The therapeutic microclimate: regulating rage in the midst of rising temperatures
This article first appeared in the November 2024 issue of University & College Counselling published by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/university-and-college-counselling/ ©BACP 2024.
As I sit down to write, I am distinctly soggy. It’s mid-September and I’ve just been caught in an unexpected hailstorm, pelted with ice chunks the size of marbles. I shiver and pull up my weather app to see how long this biblical deluge might last. My stomach freezes as I see that, in seven to 10 days’ time, we are predicted to have a small heatwave. A hailstorm and a heatwave within a fortnight of one another: my meteorological equivalent of a rock and a hard place, for I don’t do well with heat either.
I am, of course, writing into the future of the winter months when this issue will be published. It might seem impossible to think about heat in the middle of winter. Looking back on the summer months, many might consider it a disappointment, a washout with more grey days than blue. But what about when the mercury rose, when the heat crept in, when the sweat began to run? Were they the halcyon days of summer, or a prophecy of the hellscape of years to come?
In the UK, we’re in the midst of profound seasonal dysregulation, and much as we are known for a love of talking about the weather, there’s a suspicious silence surrounding this. Yet the consulting room exists in the same atmosphere. We’re contending with an unconscious emotional dysregulation to match the seasons and, as much as we might try to predict an emotional forecast, the room is subject to the same unexpected weather events as the outside world. What happens to us as therapists, and to our clinical work, under these conditions? In particular, what can we predict about the dysregulating emotional impacts of heat?
We’re all familiar with the concept of ‘global warming’, a term now so widely used that it has lost its own impact. The scientists have been clear: a rise of the earth’s global mean surface temperature by 1.5°C will be catastrophic. We will see the collapse of ecosystems, major stress of food and water resources, poverty, conflict, and extreme weather events including droughts, heatwaves and wildfires. Let’s think about this temperature variation in the human body. The average body temperature is around 37°C. Just 1°C higher can be considered a fever, a sign of lifethreatening illness and infection. Much beyond this and it would be enough to send us to a hospital.
Heat stress can have profound impacts on the body, both physically and psychologically. In terms of one emotional impact, behavioural scientists have created the Climate Change-Violence Model, identifying key pathways of how climate change will influence aggression.1
The direct mechanism is ‘the heat effect’, connecting the obvious: the hotter we are, the more irritable we become. We’re more likely to perceive other people’s behaviour as threatening, think more aggressively and behave more violently: we become, quite literally, hot-headed.
Most of us know this, perhaps having observed more conflict in the workplace on hotter days, with our clients more irritable or prone to lashing out. How seriously do we take the risk of such heat though? Some will be more vulnerable than others: studies have shown, for example, that domestic violence increases in a heatwave.2 It’s important we’re attuned to such phenomena, holding in mind clients who may be at particular risk of experiencing or perpetrating violence.
While the Climate-Change Violence Model focuses on how individuals relate to one another, we also need to consider the impact of rising temperatures on the internal world of the individual psyche. Studies have observed that suicide rates and instances of self-harm increase with ambient temperature rises, while other impacts of extreme weather events, such as bereavement, loss of livelihood or property, also increase instances of suicidality.3 This is particularly true for those from low- and middle-income nations, who are most at risk of climate disasters.
In addition to the impact of increasing temperature, the objective lack of action at a social, cultural and, most importantly, political level, also creates conditions of psychological risk. The Climate Mental Health Network has created a Climate Emotions Wheel, designed to help the expression of climate connected distress.4 Anger is one of the main themes, broken down into five other sub-emotions: indignation, outrage, frustration, betrayal and disappointment. A sixth emotion overlaps into the ‘sadness’ part of the wheel: despair.
Feelings of outrage, despair and betrayal are common among those in the climate movement, as well as Gen Z more broadly. For all students, but particularly those who are highly informed or partaking in climate activism, this rage may present as a strong sense of intergenerational injustice. The sense of abandonment and an abdication of responsibility by older generations are strong, frequently reinforced with the notion that it is up to the ‘next generation’ to solve the crisis.
Though attributable to multiple factors, it’s undeniable that rates of suicide and self-harm have increased dramatically among young people.5 Whilst the complexity of these themes requires far more exploration than I’m able to do here, we might begin to think of these acts beyond their manifest expression of despair and destructiveness towards the self. We might additionally understand them as enactments of unconscious rage towards the external world, or perhaps an identification with or introjection of the very death of nature itself. We’re faced with an essential question: How are young people meant to hold any sense of safety or a future when their most basic needs, of secure housing, food and community, are not a given?
The implications of intergenerational dynamics are an essential consideration for university and college counselling settings, where age gaps between young students and older counsellors may be more pronounced. It raises further questions about how therapists work with anger, particularly when they may hold individual conflicts connecting to an issue, such as feelings of shame or guilt. Yet to deny a young person an opportunity to express the reality of their anger could in itself be interpreted as an unconscious act of aggression on the part of the therapist, in the destruction of therapeutic safety in defence of the therapist’s own ego. Anger is a complex emotion, made up of the most vulnerable parts of the self, and should be treated with great care.
Whatever its cause, be it an increase in temperature or outrage at inaction, we must consider how we might sit with clients in the heat of their anger, rather than run from the flames. Under pressurised conditions, which questions might constitute the striking of a match? When the fury burns out, what might we find among the ashes?
Beyond our clients, it’s essential that as practitioners, we prepare our own minds and bodies in the therapeutic space, given that we too are only human, and just as susceptible to the impact of heat stress. What can we educate ourselves about and act on ahead of next summer, and all the summers to come? It’s imperative that we take the risk of rising temperatures seriously in order to regulate the therapeutic micro-climate.
This isn’t just another hot take: we must confront and bear the reality of the world as it is, not what it once was or what we might phantasise it to be.
REFERENCES 1. Miles-Novelo A, Anderson CA. Climate change and human behavior: impacts of a rapidly changing climate on human aggression and violence. Elements in Applied Social Psychology. [Online.] https://tinyurl.com/4xeyx5rf (accessed 19 September 2024).
2. Sanz-Barbero B, Linares C, Vives-Cases C, González JL, López-Ossorio JJ, Díaz J. Heat wave and the risk of intimate partner violence. Science of the Total Environment 2018; 644: 413–419. DOI: 10.1016/j. scitotenv.2018.06.368
3. Knipe D, Padmanathan P, Newton-Howes G, Chan LF, Kapur N. Suicide and self-harm. Lancet 2022; 399(10338): 1903–1916. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00173-8.
4. Pihkala P, Kamenetz A. A guide to climate emotions. Climate Mental Health Network. [Online.] https://tinyurl.com/bdfj84db (accessed 19 September 2024).
5. Young Minds. Mental health statistics. [Online.] https://tinyurl.com/2rh67nc8 (accessed 19 September 2024).
