What is hope made of?
(from my monthly Newsletter no. 14)
What is hope made of? It’s a question that has followed me through much of my life, but lately, with everything happening both close to home and around the world, it feels even more urgent.
As I sat down to face the blank page, words didn’t come. Instead, I found myself booking a ticket to Mozart’s Requiem at the Palau de la Música Catalana, as though guided by an instinct I didn’t fully understand. Listening to it became the soundtrack of my reflection, and yet, I wondered what had drawn me to it. Was I searching for comfort in the prayer-like quality of the piece? Already feeling melancholic these days, was I seeking a larger space to contain some of my own and possibly my clients’ and friends’ grief?
“What do you do when you as a therapist can’t offer any more hope?” said a colleague from the Middle East.
“Why didn’t everyone simply leave this country already?” asked a client from Serbia.
“They’re still searching for my friend’s cousin.” sadly mentioned my friend from Valencia.
Hope has been missing lately.
I remember once joking with my therapist, “You know, John, as much as I love your cynicism, I don’t think I could live as long as you have with it. I need to hold on to some hope…”
Hope has always been something I protected, almost like a shield. It was my refuge – alongside my collection of melancholy classical music, of course. I held on to ideas like: Things must get better. People will want to improve. Those who cause harm just need more love. I can create safe relationships, even if others don’t work on it. But it wasn’t until my last round of therapy that I truly examined what my hope was made of. My hope was my refusal to buy into that old Balkan legacy of “knowing my place” and “not questioning reality”. It became a kind of weapon – but a weapon crafted in childhood.
In On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “Hope is sometimes a kind of defense, a way of keeping ourselves at a distance from despair or disappointment. It’s as though by hoping, we manage not to look at our lives too closely.”
The more I realized that my therapist and I shared a common wound – both of us navigating heartbreaks early in life – the more I began to see our differences. In one session, I told him, “I think we dealt with the same topic, but in opposite ways. It’s about disappointment, isn’t it? For me, when it’s too much, too early or too sudden, I hold on to hope. You turn to cynicism. Both are defenses against really processing disappointment.”
My hopeful perspective was a childhood invention, meant to protect me from the weight of disappointment. It didn’t work and coming to terms with that was probably one of the most painful parts of growing up.
I remember feeling lost in this realization. We need hope. Life should be about hope. So should love. But how can we hope better?
Reflecting on some insights from my sessions, I’ve come to understand that:
- Nothing and no one can protect us from disappointment. Disappointment is a fact of life.
- Disappointment is a form of loss; it’s the loss of some hope, and thus it requires grieving.
- Grieving a disappointment can be as long and complex as grieving the loss of someone.
- To be hopeful in a mature way means being able to grieve as an adult.
- Grief (when processed) gives birth to new, wiser hope.
Hope, when it grows up, stops being a shield and becomes a quiet resolve. It’s no longer an escape but a way of staying. It lets us hold pain and beauty at once, allowing both to shape us without losing ourselves in either. It involves a lot of grieving. As Nietzsche put it: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Prompts for reflection:
- What is hope made of for you?
Explore the beliefs, memories, or experiences that form your personal understanding of hope. - How do you protect hope within yourself, and how has this changed over time?
Consider whether your relationship with hope has shifted as you’ve grown and faced new challenges. - In what ways have disappointment and hope shaped each other in your life?
Examine a time when disappointment impacted your sense of hope, and how you responded to that experience. - What does it mean to “hope better”? Explore what mature or “grown-up” hope might look like and what qualities you associate with it.