Latest / Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families / #71 Hope in Hopelessness

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#71 Hope in Hopelessness · Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: It's a Happy Families podcast with Dr Justin Coilson, where
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Luke and Susie parents of three little boys, and this
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  Speaker 1: is the podcast for those of us who are time
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  Speaker 1: poor parents.
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  Speaker 2: But just one answers now how to help kids be
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  Speaker 2: hopeful when they feel hopeless. We have one child in
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  Speaker 2: particular who drops to a state of feeling hopeless very
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  Speaker 2: quickly on things.
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  Speaker 1: And the interesting thing is, sus on this topic, forget
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  Speaker 1: the children, let's just navigate life in this space, because
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  Speaker 1: one of the most recent things my therapist said to
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  Speaker 1: me was an acknowledgment that I live a life where
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  Speaker 1: hopelessness is not an option, and so therefore, if something
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  Speaker 1: seems hopeless, I shut it down, I shut it out, and.
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  Speaker 3: I move on.
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  Speaker 1: So maybe I've got some brokenness to try and deal with.
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  Speaker 2: In the midst of this conversation, Doctor Justin Coilson from
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  Speaker 2: Happy Families dot com dot au, we are really going
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  Speaker 2: to be interested in your response on this. How do
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  Speaker 2: you help kids be hopeful when they feel hopeless?
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  Speaker 4: Really hard, isn't it, Because as parents we sort of
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  Speaker 4: say I think a lot of the wrong things.
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  Speaker 3: Now when the kids are down, we say, oh, come on,
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  Speaker 3: it's not that bad.
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  Speaker 4: Has anyone ever said that to you when you're feeling lousy? Oh,
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  Speaker 4: cheer up, it's not that bad. And don't you just
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  Speaker 4: want to punch him in the.
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  Speaker 3: Mouth hard enough that it will be that bad?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you don't know what I'm going through.
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  Speaker 3: It actually is that bad.
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  Speaker 4: If it wasn't that bad, I wouldn't be feeling this bad.
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  Speaker 4: Or people say, you know, come on, snap out of it.
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  Speaker 4: Come on, you know what, what's good in your life?
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  Speaker 4: Tell me something you're grateful for. And when you're feeling
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  Speaker 4: that low, when you're feeling hopeless, it's hard to find
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  Speaker 4: anything to be grateful for. Gratitude's a wonderful way to
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  Speaker 4: improve well being. But I'll tell you what, it can
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  Speaker 4: be really hard to feel grateful when you feel hopeless.
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  Speaker 1: You know what, I find strangers in the midst of that.
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  Speaker 1: One of the go tos that tends to encourage a
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  Speaker 1: lot of people. Not me, but it tends to encourage
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  Speaker 1: a lot of people. And I don't understand it is
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  Speaker 1: going well, there's always somebody worse off.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, we call that downward social comparison.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, because I look at that and I go, how
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  Speaker 1: does that make me feel better, Yeah, to go Okay,
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  Speaker 1: it could get worse.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, the world can be a really horrible place.
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  Speaker 1: But we somehow get some ability to calm ourselves because
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  Speaker 1: you know, we're not the worst off.
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  Speaker 4: So yeah, So all of these things what we would
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  Speaker 4: loosely call dismissing a person's emotion. Somebody's feeling hopeless and
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  Speaker 4: we are trying to, I guess, distract them from that hopelessness.
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  Speaker 1: And we kind of want that, don't we, Because in
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  Speaker 1: a sense, if we get to shut it out quickly,
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  Speaker 1: it's the quickest way to deal with the feeling is
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  Speaker 1: to pretend it doesn't exist.
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  Speaker 4: It's a quick fix, right, But like any band aid fix,
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  Speaker 4: it can be ripped off very quickly, and quite often
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  Speaker 4: it rips away the scab that was trying to heal underneath. Look,
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  Speaker 4: there's this wonderful idea that was developed around about twenty
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  Speaker 4: years ago by some researchers in the US, Shane Lopez
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  Speaker 4: and Charles Snyder, and it's called hope theory. And this
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  Speaker 4: I think is a wonderful antidote to the problem of
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  Speaker 4: feeling hopeless. It's how we build hope in our kids.
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  Speaker 4: And we need to have three things all three have
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  Speaker 4: got to be present. If one is missing, there's no hope.
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  Speaker 4: And if we're not hopeful, we're hope less hope. It
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  Speaker 4: doesn't sound very nice, does it. The three things got
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  Speaker 4: to have a goal, got to have a pathway, and
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  Speaker 4: got to have the belief that you can walk along
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  Speaker 4: that pathway to the goal. Now, I want to be
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  Speaker 4: clear before I speak to these three points. Some people
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  Speaker 4: feel so hopeless that these three points won't be enough
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  Speaker 4: and they need to go and see somebody and get
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  Speaker 4: professional help.
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  Speaker 3: Okay.
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  Speaker 4: The other thing to highlight is that if we're trying
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  Speaker 4: to give our kids hope because they feel hopelessness, doing
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  Speaker 4: it when they're feeling absolutely awful is not usually the best.
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  Speaker 3: Time to do it.
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  Speaker 4: Research would suggest that when they're feeling like they are
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  Speaker 4: happy to chat and the emotions aren't so great, it
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  Speaker 4: might be the best time.
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  Speaker 2: I'm an ice cream first.
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  Speaker 4: Go and get an ice cream, Go for a walk,
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  Speaker 4: spend some time in nature, get up for something nice
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  Speaker 4: to do in the mornings. This is the best time
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  Speaker 4: to have these conversations. And we need these three things goals, pathways,
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  Speaker 4: and what psychologists call agency.
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  Speaker 3: So it might go like this, So you know, what
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  Speaker 3: do you really want? Nothing? Yeah, I know, I know
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  Speaker 3: it's hard, isn't it.
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  Speaker 4: But if there was one thing that you did want,
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  Speaker 4: if there was one thing you were working toward, one
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  Speaker 4: thing that you're looking forward to, one thing that you
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  Speaker 4: think will be good that's coming up in the future,
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  Speaker 4: what would it be.
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  Speaker 1: See.
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  Speaker 4: If we've got a goal, if we've got something to
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  Speaker 4: look forward to, then we've got a reason to keep going,
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  Speaker 4: got a reason to get out of bed, got a
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  Speaker 4: reason to go to school've got a reason to go
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  Speaker 4: to work.
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  Speaker 3: We just need to have a goal.
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  Speaker 4: And quite often when you talk to people who are hopeless,
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  Speaker 4: they don't have any goals. They're just dragging themselves through
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  Speaker 4: day after day after day with nothing that they're working towards.
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  Speaker 4: Once we've got a goal established, and it can be
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  Speaker 4: the smallest little goal, it doesn't matter, it's just got
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  Speaker 4: to be a goal, then we say, okay, well how
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  Speaker 4: are you going to get there?
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  Speaker 3: That's the pathways thinking.
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  Speaker 4: People who are hopeful identify more pathways to their goal
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  Speaker 4: than people who are hopeless.
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  Speaker 3: But we just need one pathway. That's all we need.
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  Speaker 3: Because if we've got a pathway, we can get there.
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  Speaker 3: But that's still not. I remember a girl that I
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  Speaker 3: was working with one time and their family. She was hopeless.
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  Speaker 3: She was fifteen years old. She hated school, she hated life.
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  Speaker 4: She didn't want to be anywhere, and as we talked
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  Speaker 4: about what she hoped for, she said.
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  Speaker 3: I just want to work either in childcare or hairdressing.
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  Speaker 4: I want to get out of school. I hate school,
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  Speaker 4: I hate my life. We discussed that these were two
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  Speaker 4: exciting goals, and then we looked at the pathways.
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  Speaker 3: To those goals. She threw her hands up in there
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  Speaker 3: and said, oh, never do either of them. It's too hard.
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  Speaker 3: I said, well, there are pathways.
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  Speaker 4: We discussed the childcare pathway that required more school and
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  Speaker 4: she had to get another qualification.
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  Speaker 3: She said, it's too hard. I don't want to do it.
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  Speaker 4: We discussed hairdressing and recognized that there were some people
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  Speaker 4: in her circle who could give her a leg up
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  Speaker 4: so that she could have some maybe a trainee ship
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  Speaker 4: as a hairdresser.
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  Speaker 3: She came alive. She felt so good because she could
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  Speaker 3: now see a pathway to that goal. But she needed
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  Speaker 3: one more thing.
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  Speaker 4: She needed that agency, that belief that she had the
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  Speaker 4: power to walk along that pathway.
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  Speaker 3: We got the trainee ship.
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  Speaker 4: On day two or day three, she used the scissors
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  Speaker 4: to open up a poster.
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  Speaker 3: You know, you know how magazines often have a poster
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  Speaker 3: in the middle.
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  Speaker 4: She used the scissors to leave her the staple and
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  Speaker 4: the staple damage the scissors. Now hairdresser and scissors. I
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  Speaker 4: didn't know this, but by golly, they're expensive. And the
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  Speaker 4: hairdresser wasn't very polite in the way she chastised this girl.
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  Speaker 3: And the girl just threw her arms up in the
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  Speaker 3: air and said, I can't do this. She ran away.
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  Speaker 4: She never went back because she didn't have the belief
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  Speaker 4: that she could actually walk along the pathway. That chewing
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  Speaker 4: out that she got from the hairdresser was enough. It
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  Speaker 4: was too much for her. But it shows the importance
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  Speaker 4: of having all three What do you want? How are
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  Speaker 4: you going to get there? Do you believe you can?
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  Speaker 4: Now if we can have a conversation with our kids
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  Speaker 4: where we just asked those three questions, what do you want?
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  Speaker 4: How are you going to get there? Do you believe
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  Speaker 4: that you can? And maybe a fourth one, how can
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  Speaker 4: I support you? We build hope, and all of a sudden,
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  Speaker 4: the world is not so scary and life is worth living.
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  Speaker 1: And we found this for the smallest of things, because
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  Speaker 1: our boys might not overall feel hopeless, but on a
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  Speaker 1: little thing like as soon as you did this very
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  Speaker 1: thing when he had a project that fell apart the
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  Speaker 1: day before it was due, and he was devastated, and
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  Speaker 1: you walk through this, Okay, what is it that we
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  Speaker 1: need to achieve? You know, like, how do we do this?
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  Speaker 1: And then once a solution was found, complete calm and excitement,
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  Speaker 1: and they went and did it and everything was great.
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  Speaker 3: Three things, a goal, a pathway, and a belief that
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  Speaker 3: you can do it, which included part four two with
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  Speaker 3: how can I help?
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  Speaker 1: How can I help? And it was in the midst
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  Speaker 1: of that that gave him the confidence that he could
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  Speaker 1: go get it done.
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  Speaker 4: And resilience And you know what, the research again shows
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  Speaker 4: that when we do this stuff with our kids, they
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  Speaker 4: become more resilience, their well being is higher.
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  Speaker 3: They discovered that. Well I fixed that before, so now
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  Speaker 3: I know how to fix this in the future.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, well done.
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  Speaker 3: Suits, by the way, well done.
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  Speaker 1: Wonderful, wonderful feedback on the project too. It all were
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  Speaker 1: I hope you got an air doctor.
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  Speaker 3: Justin Kilson, thank you so much for your time. It's
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  Speaker 3: always enlightened. Yeah, great to chat. Thanks guys.
• 7:53
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• 8:05
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• 8:09
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• 8:12
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• 8:15
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• 8:17
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