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What Does Hope Look Like When Times Are Hard? · Wellbeing Solutions - Ask A Counsellor

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  SPEAKER_00: What can hope look like when times are really hard?
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: That can be quite difficult to answer because when we are amongst those hard times, we naturally think of a hope for the future, that it's something that lies in the future.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: But psychologically that doesn't have to be the case.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: So some of the most profound moments when we're at our lowest occur not when our circumstances change, but when our relationship with our experience starts to change.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: For example, for a lot of people really struggling, the first battle of the day begins when they wake up.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: So our mind can be flooded with shame, intrusive thoughts, and self-criticism.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's important to recognise that this isn't a failure, it's a nervous system doing exactly what it's been designed to do.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Our nervous systems predict their primary task isn't to make us happy, it's to keep us alive.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they constantly compare the present with the past, looking to anticipate triggers to protect us.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: If our history has had a lot of trauma, loss, rejection, or chronic stress, the brain becomes highly efficient in detecting threat, even when safety is present because it risk assesses off the basis of what it's recognised before.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it's trying to protect us with strategies that once made sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it that changes the question.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because healing isn't about eliminating difficult thoughts, it's about creating enough distance to recognise that the thought is not an objective description of reality.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system is perceiving a threat, it doesn't mean that you're at threat.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that is how we nurture hope.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: The moment we notice that we're having a thought rather than becoming the thought, we realise our emotions are valid, but they're not always reliable narrators.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hope isn't necessarily forced optimism, it's accepting an uncertainty, but knowing that this moment is not the whole story.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: When we've been through really difficult things that can narrow down our worlds, it trains the brain to expect repetition and it tells us because something happened before, it will happen again.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: By finding hope, we gently just sort of broaden that for ourselves and allow ourselves to find safety.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes hope is becoming curious instead of certain, and sometimes hope is seeing the possibility of a future when you've been living in survival modes.