunteers was a balm to me; we didn’t talk about our feelings very much, but we understood the stakes and felt supported by working together.

As the years passed, though, I grew increasingly frustrated with the entrenched immobility I encountered in the lobbying process. For example, in over ten years of writing, calling and traveling to meet with my House Representative, he never once agreed to meet us in person, much less give serious consideration to our concerns and policy recommendations. Unfortunately, power dynamics will always trump good sense when it comes to human behavior, at least for those who benefit, as Sally Weintrobe beautifully outlines in her book “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis.”

So I began to shift focus once again. I developed a new idea: for those of us who do care about a sustainable healthy environment for all, which I do believe is most of us, the major obstacle to confronting and engaging with climate change comes down to our resistance to the feelings it stirs up. And, while it makes sense that most of us are resistant to engaging with climate change, this is where we group therapists have so much to offer.

My passion turned to using my professional group therapy skills to help people talk about their thoughts and feelings about climate change. In so doing, one of the most important skills I’ve drawn on involves working with resistance.

Resistance

One of my favorite aspects of Modern Analysis is its emphasis on resistance, a concept first identified by Freud. His bold idea, of course, was that people could be “cured” if they came to their sessions and said everything that came to mind, because this would bring unconscious material into consciousness, insight would develop, and freedom from mental illness would ensue. To Freud, anything that got in the way of this process was considered “resistance”, and he viewed it as something to be overcome so that the beneficial treatment could resume.

It is one of the most significant contributions of Modern Analytic theorists to realize that resistances, while obstacles of a kind, also represent key aspects of peoples’ patterns of personality. In other words, resistances are there for a reason, serving an important function. For example, someone who grew up with a temperamental father prone to angry outbursts might develop a resistance to feeling anger themselves. Their view might be, “that emotion is clearly stupid and destructive, so I’m never going to feel it.” Melting this person’s resistance to anger will involve them feeling a tremendous amount of internal discomfort. For example, they may judge themselves and fear the harm they might cause to their loved ones. Their resistance to anger protects them, and it’s going to take practice for them to become aware of it and discover it can be felt and expressed in non-destructive ways.

In other words, working through this resistance IS the work this person needs to do. It’s not an obstacle blocking the work, it IS the work. This is the insight of Modern Analysis (Ormont, 2009).

Applying the idea of resistance to climate change helped me better understand the emotional work many of us need to do around the climate crisis. First and foremost, we need to acknowledge and have empathy for our resistance because, of course most of us are reluctant to feel the excruciating feelings it stirs up! Who would want to contemplate the loss of our one and only home? The chaos and suffering that will surround and swallow us as our infrastructure and societies destabilize? It can simply be too much to bear, even for brief moments of time. (Especially as we all struggle with other pressing problems every day.)

Indeed, as I started leading short-term groups for people to talk about their climate change feelings, I encountered loads of resistance. Many people said it sounded like a good idea, but that for one reason or another, they couldn’t join (the timing, the cost, the need to focus on other things, etc.). Last spring I conducted a 10-week group for people in the Austin community and after nearly 6 months of marketing I was only able to get 5 people to sign up and, even then, on the day of the first session, one of those dropped out.

Working with Resistance

So what are we to do? Once we acknowledge the resistance, how do we dissolve it? Modern Analysis teaches us that there are two main techniques. The first is inquiry: exploring it and understanding it as fully as possible. For example, “if you were to let yourself know what you’re feeling right now, what would it be? How is it to become aware of that feeling? If you can’t or won’t, why not? What holds you back?” If done in a genuinely caring way, this kind of exploration can be deeply moving and powerful. Clients begin to appreciate that their resistance is understandable, that it has served them well and may indeed have been key to their survival into adulthood. With an empathic understanding of their historical need for the resistance, they begin to be able to let it go.

The second technique is joining: agreeing with the client that their resistance remains necessary and supporting them in maintaining it. This can sound quite surprising in the moment, and its unexpectedness gives it a great deal of power. The therapist might say, with conviction, “Your anger does sound dangerous.” Joining accomplishes three important things all at once: it validates the client’s underlying fears and vulnerabilities, it avoids engaging in a power struggle, and it fully supports the client in their own maturational process, allowing them to let go of their resistance only when and if they are ready.

Our ongoing climate crisis calls desperately for this resistance work. We may feel that climate change is a niche issue that doesn’t belong in therapists’ training circles. But, just as we’ve had to wake up to the pervasive impacts of racism in our daily lives, we need to wake up to the pervasive impacts of climate change. All around us, global weather patterns and ecosystems are destabilizing. Even if the impact is felt only unconsciously or intermittently right now, you can be sure that will change, sooner than any of us would like.

Wake up call to therapists: the world needs help now!

I believe we therapists need to become more intentional and deliberate about working with our clients’ resistance to climate change. Not only does humanity’s survival depend on doing this work, we are all undoubtedly being impacted emotionally already, even if we are trying not to let ourselves notice that yet.

One of the best ways to help our clients is by working on our own emotional resistance first. For example, notice when you think about climate change, and what you feel when you do. Do you read past the upsetting headlines? Do you become aware of the feelings you are probably having? Are you staying at a surface level, or do you linger and allow the feelings to develop fully? If you encounter resistance to doing so, don’t be surprised. Instead, make room for your resistance. The title of my workshop for therapists is “I’d Rather Go Out for Tacos” precisely to honor and join with this very understandable resistance.

So, maybe go have a taco, and then consider moving towards your feelings again. What do you experience when you stay with them longer? When you try to express them, such as in your own therapy sessions, your personal group and training group sessions, and with your family and friends? Are people open to hearing more from you? Do they relate and do they describe their own feelings? How are you impacted by how they do and don’t respond?

I have been very grateful to have a well-informed therapist who always encourages me to feel and say more about my experience. But my groups have proven more challenging. For example, about a decade ago I got a lot of pushback from other group members; they were frustrated with me for talking about such a scary topic, and found themselves feeling terrorized. (Not surprisingly, this dynamic tapped into personal histories for all of us: many of them had grown up being terrified by their caregivers, and of course they resisted my scary material! Meanwhile, I grew up having my fears dismissed, and so easily identified as the “bad person” who “makes” people have painful feelings.) Over time we have developed greater understanding of each others’ experiences. I am feeling much less alone with my anxiety and frustration, and other members are more aware of their feelings and have even expressed appreciation towards me for helping them attune and make climate change more of a factor in their own lives.

To help in doing your own personal work, know that the number of “climate-aware” therapists and related organizations is growing. For example, The Climate Psychology Alliance (based both in the UK and in North America) is a wonderful group of mental health professionals working to build community around painful climate emotions and offering forums such as Climate Cafes, one-time structured meetings to discuss climate emotions. Other organizations include the Good Grief Network, Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects, and All We Can Save Circles.

Also, consider getting additional training to develop your professional competency with climate concerns. This is a burgeoning area, with more and more training options becoming available. For example, the California Institute for Integral Studies recently began offering a certificate program in Climate Psychology.

Of course, of all the possible routes you might take, I would especially recommend developing your competency to address climate change through group work. Back to Katharine Hayhoe: if the most important thing we can do about climate change is talk about it, it is in groups that people learn best to have productive emotional conversations. Modern Analysts call this “progressive emotional communication”, where the experience of each person is expressed constructively, mutual understanding deepens, and respect, compassion and caring are enhanced.

For example, in the training group for therapists I recently started leading there has been profound emotion expressed, particularly around how relieving and supportive it feels to be together while having these difficult emotions. In just the second session, one member said she couldn’t believe they had only met one week ago because she already felt so close to the others. And just a few more sessions on, multiple members have started their own personal climate-related projects!

Not Being Alone

Not being alone is profound. In fact, when it comes down to it, what else do we ever really have? What else really matters in our one beautiful, crazy life?  There’s no greater comfort than having an embodied awareness that we are not alone on the journey, but instead are understood, valued, and feel a deep sense of connection to others. This is the gift that group therapy provides. Given the threat we all face from climate change, consider using your group skills to help bring us together to do all we can as soon as possible, and, most of all, not to be alone with the experience, however it plays out.