When hope feels dangerous

"Hope is necessary..." — Toni Morrison

If you've lived through trauma, hope is complicated. You may have hoped that someone would protect you, rescue you, listen to you, or believe you, only to be let down. You may have hoped that someone would stay, leave, change, or treat you differently, but they didn't. Those cycles of hope and disappointment might have been very difficult, gradually crushing your hope and your spirit. 

If that's your experience, hope might now feel risky. For many trauma survivors, hope comes to feel like weakness. Like being gullible. Like setting yourself up to be hurt all over again.

Toni Morrison distinguished hope from optimism. Optimism is a belief that everything will work out. Hope can be much smaller, simply leaving open the possibility that our story is not yet finished.

Psychotherapy doesn't ask you to pretend that everything will be alright. It doesn't ask you to silence fear or replace it with positive thinking. It asks:

What if trauma doesn't get to have the final word on who you are?

When Hope Changes Its Meaning

Trauma doesn't simply happen to us. It changes the meanings we make of ourselves, other people and the future.

Before trauma, hope often means possibility. It allows us to imagine that things could be different, that people can be trusted, that the future is not yet written. After repeated trauma, hope can come to mean something very different.

• Vulnerability.

• Exposure.

• Disappointment.

• Being caught off guard.

• Being hurt again.

If those are the meanings that hope has come to hold for you, then avoiding hope is an understandable way of protecting yourself from pain.

In psychotherapy, experiences of safety, acceptance and genuine connection can help you to find new meaning. Hope doesn't return because someone tells you to be hopeful. It grows because your experience of yourself, other people and the world slowly begins to change for the better.

Borrowing Hope

Sometimes clients tell me they can't imagine how therapy can help. They don't trust that anything can change. I don't ask them to force themselves to feel hopeful but I keep my own hope for them strong and alive. 

Not because I know how their story will unfold, but because I have witnessed people heal from trauma. I have seen people lay down their burden of shame, find words for their rage and grief, learn to care for themselves, rest and sleep, reconnect with others, accept nourishment.

I have seen people rediscover creativity, joy and peace. 

You don't have to carry hope alone. Sometimes hope begins by being with someone else's until your own emerges.

Making Space

I don't think hope is something we have to create. I think it has been crowded out by fear.

Trauma teaches fear to stand guard. It learns to scan for danger, to expect disappointment, and to protect us from being hurt again. For good reason, fear can become so vigilant that there seems to be room for little else. But fear is not the whole story.

Hope grows quietly in the spaces that fear no longer has to occupy.

It appears in moments of safety, in being understood without judgement, in discovering that your body can relax, that another person can stay, that your feelings can be welcomed and validated rather than dismissed.

Like a seed lying dormant beneath winter soil, hope may not have disappeared at all. It may simply have been waiting for enough warmth, enough light and enough safety to begin growing again.