How to hold hope

Hope... What do you do when it feels as if you are the only one holding onto hope in the room? When everybody else is united in a consensus of despair, sharing heart-breaking stories of crushed dreams and heavy traumas?

Life has been tough for the people in this room, and they have no reason to believe it is going to get any better. As the art therapist facilitating an NHS group for people with significant mental health challenges, it’s my job to listen to these stories, accepting people’s feelings as they are. I’m not there to cheer them up. But somehow I still need to keep the possibility of hope alive. 

This can be hard, especially when I am outnumbered like this. These people have been waiting a long time for support. Now they have this group, but soon it will end and they will be back on the waiting list of an under-resourced service. There is no denying that this is disappointing.

This is when I am grateful for the tools creative therapy gives me. I can encourage people to pour those hopeless feelings into their artwork. We can get involved with paint and glue, using our hands, sometimes with surprising and interesting results. Time passes and often there is a brightening in the atmosphere in the room. We have the art and we have each other, if only for this time.

Lifting up our heads and looking at what’s going on in the world can feel similarly challenging. Given climate chaos, wars and austerity, there is a lot to feel hopeless about. Joanne Macy has written about how to meet these global narratives of despair in her book Active Hope. She emphasises the importance of allowing for grief, for example for everything that is being lost right now in the natural world.

If we don’t let ourselves feel the sadness we risk cutting off from our natural emotional responses, a kind of numbing which might feel better in the short term but ultimately prevents us from being fully alive, taking away our potential for agency. She writes that "The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies."

So we need to be able to sit with sorrow in order to be able to move forward with hope. But this isn’t easy. I believe it is essential to look after ourselves and each other through this process. We need to be mindful of not getting overwhelmed, or swamped in a sea of sadness.

In order to protect our capacity for hope, perhaps we need to 'titrate' all the bad news, like a strong medicine, just letting in a little at a time, and making sure that we are resourced enough to cope. By resourced I mean that we are looking after our needs.

Firstly there is the basic need for rest and nourishment, because as E.J Cossman puts it: "the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep." Then there are also our emotional, social and spiritual needs. This might be something as simple as a walk or listening to music, but when it comes to looking after our capacity for hope, I would suggest that any small action that brings a positive change to the world is going to be particularly powerful. Whether this is offering a friend a small act of kindness, making your garden more wildlife-friendly or supporting our communities in some way, acts of service have the potential to powerfully boost hope.

"Hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process."

Brené Brown

This is an important reflection from Brené Brown. Hope is not so much of a feeling and more of a "doing": an activity or attitude that we need to consciously cultivate. This can take effort and practice. Brown and Macy are not talking about a naïve passive kind of hope, in denial of the realities of a situation. The kind of active hope they are encouraging can help us to keep moving with an acceptance of what is difficult. This hope is also profoundly realistic, since it is as Rebecca Solnet writes, “a​n embrace of the unknown​." The future is unpredictable, but keeping an open mind, including making space for hope, makes sense. 

The word hope comes originally from the Old English word "hopa" meaning "confidence in the future". It is linked to notions of faith and trust in God. Whilst these days not everyone lives by religious creed, having respect for life’s mysteries and looking beyond our own concerns can help us to sustain hope.  This might mean nature, community or spirituality, taking a wider view and placing our faith in the hands of something greater than our individual self.

Given how challenging it can be to sustain hope, I believe it helps to see it as a collective endeavour, something we can do best with other people. Whether this is through tea and empathy, timely distractions or a wicked sense of humour, we can hold hope for each other, keeping the flame alive. In those inevitable moments when we are the one who can’t look beyond the event horizon of another day, we need someone else who can. On days when we are more hopeful, we can be the ones holding that hope for others.

Six ways to cultivate hope

• Allow space for your sadness, it may be coming up for a good reason. Is there someone you could talk to? Or can you write in a journal or make some art about how you're feeling?
• Be mindful about your boundaries when it comes to disturbing or depressing content. Is it a good idea to look at the news before bed? Do you have the capacity to listen or look at something scary or distressing in this moment? If it is something you do need to engage with, perhaps leave it until you are more rested and resourced.
• Make sure you are looking after yourself. Are you getting enough rest? Is there a small act of kindness can you offer yourself? Self-care often gets overlooked but it is vital and allows us to carry the heavy loads of daily life with resilience.
• Acts of service build hope, since they make the world a better place even if only in a tiny way. What is in your power to do? Reach out to a friend in need? Feed the wild birds?
• What do you put your faith in? What are your highest values? Whether you have a spiritual faith or not, connecting with something bigger than ourselves can help cultivate hope.
• Who makes you feel hopeful? Find the people that help you hold hope and spend time with them.