[Zoom Meeting] OCPD & Hope for the Future 🌄

“Atlas of the Heart” by Brené Brown

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

Book by Brené Brown

Places We Go When We’re Hurting

Anguish, Hopelessness, Despair, Sadness, Grief

Hope, Hopelessness, and Despair

We need hope like we need air. To live without hope is to risk suffocating on hopelessness and despair, risk being crushed by the belief that there is no way out of what is holding us back, no way to get to what we desperately need. But hope is not what most of us think it is. It’s not a warm, fuzzy emotion that fills us with a sense of possibility. Hope is a way of thinking—a cognitive process. Yes, emotions play a role, but hope is made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called a “trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.”

We experience hope when:

1. We have the ability to set realistic goals
   • “I know where I want to go”
2. We are able to figure out how to achieve those goals, including the ability to stay flexible and develop alternative pathways
   • “I know how to get there, I’m persistent, and I can tolerate disappointment and try new paths again and again”
3. We have agency — we believe in ourselves
   • “I can do this!”

Hope is a function of struggle—we develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times, but through adversity and discomfort. Hope is forged when our goals, pathways, and agency are tested and when change is actually possible. Unfortunately, there are times when hope isn’t sufficient to combat entrenched systemic barriers. It doesn’t matter how much hope we have if the deck is stacked or the rules apply to some but not others— that is actually a recipe for hopelessness and despair. We think we should be able to overcome an obstacle; however, the system is rigged so there is no possible positive outcome.

It’s also important to know that hope is learned. According to Snyder, children most often learn the habit of hope from their parents. To learn hopefulness, children need relationships that are characterized by
boundaries, consistency, and support. Children with high levels of hopefulness have experience with adversity. They’ve been given the opportunity to struggle, and in doing that they learn how to believe in
themselves and their abilities.

As someone who struggles watching my kids struggle, I can tell you— this is hard. I remind myself of the saying “Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.” One thing that bolsters my commitment to letting my kids figure out on their own things that are both developmentally appropriate and possible is thinking about the alternatives: hopelessness and despair.

Hopelessness and Despair

Everything about these words is hard. First, they are both emotions and experiences that can lead to feelings of desperation and can pose serious threats to our well-being. Second, it is really difficult to separate these two constructs and talk about them as different experiences, yet they are. In the despair research, the word “hopeless” is often used synonymously with “despair.” But in the research on hopelessness, we see very few mentions of the concept of despair. Let’s break it down.

While hope is not an emotion, hopelessness and despair are emotions.

Hopelessness arises out of a combination of negative life events and negative thought patterns, particularly self-blame and the perceived inability to change our circumstances.

Let’s look back at C. R. Snyder’s work and reverse his trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency to better understand hopelessness.

Hopelessness stems from not being able to set realistic goals (we don’t know what we want), and even if we can identify realistic goals, we can’t figure out how to achieve them. If we attempt to achieve the goals, we give up when we fail, we can’t tolerate disappointment, and we can’t reset. Last, we don’t believe in ourselves or our ability to achieve what we want.

Hopelessness is serious. In more than thirty years of research, Aaron Beck and his colleagues have established that experiences of hopelessness are strongly and specifically related to suicidality.

There are two ways to think about despair and its relationship to hopelessness: Hopelessness can apply to a specific situation (such as feeling hopeless about finishing school or feeling hopeless about our
financial future) or to life more generally.

Despair is a sense of hopelessness about a person’s entire life and future. When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives and combines with extreme sadness, we feel despair.

I once heard theologian Rob Bell define despair as “the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.” When we are in struggle and/or experiencing pain, despair—that belief that there is no end to what we’re experiencing—is a desperate and claustrophobic feeling. We can’t figure a way out of or through the struggle and the suffering.

When I look at examples of hope practices in our research, I see commitments to new ways of thinking about what we want to achieve and why. We need to learn how to reality-check our goals and the pathways to them, and how to take the shame out of having to start over many, many times when our first plan fails. I used to ask my graduate students to submit a semester-long goal the second week of school. After doing this for years, I knew I could expect 90 percent of the goals to be unrealistic. Setting realistic goals is a skill and a prerequisite for hope.

When we don’t have these skills, small disappointments can grow into hopelessness and despair. If we didn’t learn hope from our parents, we can still learn it as adults. But it’s going to require skilled help and support—a therapist or maybe even a coach.

We all fear pain and struggle, but they are often necessary for growth, and, more important, they don’t present the level of danger that hopelessness and despair bring to us. We can’t ignore hopelessness and despair in ourselves or others—they are both reliable predictors of suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and completed suicide, especially when hopelessness is accompanied by emotional pain.

In addition to cultivating a hope practice—getting intentional about setting goals, thinking through pathways, and developing a strong belief in ourselves and what we can accomplish—we can also look to Martin Seligman’s research on resilience, especially what many people call his 3 Ps: personalization, permanence, and pervasiveness.

Personalization: When we experience despair and hopelessness, we often believe that we are the problem and forget to think about larger issues and context. Self-blame and criticism don’t lead to increased hopefulness; they’re quicksand. Realizing that outside factors play a role in our struggles can give us a different lens on our experience.

Permanence: This one is tough, because thinking that our struggle will never end is built in to the experiences of despair and hopelessness. This is the “Tomorrow will be no different from today” thinking. One way to build resilience is to practice thinking about the temporary nature of most setbacks as a part of how we look at adversity on a daily basis. We can’t afford to wait to build this skill until we’re up against something huge in our lives.

Permanence can be tough for me, so I’ve developed the habit of asking myself, “I’m really scared, worried, overwhelmed, stressed about what’s happening. Will this issue be a big deal in five minutes? Five hours? Five days? Five months? Five years?” I’ve been doing it for about a year—I started it during the pandemic — and now I try not to sink into fear until I’ve asked and answered these questions. If nothing else, it pulls my thinking brain online instead of letting my fear brain run the show.

Pervasiveness: Sometimes, when we’re struggling, we fall into the trap of believing that whatever we’re up against has stained or changed every single thing in our life. Nothing good is left. I recently found myself dealing with a crisis at work that, for a moment, felt like the end of the world. I felt as if this thing had swallowed me whole and nothing was left. Then I got a text that said “hey mom do you know where my new goggles are?” The first thing I thought was, Ah, the three Ps. There’s a part of my life—the biggest, most important part—that hasn’t even been touched by this. My second thought was: I need to apologize to my mom for walking past my stack of shit on the bottom of the stairs every day for seventeen years. Those goggles have been on the stairs for a week.