Hope, Faith and Basic Trust – Part 1.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope, lately. Specifically, the question of whether hope is necessary, helpful, or even remotely in the service of healing and growth. It’s not unusual for me to find myself at odds with popular psychological opinion. In this case, the value of hope in a counselling setting. Especially the notion that as counselling therapists we have an obligation to be “hope providers”.  

Let’s first establish that the dictionary definition of hope refers to:

• a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.

• a person or thing that may help or save someone, or

• grounds for believing that something good may happen.

  
  

And that yes, psychologically speaking, there are different types of hope. The positive psychologist Charles Snyder distinguished false hope, high hopes, active/passive hope and realistic hope.  More recently, eco-philosopher Joanna Macy wrote beautifully about “active hope” and it’s relationship with resilience and creativity. I love this perspective, and find Macy’s work inspiring; when hope promotes agency and propels ingenuity, I’m all for it. 

Photo: Vitor Padua

In my experience though, when someone says “I hope that ...” there’s often a pleading quality to their vocal tone and a distracted internal reaching for an imagined future where the desired state, or object of hope, exists. That's the kind of hope I’m questioning here. The kind of hope that is given to  – or over time invested in  – the future. When we become invested in hoped for future outcomes, we dilute the potency and potentiality of the present moment, making us less aware of present reality, less open to possibilities, and less empowered.

Consider that Victor Frankl did not live in hope. Instead, he found a way to accept his undeniably awful circumstances by recognizing the choices (i.e. agency) he had in how he responded to those circumstances. As Arsène Hodali acutely observes, allowing oneself to actually feel hopeless is a doorway to deep and abiding acceptance. Similarly, John Ptacek recognized that, after his wife's terminal cancer diagnosis, "time spent hoping for happier days" was "time spent turning away from life." In actively “abandoning hope” Ptacek found that he “met a new friend: peace”. Oliver Burkman says it this way:

“Scratch the surface of our hope-fixated culture and you discover The Shawshank Redemption lied to us: sometimes, giving up hope sets you free”.

Personally, I resonate deeply with the Buddhist perspective that suffering is part of life, and that, as Frankl discovered, we have choices about how we relate to that suffering; choices that can, in very palpable ways, either amplify or ameliorate our experience of the pain and suffering. In a chapter on 'Hopelessness and Death' from her wonderful book When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist Nun, Pema Chodron, suggests that it is the relationship between hope and fear that is at the root of our suffering:

“The word in Tibetan for hope is rewa; the word for fear is dokpa. More commonly, the word re-dok is used, which combines the two. Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This re-dok is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.”

When holding on to hope, we invariably feel a sense of lack – that there is something missing – in ourselves, or in our world, as it is. Instead of ‘hoping’ for a way out of what we’re feeling, Chodron suggests that we:

“... acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?“

Chodron encourages us to explore the "shit" in depth. Something that, to me, seems a worthy task in the context of a trust-based therapeutic relationship. She continues:

“We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there’s something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who one day will emerge. We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It’s better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises.”

This “confidence in our basic sanity” that eventually emerges from an honest investigation of what we really know and feel seems to me much more grounded, more robust, and way more valuable, than hope. Another word for it might be faith. Not faith in something or someone, but a fundamental kind of faith in oneself. More on that in Part 2.

For now, I leave you with this: What if, as counselling therapists, instead of “hope providers” we are “faith holders” – consistently and lovingly reflecting our own confidence in the client’s "basic sanity" and capacity to find their way?